Eerie Visions With Eerie Similarities

Nobody depicts hell like Hieronymous Bosch. Even an American, subjected to all kinds of kinetic mayhem on TV or at the movies, may look into one of Bosch’s painted nightmares and let out a gasp. Bosch is famous for his landscapes of damnation, crammed with hapless sinners being tortured--sliced, diced, roasted and chomped upon by part-human, part-beast, part-machine denizens of the underworld.

Since December, it’s been possible for Southern Californians to add Bosch, up close and personal, to their horror catalogs. A Bosch triptych, “The Last Judgment,” has landed in a two-work show, “Choices and Inspirations: The Temptation of St. Anthony,” at the Timken Museum of Art in San Diego’s Balboa Park. Borrowed from the Groeningemuseum in Bruges, Belgium, the Bosch, painted circa 1480 in the Netherlands, is paired with a painting from the Timken’s collection, Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo’s “Temptation of St. Anthony,” painted in Italy around 1527.

The idea is to showcase the parallels between the hell depicted in Savoldo’s work and the hell in Bosch’s painting. The fact that the Italian artist borrowed heavily from his northern counterpart was noted by art historians in the early 1960s.

It is the Timken’s coup to finally put the two together, side by side. And it came about almost by accident.

“We got a request from Bruges to borrow both our Petrus Christus [“Death of the Virgin”] and Savoldo,” says Hal Fischer, director of exhibitions at the Timken, a boutique museum begun by San Diego’s Putnam sisters, Anne and Amy, whose holdings number fewer than 60 works. “When you have a small collection but choice work, they’re often requested.”

In return, Till Borchert, guest curator for the Groeningemuseum, suggested that the Timken might want to exhibit the Bosch. As a Flemish paintings expert, Borchert was aware of the long-noted connections between the “The Last Judgment” and the Timken’s Savoldo.

There are only a handful of Bosch paintings and drawings in the U.S.--and no triptychs. The last time a three-panel Bosch had visited the United States, Fischer believes, was for a 1991 National Gallery of Art show, “Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration.”

“I didn’t dare ask for the Bosch,” says Fischer, who immediately jumped at the rare opportunity. “You could have knocked me off my chair.”

“Choices and Inspirations” is the third and final installment of small exhibitions the Timken began last year to highlight various issues in art history. The first was on conservation and showed how proper cleaning and restoration can change the look of a work. The second, on provenance, traced the history of ownership of several works, including the Timken’s John Singleton Copley (“Mrs. Thomas Gage”) and Rembrandt (“St. Bartholomew”).

For the third show, Fischer says, he wanted to look at the process of a painting’s creation. He had already been thinking of using the Savoldo as the centerpiece. “I deliberately picked [it],” he says, “because it was unusual--he’s mainly known for portraits.” Furthermore, he wanted to explore the increasingly popular idea that there was cross-fertilization between northern and southern painting traditions in the 1400s and 1500s. With the offer of the Bosch, that topic became an even stronger element in the exhibition.

“Art doesn’t just spring forth,” Fischer explains. “There are precedents, antecedents, and yet an artist still brings his or her own originality and inventiveness to this.”

In the exhibition, wall labels provide background on the artists and the traditions they represent, and on the commercial and cultural ties between Venice and cities such as Antwerp and Bruges.

Bosch, born in 1450, was active from 1480 until his death in 1516 in what is now the Netherlands. His works, whose fantastical scenes are thought to be keyed to specific Dutch folk sayings and lore, were highly prized and often copied throughout Europe. “The Last Judgment,” which some scholars attribute solely to Bosch, may have come out of his workshop. Although its exact provenance is unknown, at least one work like it can be traced to a Venetian cardinal named Grimani. A 1521 account lists three Bosch works in the cardinal’s collection, including a “canvas of hell with monsters.”

What seems to be beyond doubt is that Savoldo, born at about the time “The Last Judgment” was painted, in Brescia, Italy, 500 miles from Bosch’s home territory, saw this particular painting--or a copy or print of it--and borrowed heavily from it.

Could it have been another Bosch that Savoldo saw? “No, no,” Fischer replies, “and that is really what makes this a unique situation. It’s so direct, the appropriated images are so specific.”

In Bosch’s triptych, Christ is enthroned in heaven, surrounded by angels at the top of the central panel. The left panel shows the blessed enjoying a blissful if slightly eerie afterlife listening to music and cavorting in green pastures around a lake and a white tower. Meanwhile, the lower part of the central panel and the right panel show a host of diabolical ways the damned are being tortured for all eternity. The painting is densely detailed, demanding close inspection of every group of figures and each nook and cranny of the landscape.

Despite the three-panel paradise and hell format, Bosch’s figures and landscapes fill the entire triptych space, without clear lines of separating the scenes. That, says Fischer, is indicative of the northern Renaissance’s ties to the overall compositional style of the Middle Ages.

Savoldo, on the other hand, clearly divides his single canvas in two, with a rocky outcropping (an often-used symbol of hermit saints) in the middle. This geometry is tied to the Italian Renaissance’s emphasis on Aristotelian ideals, according to the exhibition. It makes a more unified impact, sending a clear message that this work is about good opposed to evil.

But Savoldo also uses that division to his own ends, to combine two styles in one painting. The demarcation is emphatic. The left side shows St. Anthony in a typical Italian manner, all painterly modeling and fluttering robes, set against a rolling landscape with a building in the distance, thought to be a monastery (St. Anthony was a founder of the monastic tradition). The sun is out, the sky is blue, and St. Anthony is fleeing from the dark torments opposite him.

On the right side, flames engulf a ruined city and wretched humans are tortured in a nocturnal landscape. The figures are gathered in small groups that have to be carefully examined to see what is actually going on. Out of all that generalized Boschian denseness, detail and action, the exhibition calls out a handful of examples of direct borrowing.

One is a mill-wheel monster. In Bosch’s painting and in Savoldo’s, a waterwheel--associated with futility or foolishness in Dutch sayings--brings victims into the mouth of an oversized human head. Both heads wear cages holding entrapped figures. The songbird--evoked by the birdcage--also had an association with folly in Dutch lore.

Other borrowed creatures include a lop-eared beast, which carries a driver and a caldron holding huddled sinners on its back, and the fish-cum-bird that has swallowed the upper half of a human being. Even the colors of the half-eaten limbs and fish creature are the same as those in “The Last Judgment.”

So what’s a contemporary viewer to make of all of this plagiarism? According to Walter Gibson, an art historian who has written on Bosch, not much. Such blatant borrowing wasn’t the transgression it would be today. “If [patrons] couldn’t get an original painting, they would have a copy made,” he says. Reproducing Bosch in whole or in part “would have been a compliment” to the master.

For Fischer, what’s most important about Savoldo’s work is not how much the Italian painter borrowed from Bosch, but how he was able to create out of it something that was his own--a “highly original work of art,” in the words of the wall labels at the Timken exhibition.

Seeing the works side by side, he says, is “a real way of communicating with audiences and giving them an expanded perspective on looking at a work of art. It’s not the artist working in his atelier alone, but there’s a very complex dialogue and interchange and histories that go into a work of art.”

He happily notes that there has been record attendance at the museum in January and February, and he assumes that the Bosch is the biggest attraction.

No matter, he says: “They may have seen a wonderful Bosch, but they also have a new appreciation for something right in their own community.”

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“CHOICES AND INSPIRATIONS: THE TEMPTATION OF ST. ANTHONY,” Timken Museum of Art, 1500 El Prado, Balboa Park, San Diego.

Dates: Tuesdays-Saturdays, 10:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m.; Sundays, 1:30-4:30 p.m. Through March 31. Admission: Free. Phone: (619) 239-5548.

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Scarlet Cheng is a regular contributor to Calendar.