The Master of the Prado

by Javier Sierra

  “Pretty daring for the time.” I commented.

  “It’s true. What’s interesting is that they seem to have anticipated the interest in the human body that sprang up among artists of that period. The Adamites spiritualized the erotic. They didn’t see nudity as a pathway to lust; on the contrary, they believed that it was possible to have a universal platonic love unmarred by carnal desires. Their ideas were quite advanced for their time.”

  “Was Bosch one of them?” I asked.

  “Fraenger doesn’t say. Bosch’s biography is murky. We know that he was both the son and grandson of painters, possibly from Aachen, and that he worked ornamenting churches in the area, but we don’t know much more than that. Fraenger was able to show that Bosch possessed an unusual level of knowledge about the Adamite sect, which Fraenger concludes could only have come from one of the sect’s top leaders. An educated man, and rich enough to finance a work of that magnitude.”

  “You must have someone in mind!” I pressed him.

  “The thing is, there are not many candidates. It’s either some merchant who was important then but whom we don’t remember, or possibly a member of the family of Orange. More recently, it’s been suggested that the triptych was a wedding present from Henry II of Nassau to his wife.10 Who knows? Perhaps he or some other administrator from the Low Countries was affiliated with the Adamites in some way. But if Fraenger is right and this patron is in the painting then it might not be that long until he’s finally identified.”

  “How do you mean? Do we know what the patron looked like?”

  “Exactly what I said, Javier. Following the custom of these commissioned works, Bosch would have included his patron’s face among the many figures he painted. Would you like to know which figure it is?”

  I nodded impatiently, and like a child yearning for a candy, I joined the Master in front of The Garden of Earthly Delights.

  “Right there,” Fovel said, pointing. “See?”

  In the lower-right corner of the central panel next to a small group of figures, there was a kind of breach in the ground, like a small cave, and leaning out of it was a young man and woman.

  “You see that cave?” asked Fovel, moving aside. “As I said, the Adamites would use these as their temples. Take a good look at the man. Two things about him stand out. For one, he is wearing clothes. The only other clothed figure is God in the left panel. Also, he is gazing openly and directly at the viewer. Again, just like God. Fraenger believed that this figure is the free spirit who commissioned the painting from Bosch. It’s worth pointing out that Bosch placed the figure where painters traditionally sign their paintings, setting him apart from all the other figures and identifying him to the initiated.”

  The “Master” of The Garden of Earthly Delights. Central panel (detail). The Prado Museum, Madrid.

  “Couldn’t it just be a self-portrait?”

  “Some people think so, but I doubt it,” Fovel said. “He doesn’t behave like a painter. He seems more interested in showing us things than in making the painting’s case.”

  “So what is it that he’s showing us, Doctor?” I asked, staring at that small corner of the painting.

  “Well, according to Fraenger he’s showing us the new Eve, who’s holding the infamous apple from the Garden of Eden. But there’s something else. Take a look behind the young man. Behind him and leaning against his shoulder you can just make out a face, which in this case might very well be Bosch’s self-portrait. Here he appears in shadow, meek, his head on his mentor’s shoulder.”

  I stared at that small face. “I’d give anything to have a portrait of Bosch that I could compare this to.”

  Fovel sighed and arched his eyebrows, in what I took to be resignation before the infinite ignorance of his pupil.

  “Sadly, no such thing exists. The earliest portrait we have was painted fifty years after Bosch’s death by the Flemish draftsman and poet Domenicus Lampsonius,11 so it may well not be a reliable likeness. Nonetheless, it was part of a series of twenty-three portraits that Lampsonius did of Dutch artists and showed Bosch already as an old man.”

  “Is there a resemblance between that and this figure leaning on the free spirit in the Garden?” I asked, and right away I saw that for some reason my question had discomfited the Master. He stroked his nose and mouth as he tried to find a suitable response. He began slowly.

  “Well . . . it could be that Fraenger confused the two figures in the painting. Or maybe it was Lampsonius. In any case, there is one detail that those figures and the Lampsonius portrait have in common. It’s just a small thing, but . . .”

  “What is it, Doctor?”

  “You can’t really tell in the portrait, but in the triptych, the two men look directly at the viewer and pose with the nascent Eve, who appears to be passing through an open glass doorway. The men seem to be signaling both the woman and the doorway, as if these were the whole point of the entire composition.”

  “The device!” I exclaimed.

  A mysterious expression appeared on the doctor’s face. “Exactly. You have to think of this painting as a doorway, a portal that will transport you to a transcendent state, or reality. The drowsy, reclining woman represents the key with which we open the doorway. As I said, Fraenger believed that this painting was to be used as a kind of meditation tool with which the members and followers of the Free Spirit would have access to the sect’s most important teachings, and to very personal mystical visions in which they set great store. However, my own impression is that the door and the pensive woman together form a sort of hieroglyph, or symbol, which explains what the triptych is to be used for and how to use it. Shall I read you what Fraenger said about this?”

  “Of course!”

  Domenicus Lampsonius, Hieronymus Bosch (1572). Engraving.

  Fovel went through his pockets and extracted a small book with a dark, well-worn binding on which I could just make out the name of this German thinker who had evidently made a great impression on the Master. He opened the book up to a place he’d marked and began to read.

  To begin their own particular spiritual journey, the Free Spirit disciples would sit facing the panel and begin to meditate. When they reached the moment of maximum concentration, they would be lifted gently from this everyday world into a spiritual realm that they would discover little by little, and which, over time, would reveal to them truths of greater and greater significance. The only way to understand and enter into the panel was to concentrate on it unceasingly. Thus the viewer would become a cocreator of it, an independent interpreter of the solemn and enigmatic symbols in front of them. The painting was never static, but always alive and constantly animated by the living flow of transformation, the organic becoming, the ongoing revelation of life, all of this being in concert with the painting’s evolutionist intellectual structure.12

  Fovel finished and waited for the words to sink in. I didn’t need long.

  “Does that mean,” I searched for the right words, “that you know how to open the portal? Can you enter the painting? Use the tool?”

  “I’m afraid not.” Fovel said. “Not even Fraenger managed to do that. After the Allied bombers bombed Berlin and destroyed his apartment and his notes, he spent years trying unsuccessfully to enter the portal and cross over. The one useful hint to emerge from his attempts and research was that the voyage would begin with the viewer’s gaze fixed upon the fountain of life in the left-hand panel, in the opening containing the owl. From there, one would be transported. Believe it or not, I have tried. In the process, you come to realize just how many of these owls there are scattered about the painting, like multiple keys to the same door, and while I have no problem understanding their significance, getting them to work is another matter.”

  “Really? What do you think that significance is?”

  “Well, these are creatures that can see in the dark, Javier. Since the earliest of times owls, have stood for the ideal of knowledge and for that which can penetrate the invisi
ble. Only owls can move precisely through the darkness, and to the eyes of the ancients this meant that they could also navigate the territory of death. Of the hereafter. They are psychopomps, guides of souls to the afterlife.”

  “So this is another painting that acts like a medium.” I observed.

  “In a sense, yes. It’s up to us to determine what particular medium the artist is suggesting to get to the other side, to God. Is it simple meditation? Drugs? Perhaps Claviceps purpurea—ergot fungus—which in the Low Countries was often used in drinks. Fraenger is not very clear on this point, but I’d wager that by the time this triptych got into the hands of Philip II, in the late 1500s, he and his trusted inner circle would already have known all about the work’s visionary power.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  Hieronymus Bosch, Owls in The Garden of Earthly Delights (details). Panels I and II. The Prado Museum, Madrid.

  The Master smiled. “It’s no secret that Philip was a man of contradictory convictions. On the one hand, he was bound to defend the Catholic faith to the end, to prosecute the Inquisition throughout his territories, and to keep Protestants and other heretics at bay. But then on the other hand, he financed the alchemical experiments of his architect, Juan de Herrera, he was an avid collector of secret, magical, and astrologic texts, and kept no fewer than six unicorn horns in his own personal treasure chest.13 He was a man in whom orthodoxy and heterodoxy, faith and paganism, walked hand in hand. I’d bet that he had heard about the visionary properties of the painting and made sure that he had it near him at the end.”

  “But wasn’t that controversial?” I objected. “Didn’t anybody question the king’s interest in such a strange painting, or cast doubts on Bosch, in the most Catholic court in the world?”

  “They certainly did!” replied Fovel. “Bosch was called every name in the book. ‘Painter of devils’ was one of the kindest. Most of those who actually saw his paintings couldn’t explain the king’s fascination with them. Perhaps fortunately, Bosch was not a prolific painter—there are no more than forty of his paintings all told. But Philip became his biggest collector. He had no fewer than twenty-six of those forty paintings in his possession when he died, most of which he had hung in El Escorial. It could be that Father Sigüenza was mostly able to convince critics that the works were satirical, that they were an invitation to good Christians to contemplate the perversions that lurked around every corner and a warning lest they fall prey to these. What’s remarkable is that this explanation was almost universally accepted, and didn’t start to fall apart until well into the next century.”

  My mind was still on what Fovel had said earlier. “Doctor, getting back to the king—why do you think he wanted to have this strange painting at his bedside?”

  Fovel gave me a particularly impish look, adjusting his coat and tugging on his lapels. He half turned, his back to the Bosch, and fixed his gaze on me.

  “What about you? Can’t you think of a reason?”

  * * *

  I. Beware, beware! God sees.

  14

  * * *

  THE SECRET FAMILY OF BRUEGHEL THE ELDER

  Before the afternoon slipped away entirely, Fovel led me to another corner of Gallery 56a. Incredibly, not a single soul had crossed our path while we spoke. It was almost five in the afternoon and we were still completely alone. Out of caution, I said nothing, and neither did Fovel. It didn’t occur to me then that we had experienced the same thing once before, when we had appeared to be the only two people in a museum that receives more than two million visitors a year.1 If I had just thought at the time to calculate the odds of experiencing two events like that within a month of each other, I’d have been aware of the magnitude of what was happening. However, dense as I was, it would be a while before I connected the two experiences.

  “You mustn’t go without seeing this,” Fovel said, oblivious to the knot that was forming in my stomach for no reason I could think of. The painting that he led me to would do nothing to improve my state.

  To our left, on an exquisitely painted panel approximately five feet in length, an army of skeletons looked set to engage in combat with a handful of humans who were fighting for their lives.

  Fovel had chosen a truly extraordinary work.

  Death’s forces had taken their positions and would give no quarter. One of their carts, overflowing with skulls, crossed the main square. An ominous war machine advanced, flames leaping from it, driven by a sinister hooded figure. Nearby, skeletons brandishing swords slaughtered men and women pitilessly, while others busied themselves hanging the condemned, or slitting their throats with knives, or hurling them into the river, where their naked bodies swelled like balloons.

  Speechless at this horrific sight, I turned my attention to a kind of fortified enclosure that gave onto the sea. It was filled to bursting with the walking dead, all exultant and happy, and beyond those walls nothing in the surrounding picture allowed even the smallest room for hope. The rearguard positions were painfully denuded and ruined, clumps of putrefying remains lay everywhere, and smoke rose from the wreckage of various ships and coastal embattlements, adding emphatically to the sense that this was the end. Worst of all, on the horizon you could just make out new skeletal battalions breaking through, marching implacably toward the ruins of civilization. It dawned on me that no one would survive the onslaught of the armies of the dead.

  The Triumph of Death is absolutely devastating. Pieter Brueghel the Elder painted it in 1562, long before anyone had even conceived of a zombie apocalypse. It would be just over two hundred years before Goya—that genius of unease—appeared, though Brueghel more than holds his own against him. Both artists were products—you might say victims—of their time.

  Pieter Brueghel the Elder, The Triumph of Death (1562). The Prado Museum, Madrid.

  In Flanders, Brueghel lived through six consecutive Habsburg-Valois Wars and then saw firsthand the horrors of the plague, which decimated the population—rich, religious, children, and poor alike. He was about thirty-five when he started working on this nightmare of his, which, ironically, would prove prophetic for him—he would not live to see forty. His own brushes having predicted his end, he succumbed to the plague, leaving us the orphans of his talents.

  I think I know why Fovel chose this landscape to look at next. Both Brueghel’s painting and The Garden of Earthly Delights inspire reflection in the viewer. The two paintings are also complementary, in a way. While Bosch’s vision is inspired by the first book of the Bible and on a simple level describes the origin of our species, Brueghel’s serves as its culmination. Deriving from the final book of the scriptures, St. John’s Apocalypse, it shows us an extreme version of Bosch’s hell. What were already grotesque horrors in the Garden show their true face in Brueghel, revealing themselves in all their base depravity.

  Lost in thought, I realized suddenly that The Triumph of Death could be seen as a more advanced instance of the Totentanz, the Dance of Death, a popular artistic theme in the Central Europe of Brueghel’s time. Just as I was about to mention this to Fovel, he introduced something new.

  “I’d like to describe an enigma to you, Javier,” he said solemnly. “Are you ready?”

  His words yanked me out of my thoughts, and I looked at him a little discombobulated.

  “What kind of enigma?” I asked.

  “It has to do with something we haven’t yet talked about, called the ‘art of memory.’ It’s a kind of practice that I trust you will benefit from greatly whenever you’re in a museum looking at paintings.”

  “Go ahead,” I said, now intrigued.

  “The first thing you should know is that until the arrival of printing, in the Renaissance, this kind of practice, or art, was reserved for the privileged—intellectuals, the nobility, and artists—and so very few people have heard of it. With the advent of moveable type and the spread of printing, it was left behind, and with it the ability that we once had to read through images.”


  “How do you read through images?” I asked, somewhat skeptical.

  “I’m talking literally about reading via images. Not interpreting them, as we have been doing, deciphering the meaning of a symbol or gesture, such as seeing a cross upon a tower and knowing that there is a church there. This art of memory was invented by the Greeks in Homer’s time as a way to record large quantities of text that they couldn’t inscribe in stone. It turns out to be the greatest mnemonic tool ever invented by man, a practice that has survived for hundreds of years and has been used to record everything from scientific knowledge to literary texts. Generally speaking, it involves associating images, landscapes—even statues and buildings—with pieces of knowledge, which can then later be decoded and understood by any member of the elite who knows the code.”

  “You’re saying this has been used for over two thousand years?”

  “That’s right. Possibly even longer. We can’t know how it is that these Greek thinkers discovered the human brain’s ability to retain mountains of information, or this method of storing and recalling it by associating pieces of information with geometric, architectural, artistic, or other common distinctive images. That is how the method is described in ancient texts like Rhetorica ad Herennium, which is thought to have been written by Cicero himself. If, for example, one has been trained to link a body of medical facts with a particular building or statue or even painting, then all one has to do is to recall that structure and the stored facts can be easily retrieved. Do you understand?”