The Master of the Prado

by Javier Sierra

  Uneasy suddenly, I lifted my gaze from the table and realized that everything in that gallery was in some way connected to death. Perhaps this was why this visit felt so different from all my previous ones.

  Though most of the paintings in the room were by Bosch—The Haywain, Cutting the Stone, The Temptation of St. Anthony—there were another ten masterpieces by foreign painters as well. Brueghel’s The Triumph of Death and Patinir’s Landscape with St. Jerome and Landscape with Charon Crossing the Styx. And of course, dominating all of these unsettling images is The Garden of Earthly Delights, my true objective.

  At two o’clock on a Friday afternoon, Madrid was poised to begin its weekend, and the place was deserted. There was no sign of anyone, so feeling a little bolder, I sat down on the floor in front of the famous triptych and waited for Fovel to appear. He’ll show up, I thought, confidently, he always does. I took my Canon from its case, checked it, adjusted the aperture for the gallery light, and held it, ready to shoot. Like a mantra I repeated to myself, Everything will work out.

  Then I finally gave myself permission to lift my gaze to The Garden of Earthly Delights.

  The left-hand panel appeared to be the most serene of the three. It occurred to me that if I concentrated on it for a minute it might help calm my nerves. It worked. The painting’s colors and the tranquil, nude figures managed to slow my heart and breathing. After a moment, I fixed my eyes on the constellation of details opening up before me.

  The painting was a marvel. However many times I focused on one section, I always found something new to capture my attention, even though that first panel was the least busy one. In fact, it appeared to be fairly simple to understand. Compared to the others, it seemed to have hardly any figures in it, though as I looked I realized that this was a kind of optical illusion.

  The panel features three main figures in the foreground, but a seemingly endless universe of animals unfolds behind them: elephants, giraffes, porcupines, unicorns, rabbits, and, in the back, a bear climbing a fruit tree.5 For some obscure reason, in the next panel to the right, the animals—particularly the birds—grow and become gigantic, but here they are small and not the main focus. Clearly the artist wanted us to look at the three figures. So I did.

  Only one of the three is clothed. I take this to be God. He is holding a young, naked woman—Eve—by the wrist and presenting her to Adam, who is lying on the ground, presumably because his rib has just been taken out.

  Something about it unsettles me.

  Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, or The Millennial Reign. Left panel. The Prado Museum, Madrid.

  God, the Great Surgeon, does not look as if he is paying any attention to his two creations, nor as if he has much interest in introducing them. He is looking directly at me. Judging by what is happening, it seems that God is at the point in Genesis where he says, “It is not good that man should be alone . . .”6

  Somewhat intimidated by the painting, I picked up my camera and, fiddling with the telephoto lens, managed to shoot some extreme close-ups of those eyes. They are severe, penetrating, and, together with the eyes of the owl that peer from beneath the tree-fountain-what-have-you, they form an unsettling constellation. Being that close to the painting in that deep silence gave me shivers, and I asked myself what could be causing them. Perhaps this particular evocation of paradise was not meant to inspire peace in the viewer.

  I took a look around the gallery. The two doorways were empty, silent. There were no visitors in sight. Sitting there cross-legged on the tile floor, I returned to the triptych. I had read somewhere that the first panel on the left represents the creation of man, that perfect time in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve together before they committed the terrible error of ingesting the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which, it suddenly occurred to me, could have been that strange pink structure in which the mysterious owl was nesting.

  So far, that was the easy part of the lesson. I stared at the painting, and it stared back at me. I noticed that by the happenstance of geometry, that same nocturnal bird of prey occupied the exact center point of the panel.

  But there was more. As I stared longer, I began to notice that all was not quite right in this paradise. I used the long lens to zoom in on the painting and discovered something disturbing. Emerging from the water by the fountain was a reptile with three heads. I took a picture, and was about to lower the camera and look with my own eyes when I saw another mutant closer to me—this time a three-headed bird. The bird appeared to be fighting with a small unicorn and a fish with a beak. To the right of this, a cross between a bird and a reptile was devouring a toad. And on the other side, a cat prepared to make short work of a mouse it had just caught.

  What was all this? Recalling my Bible classes, I wondered—wasn’t death banished in the earthly paradise?

  “Poor Javier! Without a proper guide, this painting will drive you mad!”

  Loud and taunting, the Master’s voice reverberated in the gallery. The camera nearly fell from my hands.

  “The Garden of Earthly Delights—an excellent choice!” Fovel smiled, pleased with the fright he’d just given me. “In fact, it’s like a final exam for those who specialize in the arcanon of the Prado.”

  I couldn’t fathom how Luis Fovel had managed to walk across the room without my noticing. Nonetheless, there he was, solid as ever in his leather shoes and wool coat, standing just a step away from my perch on the floor.

  “What . . . what kind of exam?” I stammered, still recovering from the surprise.

  “It would be full of trick questions, for one thing. There is a great deal of speculation around this work; no one knows anything for certain, not even what it is called. The Garden is just its modern name. Others have called it The Millennial Reign, The Painting of the Arbutus, The Earthly Paradise . . . It’s this very ambiguity that makes it one of the most important works in the arcanon of the Prado.

  “For me the work is prophetic. A warning. A portent for our times. But to understand it like that, I’m afraid you need to regard it from a different angle. If you just look at the painting head-on, like the tourists, you’ll just end up going down the wrong path.”

  I could have hugged him right there. After my encounter with Mister X, having Fovel next to me once again, teaching me one of his lessons, gave me a feeling of indescribable joy. He sensed this, and stopped me, hiding behind an icy gaze. He warned me that understanding The Garden of Earthly Delights could take a lifetime or more, and that whatever he chose to tell me about it would barely scratch the surface of its great mystery.

  “This is not the end of your course of study,” he added. “You’ve barely begun.”

  So I reined in my enthusiasm and held my questions for a more opportune moment. I put the lens cap back on my camera, got up off the floor, brushed off my pants, and let him guide me over to one end of the painting.

  Then he did something that shocked me. He reached his hand out to the heavy gold-and-black frame of the triptych and yanked at it with some force. I heard a soft crunch, and, unable to move, I watched as the left panel—paradise—swung toward us and closed over the center panel like a shutter. Fovel repeated his action on the other side.

  “Now that’s how one should begin to appreciate this tool,” he said.

  “It’s a tool?”

  “You’ll see what I mean in a moment. But first, tell me—what do you see?”

  Viewing The Garden of Earthly Delights with its panels closed like that was a completely new experience. The backs of the panels are meticulously painted but almost devoid of color. The surreal scene is dominated by a huge, grayish transparent sphere containing a large circular island that looks as if it’s rising out of the water.

  Up above this, at the top-left corner, very small, you can make out an old man wearing a triple crown with a book open in his hands who must be God. He contemplates everything below him. There are two phrases next to him written in Gothic lettering: Ipse di
xit et facta sunt and Ipse mandavit et creata sunt.

  “What do they mean?” I asked Fovel, after trying to sound them out them slowly to myself.

  “They’re from the first chapter of Genesis. This is on the third day of Creation, when God commands that Earth emerge and be separate from the waters, and that it be populated with grasses and trees bearing fruit. They mean, ‘He spoke, and it came to be. He commanded, and it was created.’ ”

  “So all this is before human beings appeared?”

  “Yes, Javier, in fact, before almost anything had appeared. In Joachimite terms, this corresponds to the Age of the Father.”

  I was lost. “Joachimite? Age of the Father? I don’t understand.”

  “Of course, I forgot—I need to explain all this to you,” replied Fovel, more patient than annoyed. “Remember when we talked about Raphael and the battle between Leo X and Cardinal Sauli to become the Angelic Pope who would unite Christianity?”

  I nodded. How could I forget? He went on.

  “Well, at the time I told you that the first man to prophesy the coming of this almost supernatural pope was a monk from the thirteenth century, a temperamental man from the South of Italy named Joachim of Fiore. That’s where ‘Joachimite’ comes from.”

  I was working fast to recall our earlier meeting. “I remember you said Joachim of Fiore played a large part in the creation of The New Apocalypse, but you didn’t say much more than that.”

  “You have a good memory. That’s right, at the time I didn’t tell you about what a huge influence his ideas had in Renaissance Europe because it wasn’t an opportune moment, but it is now. Brother Joachim of Fiore was an actual visionary. After visiting Mount Tabor on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, he started having trances and ecstasies. But he was not only a seer, he was also quite an intellectual, who developed something called spiritualis intelligentia—a unique ability to combine reason and faith which made him one of the great thinkers of his time. He was widely respected. He corresponded with three popes, and King Richard the Lionheart traveled to Sicily to hear him speak. His writings were thought of almost as the word of God. In any case, in his writings Joachim announced the imminent arrival of this Angelic Pope who would unite spiritual and earthly power, though what really mattered to him was what came afterward—a millennial reign!”

  “What is a ‘millennial reign’?” I asked.

  “Joachim prophesied a thousand-year era in which Jesus would return to Earth and take control of our destiny. What’s interesting about this is that The Millennial Reign is the earliest name given to this triptych of Bosch’s, and it depicts exactly what this monk believed was going to happen in this world. Thanks to the main religious orders then, Joachim’s theories spread across Europe lightning fast, reaching as far as the Netherlands.”

  “I still can’t believe that the educated classes in those days would accept that kind of prophecy,” I mused.

  “They did so because prophets then were intellectuals themselves. Not like today. Joachim, for example, was a great scholar of the scriptures, and he used that knowledge to classify human history into three distinct ages, or reigns. What you see when the doors of Bosch’s triptych are closed like this corresponds to Joachim of Fiore’s Age of the Father, the time when God gives form to the world, which Bosch represents in that translucent sphere you see in front of you. The main features of that age are winter, water, and night, all of which are shown there. Now, Javier, open the panel.”

  I looked at Fovel, uncertain. “Me?”

  “Sure, go ahead! Choose a panel and open it up.”

  I chose the left-hand panel and swung it open gingerly. It weighed more than I would have thought. As it opened, it revealed the scene that had me so captivated earlier. I tried to imagine the dramatic effect that opening the panel would have had on someone from the Renaissance unprepared for the scene behind. To go with no warning from a gray orb to the rich and colorful world behind would have left a number of viewers openmouthed. Once I had the panel all the way open, Fovel declared, “Excellent. You’ve chosen the path of warning.”

  I glanced at him quizzically.

  “You could have chosen the other, right-hand panel first, and opened it to the scene of hell. If you had done that you would have instead chosen the path of prophecy. The painting gives you a different message depending on which side you open first.”

  “I still don’t understand.”

  “Let me explain, Javier. Joachim of Fiore, who many experts say was a distant inspiration for this work, had a very particular way of understanding history, and it appears that Bosch shared this view. Joachim believed that you could interpret history two different ways depending on whether you begin with the creation and move toward the birth of Jesus or whether you start with that and move in the direction of his second coming. Joachim saw these two eras as being parallel, lasting the same amount of time, and in effect being mirror images of each other. That’s why if you study the first, you can anticipate what is to come in the second. And the first is the path of warning, the one you chose. If you read this triptych from left to right this way, you first see paradise and the creation of man, then you see him multiplying across the land and the subsequent expansion and corruption driven by the sins of the flesh. Then finally—the end. Hell. Punishment for man’s excesses.”

  “What if I’d started from the right instead?”

  “In that case, as I told you, you would have chosen the path of prophecy. The first panel, on the right, represents the Reign of the Son, the age we live in today. Take a good look at that inferno. Nature is conspicuous in its absence. The scene is dominated by buildings and things made by man that have all turned against him. This is the world we live in now.

  “Then you move to the center panel and you see all that exuberant life, nature, water, fruit, and living beings as what comes next for us. We are being told that humanity will be freed from the burdens of this world and will become a community of greater and greater innocence, less attached to the flesh. More spiritual. On this path, the central panel no longer represents the sins of our species, but can instead be seen as the next, higher evolutionary stage for mankind after hell.

  “Now when we look at the last panel on this path, the one on the left, we understand that at the end of days we will return to paradise and stand shoulder to shoulder with Jesus Christ. Have you noticed that the clothed figure on the left-hand panel bears a stronger resemblance to Jesus than to the elderly figure of God on the other panel?”

  “Hmmmm . . .” I pondered this. “Is that actually what Joachim believed? That we will share the glory with Jesus at the end of time?”

  “Exactly,” Fovel confirmed. “He believed that this was our destiny, like it or not, that it was written and unalterable, that at the end of days we would see God and be able to commune with him, and that the church and all its sacraments would become irrelevant.”

  “That’s a dangerous idea,” I remarked.

  “It is. Very much so. You have to remember that Joachim of Fiore lived three centuries before this work was painted, around the time that the first Inquisitions began, and yet even these could not halt the spread of his prophetic faith. We now know that this belief of his spread quietly all across Europe, winning adherents among everyone who saw the church as being an institution more active in oppression than in spirituality. The man who commissioned this painting from Hieronymus Bosch was in complete agreement, and no doubt wanted to have a tool to help him contemplate the meaning of history and the future of the species.”

  “You seem very sure about this, Doctor. Why did this necessarily have to have been commissioned? Couldn’t Bosch just have painted it for himself?”

  “Come now, Javier, don’t be so naïve. That’s just not how art worked during the Renaissance. I believe I went over this with you when we were talking about Raphael. What’s more, have you looked carefully at this triptych? Have you compared it to the other Bosch paintings in the room? It’s not only much
bigger, but it’s also infinitely more populated with figures, more intricate in its detail and much more challenging to interpret. It no doubt took Bosch a very long time to paint, and the materials must have cost a great deal. No one in the fifteenth century painted for pleasure or in their spare time. Painting just wasn’t a pastime then. This was definitely a commission.”

  “Then who commissioned it?” I ask.

  “That’s the big mystery, Javier. At the height of the Second World War, there was a German scholar named Wilhelm Fraenger who was being pursued by the Nazis. He came up with a theory that, to this day, best accounts for all the various oddities of the painting. According to him, The Garden of Earthly Delights was a kind of device used by the faithful of a heretical movement known as the Brethren of the Free Spirit to contemplate their origins and their destiny.7 In central Europe they were known commonly as Adamites because they believed themselves to be the sons of Adam and as such, to have been created in the image of God and therefore incapable of sinning.

  “Fraenger discovered descriptions written by church fathers such as Epiphanius of Salamis8 and St. Augustine9 which mentioned the sect among the earliest deviations from the true faith, and described them performing their rituals naked in caves. One description of them said, ‘One encounters men and women, naked. They pray naked. They listen to sermons naked. They receive the sacrament naked. For this reason they call their church paradise.’ ”

  I shot a glance at the Bosch, surprised by how well that description fit the images I saw.

  “Traces of the Adamites can be found as late as Bosch’s time,” Fovel continued. “In 1411, a hundred years before this was painted, in Cambrai in the part of France that abuts Flanders, the powerful bishop went after the sect. Wilhelm van Hildernissen, a Carmelite monk from Brussels, and his deputy, Aegidus Cantor, were burned at the stake. It’s from those ecclesiastical proceedings that we know that the Adamites performed their rituals in caves and that they resisted authority and were indifferent to Rome. They also believed that the end of days was imminent, and that when it came they would be recognized as the true sons of Adam and be able to roam the earth freely as God had intended.”