Hieronymus Bosch: Heretic, Lunatic, or Philosopher?

Dr. Laurinda Dixon

The Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch (ca. 1450-1516) had a bizarre and seemingly inexhaustible imagination. Known as the creator of disturbing demons and spectacular hellscapes, he also painted the Garden of Earthly Delights, where gleeful naked youths seduce each other with giant strawberries and place flowers in bodily orifices best left unexposed in polite society. Viewers from Bosch’s time to our own have struggled to find meaning in his startling paintings, citing dream imagery, lunatic fantasies, and even heresy in his works. Adding to the difficulty of interpretation is the fact that Bosch’s name appears on only seven of the 30 or so paintings accepted as his, and none of these shows a date. Furthermore, we know very little about the painter’s life – his education, friends, or patrons. Despite these problems, it is possible to understand Bosch as belonging to a world of mutable boundaries and multiple points of view. People lived always with an eye towards Christian salvation, and there was no distinct boundary between secular and sacred. We need not accept Bosch as either ignorant or learned, bourgeois or aristocratic, devout of heretical, pragmatic or visionary. In the end, his fascinating paintings reveal a world that was different from, but no less complex than our own.