The Case Against Theory

The question isn't – how has the Academy misled us? It's how has the Academy allowed itself to be so misled? (16-minute video)

The power of theory, authoritatively pronounced with an air of transcendent knowledge, has a remarkable effect on our scholars. Even the grandest are not immune. We saw in the previous episode how EH Gombrich was able to deceive even himself when he built a theory around the Days of Noah, on a hallucination of castles on the outer panels.

Once a theory is established, confirmation bias kicks in and people seek out images that support what they believe should be there, according to the ideas they have adopted.

Also, at a certain point, scholars are inclined to gather round a dominant idea – trusting to the dicta of their peers, rather than the evidence of their eyes. Clustering is a common phenomenon in all professions and in all walks of life.

If I may be permitted an authoritative announcement, with an air of transcendent knowledge – this video establishes how, why and where our grandest scholars have got things so very wrong about the Garden of Earthly Delights.

And the challenge to their conclusions made here in this essay – does, as a point of principle, refer to the visual information in the triptych.

There’ll come a time when we look at the errors and confusions caused by iconographers whose reading of the painting is akin to astrologers’ reading of an ephemeris. But that’s for a future episode.

PS: To restate two things.

When I say in the video that scholars have failed to look at the painting, that isn’t quite right. Many academics have looked intensively at the panels and have itemised the details, creating an inventory of the images. Their failure lies in not seeing what they are looking at. They may catalogue a woman in a crystal bubble, or a man attempting to eat a strawberry, or an owl that is 12 feet tall – but they glaze over and fail to see depictions of the human realities Bosch has painted – grief, addiction, depression, alienation, comedy, sexual desire, along with an emphatic homosexual theme that persistently makes its presence felt. Failing to register the dozen Staring People scanning the sky (I say for the Second Coming) is a remarkable failure of seeing things (previous video on Treasures may be worth reviewing).

And second: While this video disparages the effects of theory, it is also true that there is a general theory of the triptych laid out elsewhere in this series of videos.

Is this inconsistent?

The difference is that the theory in the Revelation video is based entirely – or almost entirely – on the visual facts of the painting. Its reading of images can be judged by anyone who cares to look. It is, to that extent, falsifiable, unlike an iconographic reading of the painting.

It’s true I might be criticised for reading expressions, attitudes and actions 16th century characters in a 21st century way, but that is a debate that reasonable people can enjoy.

The theories that come in for something of a kicking in this new video are those that originate from outside the frame of the painting, not verified by the visual facts inside the frame, and ultimately not verifiable at all, so often being a private connection of the critic.

Any comments are welcome.

AGAINST THEORY

TEXT OF VIDEO

Julian

Many are the theories our learned professoriate has developed, purporting to explain Bosch's garden of earthly delights. And while they may contain interesting and sometimes useful information, no theory has survived contact with the multitudes in the triptych. And perhaps surprisingly, there is an aspect of theory that is actively counterproductive.

Rather than illuminate or unlock meaning, theory can obscure like a heavy, thickening glaze what is in front of our eyes. This can be a disadvantage for culture workers in a visual medium, because seeing things, that is quite a part of the job description.

Quentin

If we go back into the last century, we can see that authoritative pronouncements made then helped to set critique of Bosch's garden off in the wrong direction for decades, even for generations. One such pronouncement was that the characters in the garden have no character at all. If Dirk Bax didn't exactly start the idea in the mid-20th century, he certainly helped create the conventional wisdom about it by saying, Many persons depicted by him have but little individuality.

His sylphic figures represent no creatures of flesh and blood.

Hans Belting picked up the thought, saying,

Bosch's characters are not only ageless, but lacking in individuality.

Ernst Gombrich came to the party with his contribution.

As far as facial expression is concerned, Bosch's figures frequently wear impenetrable masks.

It's all completely untrue, and actually amazingly, almost wilfully, unobservant. We only have to look to see that this lugubrious fatalist is quite different from this blasé young man, who differs equally from this stern old fellow, who in turn comes from a different moral perspective from his soft-eyed, smiling admirer.

We surely see that this tall, glamorous seductrix has a very different life from this plump, stooped, and rather sour-faced old-age pensioner, and both so different from this isolated, wonky-eyed courtesan who nobody wants to engage with.

Julian

This idea that Bosch wasn't painting real people released critics from the human realities of the triptych and gave them free reign to pursue their own theoretical abstractions, their own private specialisms, and allowed or even encouraged them to ignore the great treasury in front of our eyes.

Quentin

The temptation for academics is to apply some obscure area of knowledge of the period to the triptych, saying definitively that Bosch had this or that in mind when he painted this or that image. So, The Garden of Earthly Delights is all about 16th-century church sermons, St Augustine's City of God, or Bible verses, or mediaeval astrology, or alchemy, or the Antichrist, or heretical belief systems, or Kabbalistic marriage ceremonies. And focussing on this extraneous knowledge obscures or even wipes out the teeming humanity in front of our eyes.

Is this why critics have failed to see so many individual desires, so much personal sorrow, and all the carefully held secrets like this one? These human realities have gone unobserved, unnoticed, unregistered.

For instance, no major academic has written about what is going on here with this forlorn creature.

Appolonia

The conventional wisdom is that carrying a candle was the sign of a mediaeval sex worker and that therefore this woman is a prostitute. Whether or not that is true, it is the least interesting thing about her. The expression on her face is the most affecting representation of grief in the painting, and one that bears comparison with any pieta of the period.

Her pain has overwhelmed her. Her mouth, her eyes tell of a human tragedy of great intensity. She is inhabited by grief, consumed by it.

Why is she, of all this company, the only one so deeply affected? Is it that she is grieving not for herself but for someone else? Because, look, she is reaching down in an attempt to stay the sword hand of the rat demon who is executing a man we might assume is her lover.

In addition, the die on her head is false. The five and the two should be on opposite sides. This hints at her having had something to do with the quarrel at the gambling table.

If she had anything to do with the cheating, the argument, the execution, this will have compounded her grief with guilt, which must be adding to the torment that we see written on her lovely face. She is also the culmination of a narrative that begins over here with the swindling sister swine. We deal with that in another video in this series.

Quentin

All these speculations and interpretations have been sealed off by identifying her as a prostitute and treating that as the end of the matter. I think the fault lies in the belief that many Bosch scholars have that there is a code to be cracked, that there is a universal key that deciphers the garden.

Julian

Dirk Bax believed the triptych was a rebus, a giant puzzle in which Bosch had illustrated hundreds of local proverbs and sayings. He told us that to be in “a shell” was to be in a quarrel with someone, which may well be true, but if so, it is the beginning of the story, not the end.

If, by putting this couple in a shell, Bosch hints that they're quarrelling, surely the interesting question is, what is the quarrel about?

We can actually see for ourselves, if we look, because Bosch has given us all the visual facts.

Quentin

This beauty is bored. She is bored because she is neglected. Her young man is otherwise occupied.

But in what? By the giant berry in the water that he is pulling towards him. Why does he want it?

Julian

Why do the dozen desperados in the water want it also? There is a reason for their craving that we go into in another video in this series.

Quentin

The neglected beauty looks out into her audience with a mute plea, a soft, seductive look, asking to be taken away from all this. All this has been left unregistered because scholars have stopped at the scholarly knowledge that to be in a shell is to be in a quarrel.

Julian

Dirk Bax also tells us things like, a bird's beak close to an anus signifies a pauper. It's the sort of scholarship that bedevils appreciation of Bosch's triptych. In this garden world without clothes, money or houses, the concept of poverty has no meaning.

But Dirk Bax’s' somewhat unhelpful information does serve to deflect attention from the meaning that is actually there in full view.

Quentin

The vignette portrays a young show-off demonstrating his circus skills with an acrobatic pose, and a long-beaked bird is about to teach him a lesson. The beak is about to violate the boy's deepest privacies, and the humour lies in his realisation, all too late, that he is powerless to stop it. And we can tell by his expression that he's appalled at the prospect of what's in store.

It's a slapstick moment, still used today, the moment before the disaster, and nothing to do with a recondite knowledge of proverbial sayings about pauperism.

Julian

Dirk Bax is not the only critic with a weakness for unusable scholarship. Lotte Brand Philip produced a marvellously intricate interpretation of this famous scene. She viewed it as a strictly symbolic action, saying that it doubtlessly represents a visual pun made not just in French but also in mediaeval Latin.

Quentin

Please note how hard that word, doubtlessly, is working.

Julian

In Lotte’s view, the flowers are lilies – or lis in French. They are inserted into the rectum – or, in French, the cul of another. So, in French, Bosch is visualising au-cul-lis – which transliterated into Latin becomes oculis. Which means eyes. Which suggests to Lotte Brand Philip that Bosch is referring us to ‘a warning against the lust of the eyes.’

Quentin

Such cryptic crossword games distract attention from this face, which is mysteriously out of place. The gentle intelligence in it is remarkable. His lack of concern at the embarrassing predicament also.

Bosch has some private intent here that we can only guess at. It's certainly worth considering the possibility that five minutes spent on this curious face yields more aesthetic satisfaction than any intellectual theorising written around this little vignette.

The glorious Harvard professor and Bosch specialist Joseph Koerner has written extensively on his idea that Bosch was an ‘enemy painter,’ with hatred as his speciality.

In his Glasgow lecture he put it like this.

Julian

Bosch made portraying enemies his trademark skill,. The devil’s hatred of people. people’s hatred of other people. And the wrath of God that consumes everyone.

Quentin

And then going on to say with professorial eloquence.

Julian

This global economy of loathing stands not just portrayed in Bosch's pictures, it is performed in them as if his brush were an instrument of enmity.

Quentin

I think that this is the professor's way of saying Bosch was a savage satirist, a relentless scourge of folly and sin. This is very probably true of Bosch's earlier work, but not here. That inference of hatred, of loathing, it does not carry over into the garden of earthly delights.

There's a lot going on here, but there is a conspicuous lack of loathing. Many questionable activities, but where is the evidence of hatred? The visual facts will not support that theory.

In the garden triptych there is just too much empathy, too much charm, too much humour, and far too much humanity.

Even in the hell panel, as Ludwig Baldass noted,

Most of the damned seem to be acting rather than actually experiencing their sufferings.

Baldass may have been looking at these characters with their exaggerated Boys in the Band manner.

There is this cheeky peaking sinner, and sinners who seem wholly indifferent to punishment or pain.

The three or four bottom jokes that Bosch has given us certainly go some way towards lightening the mood of this particular version of hell. The only creatures who are displaying evidence of guilt are these dogs, who know they really shouldn't be doing what they are doing.

The guilt is in their eyes. It all bespeaks a very different hell, a very different sense of judgement than previous Bosch. And all through the garden triptych it is invested with too much empathy to support the idea of a global economy of loathing.

There is so much sympathy for the plight of women and how they may be neglected.

From the bathing beauties in the bath of Venus, to the lovely girl in the shell, to the poor, unsuccessful courtesan with the unfortunate eye who is ignored by all the men around her.

We've seen the woman in her extremity of grief. Here another grieving motherly figure cares tenderly for a miserable sinner. These women, they're gently wondering what may be coming down from the sky. This girl, by her flaring eyes, shows she is puzzling how she has gotten herself into a close relationship with a blueberry-headed boy.

If we arrange them in a gallery, we can see that these women testify to a spirit in the triptych as far from hatred or revelling in enmity as we can imagine.

THE INVISIBLE THEME

And now something so unexpected as to be invisible to modern scholars. We come to Bosch's treatment of male same-sex involvements.

It is astonishing to find this in Bosch's triptych, right there on the centre line of the centre panel. And this from an age of hysterical homophobia, an age in which the act was so feared it was said that the devil himself did not dare name it.

We treat this frankly amazing discovery of gay eroticism and sexuality at length in another video.

Suffice it to say here that Bosch shows us a full range of male-to-male attraction, from romantic desire to the power of a thunderclap crush, through to the desolation of abandonment.

Without forgetting the exaggerated and therefore semi-comic wailing in the third panel, along with a tantalising skirl of balletic sado-masochistic suffering, but far from judging, scourging, condemning, Bosch shows us instead the soft and suffering thing that is the human condition.

Julian

For Professor Koerner to carry forward from previous Bosch works the idea of a global economy of loathing, to carry that into the garden of earthly delights, it shows the power of theory to control perception of what is in front of our eyes.

Because the facts of the centre panel bespeak a visible lack of loathing for any of us to see, and even in the Hell panel the sense of divine punishment is tempered with humour, humanity and secular storytelling – as well as a little bit of problematic blasphemy. Not to mention the offer of demonic sodomy – things that will receive more detailed explanation elsewhere.

It is certainly possible to speculate that the artist has gone through an evolution of the spirit to arrive at a new state of being, realising that everything he had previously believed was wrong.

Quentin

We go into that pretty thoroughly in a Revelation video elsewhere in this series.

Julian

So to conclude, it's not just Professor Koerner, there has been a general failure of interpretation around the Garden of Earthly Delights, and it probably stems from the one fundamental failure, extraordinary in this visual enterprise of art criticism, a failure to look at the painting, or if looking failing to register what is there for any innocent eyes to see.

Quentin

And therefore the moral of this story is that, beware theory, it should be treated with enormous caution. It has the power to distract and deflect and divert attention from the visual facts of this, the source material of the garden of earthly delights, showing us that theory is more likely than not to obscure what it claims to be trying to reveal.

Please, join us again for the next episode in this series.

Thanks for watching.