Iconology of the Wayfarer Triptych

The secret heresy of Hieronymus Bosch

The inn which he [the peddler] finds so tempting is obviously a place of sin and corruption. Its swan signboard, its pigeons in the loft, its jug, and its women all show that it is a house of prostitution. It also a place of drunkenness and intoxication. Symbols of drink include the leaking barrel and the man who urinates at the side of the wall. Bosch’s inn can be interpreted as a conventional Christian image of temptation, but it corresponds even more closely with a metaphor in the Manichean-related Hymn of the Pearl. In this poem, the Saviour who has come to rescue the fallen soul goes to stay in a similar inn. Symbolically, this is a temporary dwelling, which represents the earth [Jonas, 1963, 55f.]. Like the tavern/brothel in the painting at Rotterdam, it is a place where corruption and drunkenness are rife. (pp. 163-164)

Harris, 1995

#607

Hanging birdcage from The Pedlar

It represents the spiritual conversion of the Prodigal, and is therefore to be regarded as his soul-bird. We see it first in a cage outside the sinister house, representing the hero’s past entanglement in the evil world. In those days a birdcage hanging at the door was the sign of a brothel. Then the bird escapes and, like the birds that so often show people the way in fairy tales, flutters ahead of the fugitive and perches on the bottom bar of the gate-the direction his feet must take. Finally it soars to the top of a high pole from where it can see his father’s house rising out of the trees… Bosch borrowed the magpie symbol from a medieval world poem, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, to which the famous magpie paradigm serves as an introduction [von Eschenbach, ca. 1200-1210]. For him the black-and-white magpie colors stand for zwivel (doubt), not in the present-day sense of vacillating faith or conscience but in the original sense of “zwie-fall” (duality), i.e., the fundamentally given polarity of cosmic, moral, and metaphysical powers. (p. 260)

Fraenger, 1999

Hieronymus Bosch

#610

The Peddler by Hieronymus Bosch, a study in detectio

We see it first in a cage outside the sinister house, representing the hero’s past entanglement in the evil world. In those days a birdcage hanging at the door was the sign of a brothel. (p. 260)

Fraenger, 1999

Hieronymus Bosch

#706

Rooster from The Pedlar

The rooster which occurs near the inn in Bosch’s painting [Philip, 1958, 6: note 14] is a symbol of lust and unchastity and is also connected with the procuring activities of the peddler. The rooster originally signified fertility and was therefore an attribute of the god Mercury. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the cock frequently appears on the caps of fools in representations in which the fool is the entertainer and procurer. Cf., for instance, the fool as the maître de plaisir in the woodcut by Cornelis Teunissen, repr. in Hampe [Anthonisz, 1541]. There are innumerable examples of fools, prostitutes, procures, go-betweens and match-makers with the rooster [Bax, 1949]. (p. 69:note 146)

Philip, 1958

#707

Pigs from The Pedlar

The swine, the counterparts of the rooster in Bosch’s representation [Philip, 1958, 4:note 10]), also point to unchastity and prostitution when seen in the story-telling context of the painting [Seligmann, 1953, 101; Bax, 1949, 50, 99, 223]. (p. 69:note 146)

Philip, 1958

The Peddler by Hieronymus Bosch, a study in detectio

#710

Ragged poor man from The Pedlar

Despite his drinking in the tavern, the peddler cannot be regarded as the “victim” of this evil house, where his drinks were probably even free of charge. All writers who had taken this figure for the Prodigal Son, assumed that the peddler was the victim of the evil. But the peddler is by no means and in no respect the victim of the evil tavern. Quite to the contrary, according to the practices in low-class brothels in the middle ages, the girls were held like slaves by keeping them in debt and vagrant traders working in collusion with the inn-keepers were part of a scheme for the exploitation of the of the prostitutes [Philip, 1958, 70:note 150; Avé-Lallemant, 1858, 334f.; Bloch, 1912, 724f., 767, 769]. To the middle ages it was not so much the prostitutes themselves but the people taking advantage of prostitution who were utterly detested [Philip, 1958, 71:note 151; Bloch, 1912, 632f., 645, 818f.; Rabutaux, 1881, 22f.; Sanger, 1897, 97f.]. A figure like the peddling drunkard who probably cheated and over- charged the girls in their purchases and whose side-line it was to procure customers for them, was an odious person to the public of the time. (pp. 70-71)

Philip, 1958

The Peddler by Hieronymus Bosch, a study in detectio

#793

… when figures in Northern European art are shown in front of taverns, they are usually associated with the kind of activities that take place within them [Tuttle, 1981, 93: note 47; Bosch, ca. 1505-1510; Bosch, ca. 1504-1508; de Tolnay, 1966, 174; Bosch, ca. 1500; Bosch, ca. 1490-1500; Beham, 1535]. One’s suspicion that the Rotterdam poor man was a frequenter of taverns and brothels is increased by the other changes that Bosch made in the painting. The precise symbolic meaning of some of these details may be irretrievably lost in forgotten folk proverbs and jokes, but some observations can nonetheless be made about them, with varying degrees of certainty. (p. 93)

Left leg with bandage from The Pedlar

#795

The sore on the man’s leg is a symptom of an affliction that has stricken several characters in Bosch’s works. These characters are often associated with taverns and brothels. The Tree-Man in the Hell panel of the Garden of Earthly Delights, for example, has a bandaged carbuncle on his leg [Bosch, ca. 1490-1500; de Tolnay, 1966, 240]…. A similarly stricken figure, whose body seems to serve the same function as the Tree-Man’s, can be seen in the left panel of Bosch’s Saint Anthony triptych [Bosch, ca. 1500 (Temptations of St. Anthony)]… The man who empties the contents of a jug into his mouth in the illustration of Gluttony on Bosch’s Seven Deadly Sins tabletop also has a bandaged sore on his ankle [Bosch, ca. 1505-1510; de Tolnay, 1966, 66]. (p. 93-94)

Left leg with bandage from The Pedlar

#796

The best-known character in a Bosch painting to suffer from such a sore is the sinister man who stands in the doorway of the shed in the Prado Epiphany, a figure who has been identified as the Anti-Christ or the Jewish Messiah [Bosch, ca. 1494 (Triptych of Adoration of the Magi); de Tolnay, 1966, 297; Philip, 1953, 267-293]. Lotte Brand Philip and Ludwig von Baldass have diagnosed his ailment as leprosy [Philip, 1953, 268; Baldass, 1943, 40]. It was appropriate for Bosch to have represented this character as a leper because, as Philip has shown, medieval legends described the Jewish Messiah as a leper [Philip, 1953, 268]. Furthermore, the Middle Ages commonly believed that leprosy occurred as divine punishment for sin, particularly the sin of heresy or unbelief [Brody, 1974, 115-117, 149-159]. The Anti-Christ would, of course, be the archetype of this type of sinner. Saul Brody has suggested that the connection between leprosy and heresy may be based on one of the curses in Deuteronomy to which Israel would be subject if she failed to keep God’s commandments: “May the Lord strike thee with a very sore ulcer in the knees and in the legs.” [Brody, 1974, 124-125:note 27; English Standard Version Bible, 2001, Deuteronomy, 28:35] But he then goes on to show that leprosy was associated with lust even more closely than with heresy [Brody, 1974, 117-118, 129-132, 143-146, 173-189]. The connection between carnality and leprosy was unanimously accepted in religious, medical, and popular theories: “for what is the impurity of leprosy, unless it is the sin of lust?” [Brody, 1974, 129]. Leprosy was believed to be a venereal disease that one was most likely to contract in brothels [Brody, 1974, 52-58, 143, 177-179]. This belief was so ubiquitous that Bosch’s apparent association of leprous sores with taverns and brothels seems quite unexceptional. The appearance of a sore on the leg of the man in the Rotterdam tondo reinforces our suspicion that he has been frequenting the house that is shown behind him. (p. 93-94)

Hanging hoof amulet and white string from coat from The Pedlar

#798

The hoof appears to be associated with gluttony and lust – sins that were known to prosper in public houses. Within Bosch’s own oeuvre, hooves are shown in contexts that seem to establish this association. A hoof is portrayed on a banner flying above a tent that serves as a tavern and brothel in the fragment of a painting at Yale, Allegory of Gluttony and Lust [Bosch, ca. 1495–1500; de Tolnay, 1966, 94]. Another hoof is shown clutched in the greedy hand of the jug-holding glutton in the Seven Deadly Sins tabletop [Bosch, ca. 1505-1510; de Tolnay, 1966, 66]. The Rotterdam poor man’s hoof would thus suggest that he is guilty of similar carnal indulgences. (pp. 94-95)

#863