Dark, rich and intense colours. Earthly tones extracted from bark and leaves and spices and berries, through an elaborate process of grinding, drying, and pressing. The rich colours of the renaissance exude the rustic craftsmanship of a world just then awakening from a thousand-year slumber.
As a child, I had the privilege of visiting El Museo del Prado in Madrid, as my grandparents were determined to inculcate in me a love for the history of art. As an impatient seven-year-old held captive by the firm hand of my grandmother, who insisted on slowly wandering the infinite halls of Velazquez, El Greco, Raphael, Rubens, and Goya, I was quickly overcome by boredom. It was only after we entered a small room of Dutch and Flemish renaissance art that my curiosity, not unlike that of a cat which smells something interesting, flared up.
Towering above me, on a large support, stood the Garden of Earthly Delights, a triptych by Hieronymus Bosch. I was overstimulated; I did not know where to look. Hedonism, murder, sin, debauchery, but also the sublime and the holy, were staring right at me. Ghoulish figures of a deformed nature created by the combination of the most arbitrary animals. A man inside of a clam, a giraffe-looking quadruped, unicorns, demons, monkeys, a cat with a lizard in his mouth, a freakish birdman consuming the body of a condemned soul. Everything was carefully crafted. None of these abnormal creatures looked out of place.
Composition aside, the colours were out of this world. I was struck by the richness of the blue, the audacity of the pink, and the soft red used to paint the feathers of the kingfishers and woodpeckers on the left of the central panel. Nightmarish, the colours called like mermaids to a sailor, and up to this day this artwork produces in me an effect similar to that of Stendhal when he visited Florence. To quote him, “I reached the point where one encounters celestial sensations… . Everything spoke so vividly to my soul”.
Renaissance art has the unique quality of showing the tension between earthly existence and the divine. Rooted in the religious upheavals of the era, the Renaissance movement, and especially the Dutch movement, offered very visual interpretations of sin, redemption, and the mysteries of faith. Bosch’s artworks in particular also provide a window into the medieval conception of madness, with Bosch suspected of having been tormented by schizophrenia. This was notably explored by French philosopher Michel Foucault, who used painters such as Bosch as examples of how society perceived madness, with the concept being viewed in a mystic way. The madmen of Bosch’s paintings are tormented by exterior beings, not by elements from within.
The Prado Museum also hosts other masters of this school of art, which I encourage the reader to explore. For example, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, with his work The Triumph of Death, depicts an army of death razing the earth. Equally interesting is Joachim Patinir, particularly due to the similar richness of colours he has in common with Bosch, which can be seen in his painting Crossing the Styx.Through its artworks, the Dutch Renaissance movement, often more humbly praised than other schools of art, offers glimpses of divine truths amidst the complexities of human life. I remember discovering the sketches Sandro Botticelli made for his illustrations of Dante’s Divina Commedia and noticing just how personal these illustrations were. It was as if I could see the hand that pressed the ink onto the paper, the eyes that, maybe under candlelight, visualized hell, purgatory and heaven and brought them to life. With Bosch, a similar feeling arises. Is there a more personal act than to give form to our deepest fears? In his paintings, Bosch exposes the rawness of his terror, translating the chaos of his imagination into a shared vision of heaven and hell. And yet, within this hellish spectacle, there is a strange intimacy—an enduring reminder that our darkest fears, once revealed, can also become our most hauntingly beautiful truths.
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