Bosch in Den Bosch: de-attributions made by the BRCP and Prado’s next move

“One month after the opening 300.000 tickets have already been sold” proudly announced last Saturday the Het Noordbrabants Museum director Charles de Mooij to a group of 80 international art journalists invited to ‘s-Hertogenbosch, often called simply Den Bosch, to visit Hieronymus Bosch, Vision of Genius. “And it could become a record” he added with a hint of hope, while also the sleepiest among the early visitors were realizing that being waked up at 6.30 am to visit the show one hour before the opening (generally at 9.00 am) was not a bad deal. On the contrary, it turned out to be a rare privilege. This exhibition is a must visit and has to be regarded as a milestone in the artist’s fantastic post mortem career: 17 out of the about 24 paintings today attributed to Bosch, and 19 drawings out of 20, returned to their home-town, where the landscape, the sky, the canals and the perfectly vertical trees the artist painted in its pictures are still there, as the two buildings that were his home and workshop. Taking into account that 500 years after the artist’s death this body of works is spread across 2 continents, 10 countries, 18 cities, and 20 collections, this exhibition will be remembered as the exhibition.

 

Moreover, as in the most typical paintings by Bosch, there is a little detail on the background that is making this operation even more interesting, namely a main problem of attribution which concerns two important pieces in the collection of the Prado museum – that is going to put on display this same exhibition from 31 May to 11 Sept. In fact, the Bosch Research and Conservation Project, an independent and non-profit organization established ad hoc in 2010, which has been able to rise about 3 million euro from different institutions (including the Getty Foundation) to study and make scientific analysis on the relatively small corpus of survived artworks by Bosch and his workshop, had some unexpected outcomes. Last Autumn the BRCP announced that, according to their analysis, The Temptation of Saint Anthony and The Extracting the Stone of Madness was not painted by Bosch himself, as previously believed, but by someone else in his studio.

 

A few days after the BRCP’s declaration, the Prado made an official announcement claiming that the two pieces, along with The Haywain, were requested by Het Noordbrabants Museum as autograph works and were lent as such for a project “completely devoted to original works by Bosch”, as stated in the loan request letter. In late October 2015 the Prado affirms “to have found out only from the media” that the BRCP had de-attributed The Temptation of Saint Anthony and The Extracting the Stone of Madness. On 25 November 2015 the Prado, which “respects the scholarly conclusions reached by our colleagues but it does not share them”, revoked the loan of these two works for technical reasons.

 

As the Garden of the Earthly Delights, a painting largely considered not transportable that effectively the Het Noordbrabants Museum had not requested for the show, the two beautiful paintings under trial are currently at the Prado, and on the Spanish’s museum web site still attributed to Bosch’s hands. Nonetheless, they have been published on the catalogue of the current exhibition in Den Bosch as pieces by the workshop or followers of Hieronymous Bosch. On the other hand, two other pieces from the Prado are currently on show in Den Bosch. The Haywain, which has been used both as the front cover of the catalogue and as the accompanying poster, and The Creation (a copy of the left panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights).

 

Reached by phone by Cfa, Matthijs Ilsink, project coordinator of the BRCP and art historian at the Radboud University Nijmegen, asserted that in this case it wouldn’t be possible to speak in terms of percentage error. “We have collected a very large extent of data regarding the surface and the under-drawing of Bosch paintings, in order to make comparative analysis. But despite the extraordinary resolution of the images we now can count on, we are talking about a visual analysis and as a matter of fact two people in front of the same object react differently. In general, any attribution based on comparative visual analysis is to a certain degree open to debate. What we actually can do is share experiences. Moreover, while we had access to The Extracting the Stone of Madness, in case of The Temptation of Saint Anthony we could only carry out visual analysis in the galleries, and use the technical documentation that was made by the Prado itself”.

 

At this point the Prado’s specialists are expected to produce new positions in support of their attribution to Bosch, to be published in the catalogue that is going to be released in occasion of the Spanish edition of the show. What we may say at the moment is that science and technical devices are evidently reducing of a certain degree the percentage error in the attributions and probably sooner than later people will be finally free to pay more attention to the quality of the work itself than to the author who made it. At some point, on the contrary, documents may turn out to be the real work of art, and that is of course a non sense. Just have a look, for example, at the version of The Temptations of Saint Anthony that the BRCP had attributed to Bosch, while the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art was keeping it in storage considering it a minor work. Taking into account that it is a fragment of a larger work – we don’t know how big the entire composition was for the fragment has been trimmed on four sides –, is this the Bosch you would buy for your collection if you could choose? Wouldn’t it be better to have at home The Extracting the Stone of Madness or the other Anthony instead?

March 25, 2016