Transcription
Hello. In the next 10 minutes, we'll explore 'Christ Mocked' by Hieronymus Bosch, and discuss what this painting tells us of human corruption and evil.
Hieronymus Bosch was born in the middle of the fifteenth century to a family of painters in the town of Den Bosch, in today's Netherlands, and that's where he spent his entire career, and where he took his name from. 'Bosch' or 'Bosch', as we pronounce it in English, Bosch attained an international reputation during his lifetime, through his incredibly compelling, eerie depictions of fantastical creatures, mostly demons, which peopled paintings that were reflection on human moral corruptions. And perhaps the best example of that is his monumental triptych, 'The Garden of Earthly Delights', now in the Museo del Prado.
Bosch has fascinated generations of commentators, who have variously cast him as a sort of lone visionary genius, a heretic, an outcast, and even a proto-surrealist, but I think it's perhaps a bit more pertinent to look at his strange imagery as a reflection of the anxieties of the times in which he lived. The end of the 15th and early 16th centuries, which were moments of great cultural flourishing, as we know with the Renaissance, but also a time of very quick societal transformations, and budding religious crisis, which would culminate with the Protestant Reformation in 1517, the year after Bosch died. Therefore, Bosch lived at a time where the nature of human sin and the possibility for salvation were being deeply interrogated, and his paintings somehow echo these concerns. And none better than the one displayed behind me. 'Christ Mocked'.
The scene depicts a seminal moment in the story of Christ's Passion, namely the episode when Christ has just been betrayed by Jesus. He's brought to the palace of Pontius Pilate, who condemns him to be crucified, but before his execution, Pilate has his men mock flog and crown Christ with thorns, and that's the scene depicted here with remarkable intensity. The scene was by no means unusual in Netherlandish paintings of the day. It was really frequently treated, and usually, it would be set in an elaborate architectural setting, with a slew of figures, and a wealth of anecdotal details. What's so striking here with this painting is that Bosch has taken the radical step of stripping the narrative from any such contextual details, and instead he confronts us very directly with just the main protagonist. We don't know where they're exactly standing. There's just this kind of anonymous grey background, and he's brought the figures really up to the picture, playing our space, making the encounter rather inescapable.
So what do we see at the centre of the painting, we have Christ, and he's surrounded by these four tormentors. The one - and they crowd very tightly around him - the one wearing green is a soldier, and he's actually in the very process of placing the crown of thorns on Christ's forehead, and suspended in space. As it is the crown actually looks very much like a halo, which is a very clever compositional device, on Bosch's spot. Opposite from him is another soldier, who leans very ominously towards Christ's ear, almost as if whispering something to him, and grabs his shoulder. He's wearing an oak leaf on his hat, the significance of which is rather still unclear. It might be referring to pagan rituals, but we're not sure what's the significance of his really prominent spiked collar. And this was a dog's collar at the time and it refers to a biblical passage in which God's chosen one is said to be surrounded by dogs, so the message clear is very evident. Christ is being hounded, and this metaphor is actually picked up in another detail opposite from Christ. If we go back to the man wearing green, tucked in his headdress is an arrow, which is unusual in the fact that its tip is not pointed, but has a shape of a, chisel and these types of arrows were used specifically during hunting, in order to maim the prey, to make it easier for the dogs to catch it.
Closing the composition and effectively enclosing Christ are two figures on the bottom half of the painting. They're both seen from the profile, and the first one is this kind of old man with a white beard, who seems to reach very uneasily towards christ's gently crossed hands, the other one vigorously seems to pull on his tunic. A wonderful aspect of this composite of the composition is the ways the four tormentors all gaze intently at Christ, creating this kind of X shape, and direct our own gaze towards him. Christ's serene expression really contrasts dramatically with the grimaces of the men that surround him, and his white habit also stands out very dramatically from the colourful crowd upon which he stands. He's, most hauntingly of all, he looks at the viewer in a case that's actually hard to escape, and we'll come back to that.
Technical examination has revealed that Bosch conceived his composition very carefully, and made substantial changes while he was painting it. Originally the oppressors were much more violent in their gestures, and much more grotesque in their features. For instance, the man at top right was originally holding Christ with both hands, and his staff had spikes in it. The one at the bottom left was actually making an insulting gestures towards Christ, and his chin was much more prominent. He looked prognate. So what did these changes mean? Why has Bosch muted the violence, and what was the effect of that? I think that it makes paradoxically the picture much more disturbing, because what's at stake here is that we are not, but Christ is not, confronted by grimacing monsters and caricatures, but by real men. What Bosch seems to be telling us is that evil is not a chemical, creature, or demon. Evil has a human face.
What's always struck me most about this painting, is how Bosch has cleverly manipulated the space for emotional effect, by placing the figures so close to the viewer's space, and restricted the movement in the back, by placing them in front of this grey anonymous background, he's created a shallow setting that's very compressed and restricted, and this creates a genuine feeling of claustrophobia that mirrors perfectly the state of Christ's entrapment. Christ cannot escape, but in a way, neither can we, as you are, we cannot escape his haunting gaze, we cannot arrest our eye anywhere on any detail of the painting that would be comforting, and this actually invites us as viewers to question our own role as witness to this man's ordeal as silent witnesses. Inactive witnesses, and these types of interrogation of our own role in as sinners, or in the history of salvation, would have been very much the type of meditations that a picture such as this one would have made to elicit for viewers of the period. There's reasons to believe, based on its scale and subject matter, that it would have been used for private devotion and in this context it fits very well within a special strand of devotional literature of the day, which invited viewers to really imagine and visualise the actual physical atonement of Christ's passion, so really try to a really embodied reading somehow of the Passion narrative, and vivid images such as this one would have definitely helped this effort of imagination on the part of the beholder.
But beyond the religious narrative, I believe that what this painting captures extraordinarily well is a more universal human experience, that of feeling trapped, helpless, and claustrophobic, and these very universal experience I think make this painting actually as compelling as it is, and enduring and relevant today as it was at the time when it was created.
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