Bosch at the Prado continued (if you understand Spanish)

JAMIE EDWARDS

The Prado have just released another video ahead of the opening of their new Bosch exhibition: Bosch. The 5th Centenary Exhibition (31.05.2016 – 11.09.2016).It’s presented by Pilar Silva, who is head of the Prado’s collection of flemish painting before 1600, and who has had the lovely job (gripes over the findings of the BRCP notwithstanding) of curating the Bosch exhibition.

To say that my Spanish is rusty is putting it generously. But unless I’m totally wrong, and if I am, sorry, I think that Silva mentions in the video that the Garden of Earthly Delights was probably commissioned by Engelbrecht II of Nassau. If this is indeed what she says (?!), it heralds an interesting shift in the accepted view.

Most scholars have up to now tended to view the Garden as a mature work by Bosch (usually 1510 or thereabouts; certainly post-1500). The earliest documented reference to the triptych comes from 1517, when it was seen by Antonio de Beatis in Henry III of Nassau’s Brussels Palace. Since this became known, it always been used as evidence to support the view that the Garden is late, since it has often been assumed that Henry commissioned the triptych from Bosch. Underlying all this, of course, has always been the idea that Bosch’s most visually spectacular work must have been the product of his fully-formed genius. Silva’s reference to Engelbrecht in the above video, though, signals serious interest in an alternative point of view.

Hieronymus Bosch, Garden of Earthly Delights, 1480s, Prado, Madrid

I’ve always believed that the Garden is an early work; Bernard Vermet has convincingly, in my view, championed just this. It is based on style (I, for example, don’t see how the Garden can seriously be thought of as a mature work when you put it next to the Haywain, which certainly is). The surprisingly early dating of the planks of wood from which the triptych is made–surprising, that is, to proponents of a late date for the Garden– fully supports an earlier dating: the tree concerned was felled in the 1460s, meaning that the panels could have been assembled and painted on, say, during the 1480s, which seems to be the most likely date for the picture’s execution. And if you believe this, that the picture could have been made as early as the 1480s (and note at the start of the Prado’s video that the dating has indeed been pushed back as far as 1490), then you have to look elsewhere for possible patrons. And it turns out that you needn’t look far: Engelbrecht II of Nassau was Henry III’s uncle, and when Engelbrecht died his estate fell into the hands of Henry. Engelbrecht could therefore have been the patron of Bosch’s Garden, who, it turns out, had the opportunity to commission the work from Bosch in 1481, when he stayed in Bosch’s hometown of ‘s-Hertogenbosch to attended a meeting of the Order of the Golden Fleece.

It’ll be interesting to read more about this when I get my hands on the literature…

Should also say–I am going to Madrid in a fortnight’s time, and will do a write up of the show. So watch this space.

DEPARTMENTAL RESEARCH SEMINAR: 18 MAY

‘Church Design in Counter Reformation Venice: San Nicolò dei Mendicoli.’

Faith Trend

(University of Birmingham)

Wednesday 18 May
4:10pm
Barber Institute Photograph Room

‘In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the churches of Venice were a hive of activity as the majority were updated – either rebuilt entirely or retrofitted with new features – to correspond with the new requirements for ecclesiastic architecture that were triggered by the Counter Reformation. Until recently, this is an aspect of the architectural history of Venice’s churches that has not had enough academic attention and this paper considers the reasons behind this, as well as demonstrating through the renovation of the church of San Nicolò dei Mendicoli just how significant this climate of reform was on the city and how clearly it can be demonstrated.’

All welcome; refreshments served
Enquiries to Sara Tarter: SET497@student.bham.ac.uk

DEPARTMENTAL RESEARCH SEMINAR: THURSDAY 12 MAY

‘Sweetness and Light at the Grosvenor Gallery’

Dr Melody Barnett Deusner

(Indiana University Bloomington and Fulbright-University of Birmingham Scholar 2016)

Thursday 12 May
4:10pm
Barber Institute Photograph Room

Grosvenor Gallery, 1877 (more images below)

‘Sir Coutts Lindsay’s Grosvenor Gallery in London has long been known to art historians as the premiere showplace for Aesthetic Movement painting in the late 1870s and 1880s. To technological historians, however, the location has a different significance as the site of London’s first truly successful central electrical power station, operated by Coutts Lindsay and located in the basement of the gallery itself. This paper draws together these two parallel histories and probes the relationships between the individuals involved in both projects. The cadre of upper-middle-class and aristocratic investors that speculated in this new technological field and reshaped the city as a series of interconnected nodes included collectors and promoters of Aesthetic paintings by James MacNeill Whistler and Albert Moore—pictures that elevate compositional arrangement and systemic organization to the level of the highest art.’

Biographical Statement:

Melody Barnett Deusner is an art historian for whom the networked conditions of our present world have sparked a series of investigations into the ways that an international range of artists and their audiences experienced and visualized the interconnected world of the past. As a Fulbright Scholar based at the University of Birmingham’s American & Canadian Studies Centre, she will be walking the canal towpaths and exploring the rail systems that served as key components of the nineteenth-century transportation, communications, and economics networks at the heart of her current research and teaching. Her own pathways have led her from Texas to an undergraduate degree at Rhodes College, a Ph.D. at the University of Delaware, and a post at Indiana University, Bloomington, where she serves as a specialist in American art to 1945. Her work has been recognized and supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS, and the Kress Foundation.

All welcome; refreshments served
Enquiries to Sara Tarter: SET497@student.bham.ac.uk

Grosvenor Gallery Electric Network

Albert Moore, Study for Birds, 1878

Bosch, Bosch, Bosch

JAMIE EDWARDS

In a few days’ time, the exhibition Jheronimus Bosch – Visions of a genius will close the Noordbrabants Museum, ‘s-Hertogenbosch. Most of the works are then being shipped to Madrid, where, on the 31st May, another Bosch exhibition will open at The Prado: Bosch. The 5th Centenary Exhibition (31.05.2016 – 11.09.2016). The trailer (which has a curious voiceover) is here:

Regular readers will remember that the Prado and Noordbrabants museum have come to blows this year (the 5th centenary year of Bosch’s death), mainly over the Bosch Research & Conservation Project’s findings. The findings call for the “downgrading” of several works previously thought to be by Bosch that are held by the Prado. This led, at the eleventh hour, to the Prado’s decision to withdraw the Cure of Folly and St Anthony from the show in ‘s-Hertogenbosch. Those works will now be included in the Prado’s own exhibition, which will also include the monumental (so-called) Garden of Earthly Delights (1480s) that the Prado owns (and obviously didn’t lend to the Nordbrabants Museum).