It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came.
-H.P. Lovecraft, The Call Of Cthulhu
By the standard of his time, Hieronymus Bosch was a strange man. By the standards of any time, he was strange. But to produce a work like The Garden Of Earthly Delights in the 14th century? To populate a religious painting with unearthly and downright bizarre creatures?
Let’s just say that Bosch was lucky he had the patronage of some wealthy and influential people. Without it, his art might have gotten him into a lot of trouble. He may have even found himself burned at the stake…
We know almost nothing about the man who created these works. He left behind no letters or diaries. He appears only as a glimpse in the municipal records. Even his last name, Bosch, is derived from his hometown in the Netherlands, ‘s-Hertogenbosch. I think this was intentional. I think Hieronoymus Bosch kept a low profile because he knew too much. He was deeply connected to the mysterious world that exists beside (and sometimes overlaps with) our own.
Nowhere is Bosch’s secret knowledge more apparent than in Noah’s Ark on Mt. Ararat (1514).
It is a standard subject in Biblical art. Noah and his passengers find themselves on top of Mt. Ararat after the flood waters recede. Some of them have already left the boat and are exploring the devastated landscape.
But what is the half-visible figure lurking in the cave? It doesn’t look like any of the animals or the people who just got off the ark. In fact, this creature looks like it might be retreating into a stony cave. I think this mysterious figure is Bosch’s depiction of the Old Ones. Think about it. A great flood inundates the earth (a myth that appears in many different societies and religions). When the disaster is over, a Cthulhu-like creature retreats from this new world into a subterranean space. Coincidence? Maybe. But consider the words of H.P. Lovecraft.
“In the elder time chosen men had talked with the entombed Old Ones in dreams, but then something happened. The great stone city of R’lyeh, with its monoliths and sepulchres, had sunk beneath the waves; and the deep waters, full of the one primal mystery through which not even thought could pass, had cut off the spectral intercourse.”
Is that what we’re seeing in Bosch’s Noah’s Ark on Mt. Ararat? Did some sort of flood, a global catastrophe, wipe out humanity’s connection with the Old Ones? Or was something else behind the exile of the Old One to the great stone city? Something we now refer to as God?
These are the sorts of questions we will entertain in Weird Art Through The Ages. Make no mistake. Parts of this class will be intense. All of this class will make you question your concept of reality. But I will mix light material in with the dark. In that spirit, I leave you with a tidbit from The Garden Of Earthly Delights that I hope will put a smile on your face.
In the damnation part of the painting, there is an unfortunate soul who has music painted (or tattooed) on his butt. A former student asked me whether anyone had ever bothered to put these notes to music. Well, after a brief search, I discovered that Amelia Hamrick, a student at Oklahoma Christian University in Oklahoma City, has done just that. I will end my lecture by playing you a “blast” of five hundred year old “butt music”.