The Prado houses about 8,000 paintings, of which just under 2,000 are on display at any time. I spent four hours walking around the Prado looking at work by Valasquez, Goya, El Greco, Rubens, Titian, Tintoretto, Bruegel, and Raphael among many others. Most of the paintings were wonderful…
BUT.
The absolute show stealer, the single painting that stopped me in my tracks and had me on the verge of tears of joy, was Hieronymus Bosch's 'The Garden of Earthly Delight'. Just the most outrageous and involving picture I have ever seen, joyous detail, and everywhere you look a surprising image.
View it at:
The allegorical complexity would take several years and a couple of PhD’s to decipher and several hundred pages to explain.
What was particularly striking about it was how modern the picture looked. The shapes, the glass tubes and balls, the bending of reality, the buildings that appear to be made from pastel coloured plastic, all seemed more suited to the middle of the C20th than 400 years earlier.
I was standing next to a couple of people who clearly liked it, but just thought it was "mad", "random", the product of a crazed imagination - an amazing imagination - but one that they thought was on mushrooms, acid or some medieval equivalent.
But the message of this triptych is actually a very simple one - we started in paradise (the left side) we are living in a mess inspired and created by own own failings (the stunning and outrageous middle section) and we are all going to end up in hell, pictured in scary detail on the right-hand side, making it very clear that hell is not going to be fun.
Remember this is a medieval painting produced around 1500. And it was loved at the time by those who patronised art and artists. It was displayed by Henry III of Nassau (Brussels), until it was stolen (pretty much) by the Spanish Duke of Alba. In 1593 it came into the possession of King Phillip II of Spain who put it on display in his palace El Escorial.
So this was no weird little, unknown man doodling away in his crazy painting shed, producing obscure mad images that no-one wanted to see. Because, this painting was at the centre of elite European culture from the moment of the last brush stroke.
It captured the theological confusion, moral danger and spiritual despair of it's age, it was confirmation of the chaos and sin in which the Catholic hierarchy believed everyone but themselves was living. It is, therefore, one of the ultimate 'us and them' moments. The production, ownership and display of the picture makes it clear that the aristocrats, churchmen and intellectuals who formed the ruling class, knew what was civilized, moral and righteous. This knowledge raised them above and set them apart from everyone else who remained, and always would remain, mired in their own filth and destined for hell. And this was confirmed by Hieronymous Bosch’s image of the barbaric, irreligious mass of ‘others’, out there behaving with no moral or spiritual restraint.
One thing that not many people notice about this triptych is what happens when you fold the two outer wings in to 'close' the picture. You can see this by bending over the rope to look at the back of the two side panels. The image of the closed triptych is of a dark blue night-time world enclosed within a twinkling glass ball. Just imagine the effect of coming into a room and seeing that dark, magically foreboding scene, and then opening up the picture to reveal the stunning multi-coloured mess of civilisation falling apart, presented inside it.
Now that's a 'Ta-Da' moment right there.
No wonder the Duke of Alba nicked it.
Compare it then to a painting I saw the next day at Thyssen-Bornemisa Museum, Metropolis by George Grosz, painted in 1917.
View it at:
Again extremely detailed, very busy. The American flag in the top left seems to indicate it is an American city scape; but it could be any city where the people blur into one another as they hurry to get where they so very urgently have to be. It is wildly colourful and vibrant, with so much red, so much fast action, it is like a blood-soaked rush-hour nightmare reproduced with unerring accuracy on waking.
But as with ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ the message and the method is simple. The message is that the world is full of sin, and here are several examples of the sins which I the disillusioned artist would present as evidence. For Grosz these are the deadly sins as defined by a Marxist - the greedy striving for material success at the expense of others, the blurring anonymity and unconnected nature of relationships between people and the brassy exploitation of earthly desires and needs by those in control of the means of production. In 1917 Germany the suffering of war casualties and the deprivations being endured by most of the people of Germany were in sharp contrast to the bright lights of clubs and restaurants where the rich could stuff their faces and be ‘entertained’ by whatever and whoever took their fancy. Grosz would not need to go far to find evidence to confirm his disillusionment.
Two separate faiths, one Christian and one Marxist, inspire two separate paintings.
Time, just over 400 years appears to divide them further, yet both present pretty much the same narrative.
Do we need another George Grosz, or better still (in my opinion) a Hieronymous Bosch for the C21st?
Is there someone already out there?
If so, names please.
