Iconology of the Wayfarer Triptych

The pedlar is on the outside in the truest sense: he is outside the Christian fellowship of the central panel and not yet close to the Salvation, or at least not as close as are the guests at the Wedding at Cana. He is, nevertheless, a repentant sinner. (p. 192)

Fischer, 2016

Jheronimus Bosch

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e vergeten beeldentaal van Jheronimus Bosch: de symboliek van de Hooiwagen-triptiek en de Rotterdamse Marskramer-tondo verklaard vanuit Middelnederlandse teksten.

The main figure shown is a pedlar and not, for example, the Prodigal Son, an interpretation often proposed. For all his similarity with the character in the biblical parable, this improvished, itinerant hawker is present as a type in his own right in late medival period, both in literature and in the visual arts [de Bruyn, 2001]. The painting’s message may be read to mean that humankind can reduce and overcome the breadth and variety of sinful paths by turn to God. (p. 255)

de Bruyn, 2001

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Man on his deathbed with a chest from Death and the Miser

The iconography of this representation of a miser who has reached his final hour has been compared with pictures from the Ars moriendi tradition and illustrations of pointless wealth[Morganstern, 1982, 33-41; Morganstern, 1984, 295-302; Marijnissen, 1972; Marijnissen, 1977; Marijnissen, 1987; Vinken & Schlüter, 2000, 69-78; Colenbrander, 2003, 22-32]. Areas of overlap can be found in the dying man’s confrontation, for on last time, with the temptations that have ruled his life, here represented by devils, exempla and symbolic objects, and the promise of salvation extended by the Church, in the shape of clerics, angels, saints and Christ. (pp. 256-257)

Fischer, 2016

Jheronimus Bosch

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Man on his deathbed with a chest from Death and the Miser

Bosch also did not ignore the worldly side of the temptation to commit deadly sins. For avarice, he depicted The Death of a Miser on a panel that was surely the shutter of a triptych configuration, viewed obliquely leftwards in terms of its perspective [Marijnissen, 2007, 320-324]. The dying man lies in his bed amidst a cluttered room of stored legal papers with seals, knightly armour and bags of money in locked chests, Demons hover around all of these worldly trophies, and a second standing old figure, despite a rosary at his waist, holds a coin in his hand above a moneybag. One other demon at this last moment still offers the dying old man a moneybag, to which he reaches even now. At the same time, he stares obsessively at the shrouded, skeletal figure of Death in the open doorway, who bears a mortal arrow aimed at him. Consequently both of these conflicting preoccupations preclude the old man from seeing what viewers can – namely, a guardian angel behind him, who attempts to redirect his vision upwards to the window above that doorway, where divine light enters the room across a hanging crucifix. Even at the very last moment, demons and worldly temptations can distract errant humanity into deadly sin, here avarice. Scholars have rightly invoked the fifteenth-century text Ars moriendi (How to die) [Ars moriendi, ca. 1415-1450], where a Christian on his deathbed is tempted to sin by demons but is ultimately consoled and saved by Christ and his angelic forces [Tentler, 2005; Olds, 1966; Ariès, 1981, 107-110]. (p. 129)

Silver, 2017

Crimes and Punishments. Bosch’s Hell

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Man on his deathbed with a chest from Death and the Miser

The composition recalls illustrations in the Ars moriendi manuals – popular in Bosch’s day- which taught readers the art of dying. A typical illustration in such a book presented a man on his deathbed, with a devil tempting him into choosing material things and an angel pointing out that there is still time to repent and that the dying man’s eternal salvation is much more important than his worldly goods. The Washington panel can be compared to the depiction of a dying man with both a devil and an angel sitting on the headboard of his bed on The Table of the Seven Deadly Sins [Bosch, ca. 1505-1510; Hand & Wolff, 1986; Lammertse & van der Coelen, 2015, 62; Ilsink et al., 2016, 212-215]. (p. 298)

Lammertse, 2017

Hieronymus Bosch: The pilgrimage of life triptych

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Man on his deathbed with a chest from Death and the Miser

The scene in the Death tondo [Bosch, ca. 1505-1510] closely resembles that depicted in Death and the Miser in Washington, but here the protagonist is receiving the last rites, and the angel has clearly won the contest. (p. 302)

Maroto, 2017

Bosch and his work

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Wooden clubbed stick held on right hand from The Pedlar

Bosch’s images of human beings on the pilgrimage of life do not refer to the countless real pilgrims of his period, but to man in general, as he plods through his weary existence. It was up to the individual, with God’s help, to make his own pious way through life, equipped for that journey with a hefty stick. That Bosch does not present this as the typical, long pilgrim’s staff, is an attempt, once again, to avoid the overly specific associations. However, the dub-like stick that the traveller holds in his right hand, using it to ward off a menacing dog, clearly identifies him as a man on a journey – a pilgrim who has to stick to his path. It is as if Bosch had literally painted a passage out of the Middle Dutch version of the Speculum Humanae Salvationis [Speculum Humanae Salvationis, ca. 1466-1467]. The ‘Mirror of Human Salvation’ states that the pilgrim often has to take back roads and that he needs his stick to defend himself against dangerous dogs. The stick represents the faith that helps humanity stay on the right path and arms it against threats, which the ‘Mirror’ identifies as ‘dogs’ and ‘hellish dogs’. (p. 63)

Koldeweij, Vandenbroeck & Vermet, 2001

Hieronymus Bosch. The Complete Paintings and Drawings

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Koldeweij, Vandenbroeck & Vermet, 2001

In Bosch’s image, the man has packed all his worldly goods into a high wicker basket that he carries on his back, lugging his earthly burden along the path of his life. It has been frequently suggested in the literature that it is a goods basket – a pedlar’s pack- and that the man would therefore have to be a pedlar (as indeed he is called throughout this book). However, we ought to be careful about identifying him too literally; the point is that, like every Christian, he must follow the difficult path of his life, weighed down by the burden of his earthly existence. He lives his life in imitation of Christ, considering Jesus’ example day by day, hour by hour, and bearing his burden. This reading of Bosch’s two, heavily laden vagabonds is reinforced by the title page of an edition of the famous book by Thomas à Kempis, the Dutch edition of his lmitatio Christi, published in Antwerp in 1505 [Kempis, 1505]. The page is decorated with a woodcut showing Christ giving his blessing as Salvator Mundi, which is accompanied by the words ‘No follower of mine shall walk in darkness, says the Lord’ (John 8:12) in both Latin and Middle Dutch. These opening words of the lmitatio Christi epitomize the whole Devotio Moderna movement and are the key to the interpretation of Bosch’s two pedlars. The Christ giving his blessing on the title page looks down at an angle towards the figure of a heavily laden man, who appears in the frame of the woodcut, surrounded by monsters and vines. The resemblance to Bosch’s pedlars is striking, although his basket is filled with the grapes he has picked, the eucharistic symbolism of which is fairly plain. (pp. 63-64)

Hieronymus Bosch. The Complete Paintings and Drawings

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We probably justified un seeing in the gate and fields a reference to Christ who, in John 10:9, speaks of himself as the door through which those who enter ‘shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture’ [English Standard Version Bible, 2001, John, 10:9]. (p. 106)

Gibson, 1973

Man on his deathbed with a chest from Death and the Miser

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The relationship of Death and the Miser to the Ars moriendi is less direct than that of the Prado Tabletop [Bosch, ca. 1505-1510, “The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things”]. In place of discrete, opposing images Bosch seems to have conflated scenes of the temptation by and triumph over avarice and introduced an element of suspense. The miser seems to ignore both the guardian angel who offers salvation and the toadlike demon who pops through the bed-curtain with a sack that almost certainly contains either money or gold. Instead, the dying man is transfixed by the figure of Death who, as in the Prado Tabletop, is represented as a shrouded skeleton holding an arrow. As with the Ars moriendi images [Ars moriendi, ca. 1415-1450], demons scurry under the furniture or peer down at the dying man from the bed canopy. While the outcome of the struggle may not be immediately apparent, other elements in the scene show the dying man to be guilty of the sin of avarice, the last temptation mentioned in the Ars moriendi. (p. 18)

Hand & Wolff, 1986

Early Netherlandish Painting

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Hieronymus Bosch c.1450-1516

Bosing, 1987

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The circle of the absolute One, who “maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust [English Standard Version Bible, 2001, Matthew, 5:45] encloses the coincidentia oppositorum and breaks it by pointing to the right road leading out of the dissolute playground of the “world” through the narrow gate, into “life” (p. 258)

#611

In keeping with this color symbolism, Bosch has dressed his hero all in gray, a mixture of black and white appropriate to the transitional hour of conversion, to the step out of the dark into the light. Following in Wolfram’s footsteps [von Eschenbach, ca. 1200-1210], he made his hero a Dutch Parzival, prophetically anticipating de Coster’s Parsifal, the popular hero of the Gueux [de Coster, 1867]. (p. 260)

#621

…the number six is the hinge on which the lattice gate swings toward the good, to open on the way of redemption and the certainty of salvation on the other side. In his Gemma Animae Honorius Augustodunensis synchronized the six days of Creation with the work of redemption [Augustodunensis, ca. 1080-1156] (p. 265)

Vaulted ceiling from Death and the Miser

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Almaengien’s theological conception emerges readily from the three fields of concentration… The field of most intense concentration, the vault, gives visual form to a text from Colossians -“Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth” [English Standard Version Bible, 2001, Colossians, 3:2] – by contrasting the clumsy chest with the light window framing the crucified Christ as the hope of the beyond. Not only is the whole perspective designed to draw the eye up to the vertex of the vault, but the text is even illustrated pantomimically. Two equally expansive arm movements, emphasized by the outstretched palms of the hands, catch and hold the eye through their striking parallelism: the old man’s arm reaching down into the treasure chest and that of the angel pointing upward to the crucifix. (p. 300)

Old man in green and chest from Death and the Miser

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Winged figure behind man of his deathbed from Death and the Miser

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Crucifix on window from Death and the Miser

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Interceding grace emanating from above takes away sin, as the beam of light from the crucified Christ overcomes the “sting of death” [English Standard Version Bible, 2001, I Corinthians, 15:55-56] and robs Hell of its victory. (p. 300)

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Together, the three scenes [Bosch, ca. 1500 (The Pedlar); Bosch, ca. 1475-1500; Bosch, ca. 1485-1490] in these panels form an image addressing the course of human life. Human beings act and make choices. They often misbehave and choose wrongly. The question here seems ultimately to be what choice will they make in the course of their lives in the face of death? Will they succeed in turning to God and letting go of their urge for material things? Will the sinner – for that is what the human being is, by definition – repent or not? The answer to that question is crucial, because nothing less is at stake than the salvation of his or her soul. (p. 318)

Boat with ten people onboard from Ship of Fools

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Man on his deathbed with a chest from Death and the Miser

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Homo viator, the travelling man, might be an even more neutral and universal description for him. Calling the wayfarer ‘Everyman’ would also seem apt, with the proviso that – like ‘Prodigal Son’ – it risks reducing the figure to the illustration of a text [Zupnick, 1968]. As an ‘everyman’ with a lower-case ‘e’, by contrast, he makes this painting a mirror, just as the Everyman text itself does. The full title of Elckerlijc – in translation of the Middle Dutch version of Everyman – reads: ‘The Mirror of Everyman’s Salvation. How every man is summoned to give reckoning to God.’ Text and painting are linked by the notion that at the end of each human life, a balance sheet must be drawn up and an accounting given to God. However, where Everyman/Elckerlijc is a morality tale with an extremely clear progression from sin and repentance to salvation, the situation in Bosch remains unspecified. The outcome of the wayfarer’s life is unclear; we cannot say with any certainty whether he has truly repented. It looks like he is passing an inn with loose women. This gives the impression that he is leaving that world behind him, yet it is far from obvious where he is headed [ Lammertse, 1994, 95]. What is plain is that life’s road is beset with temptations and dangers, and that it does not leave those who travel it unscathed. (p. 320)

Man on his deathbed with a chest from Death and the Miser

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Bosch’s artistic challenge was to express the dying man’s dilemma in a single image rather than a series of illustrations. He places greater responsibility than the Ars moriendi does, moreover, on the man himself. It is up to him to choose. The choice between moneybag and crucifix has not yet been made: Bosch leaves the viewer with a cliff-hanger. It is evident from the painting’s underdrawing that the artist initially had a simpler image in mind. The man’s hand was originally clamped around the moneybag, and he also held a costly jar in his left hand. The painter evidently decided that this solution was too one-dimensional, as he ultimately omitted the jar, while the dying man in the painting has not yet grabbed the bag. This makes the miser slightly less miserly, while introducing an element of suspense to the struggle for the man’s salvation. In the earlier configuration, the demon looking down from the canopy of the bed would have got its way, and the dying man’s soul would have been lost. In the current form of the painting, by contrast, there is still some hope for the man in the bed. The decision has yet to be taken. (p. 330)

Man on his deathbed with a chest from Death and the Miser

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…this combination of riches and demons derives from me fifteen century pictorial tradition of me Ars moriendi (The Art of Dying [Well]), an advice treatise – particularly popular in both Latin and the vernacular during the early decades of printed books – that presents a series of temptations to sin at the deathbed of an individual [O’Connor, 1942; Tenenti, 1952, 98-108; Mâle, 1908, 348-355; Ariès, 1981, 107-110, 128-130; Binski, 1996, 39-43]. Significantly, this text is addressed to an individual layman and suggests the value of a deathbed conversion and personal reform. Altogether the text progresses through a series of five temptations – unbelief, despair, impatience, pride and avarice – with five Christian responses to combat them, followed by a final set piece of the good death and its promise of ultimate salvation. (pp. 239-240)

Silver, 2006

Man on his deathbed with a chest from Death and the Miser

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… this image by Bosch renders the happy ending of the text and its illustrations problematic at best. Whereas only a single angel appears in the panel, and his message is being ignored by its target recipient, devils abound – as is usual in the painted settings of Bosch. Upon the canopy above the bed, another toadlike demon hovers with a flaming torch, counterpoint to the rays of natural light coming through the window at the same level. This imp stands ready to negate the ministrations should the demon with the money bags fail to distract the dying man from the front. At the crucial final moments of his life, the dying man’s salvation hangs tenuously in the balance, with the forces and the message of Christian salvation dangerously outnumbered and drowned out in terms of volume… This same danger for a pawnbroker reappears during Bosch’s own lifetime in the exterior panels of a triptych by the Bruges painter Jan Provoost (c. 1465-1529: The Miser and Death… Morality matters so much in Christianity because the belief in the soul’s immortality resulted in a preoccupation with guilt and punishment – once more a preoccupation of Bosch, particularly in his Last Judgments [Silver, 2006, 305-360] (p. 241)

Silver, 2006