Traveller of further on, painter of impossible creatures, hereje of masterful an ancient sect or of shady life and death, Hyeronimus Van Acken, the Bosco, is one of the great enigmas of the history of the art. What mysteries are hidden in their disquieting works?

Of the so famous and strange picture author as the garden of the delights, fascinating composition that makes pause in dry to the visitors of the Museum of the Prado, we know very little. Almost nothing. That is first that surprises the investigator who, like I, come near to the old enigma that surrounds to one by the creators more singular than they have seen the centuries.

It is not really known when the Bosco was born. The dates dance following the biographies and the historians, who do not agree themselves absolutely, as he happens to practically each element that he has to do with this primitive flamenco teacher. Of the place yes certainty is had: Hertogenbosch (the present Bois Him Duc, in Holland), small provincial city of whose completion extracted his pseudónimo and from which at the end of century XV radiated astonishment and fear in their incomprehensible tables, full of the terrors deeper than knocked down the human being of an apocalyptic and still tenebrous time.

It went, to his way, a cronista of the dark part of the soul: the one that nobody dared to portray with fidelity and crudity, that same one that it shaped in pictures that “hypnotized” the most powerful governors of their time.

The “black dog” of the Dump

It was an order that still today, four hundred years later, nobody can or wants to include/understand. Felipe II, the monarch in whose empire the sun was not put, struggled febrile in his I milk mortuary. During fifty and three days, bubas and pustules had reproduced to him by all the body, turning it into a living corpse species that hardly mascullaba some words to its advisory faithful, Sigüenza father. Knowledgeable of which the final moment advanced almost of inexorable way and feeling the passages of the Sparing one bouncing in the long corridors of the real aposentos, it issued to order of that transferred some pictures they put and them before his eyes in the austere empty wall, that seemed to be calculated a long time ago and accurately for that one macabre necessity. “They have not heard to me? They bring paintings of the Bosco! ”, it ordered.

According to they narrate official cronistas of the Dump, like Ricardo Sepúlveda, that dived in century XIX in the secret material regarding the agony of Felipe II, the obsession and the hallucinations already had seized of the mind of their Majesty. Watching fixedly those compositions, between which they emphasized the table of the seven capital sins, the extraction of the stone of madness or the very same triptych of the garden of the delights, it seemed to penetrate in a maleficent spiral absorbed that it little by little, a dark tunnel where those beings of nightmare, those emissaries of death with hybrid bodies of men summoned up life and animal; those faces of demons who never nobody dared to paint of a so disquieting and hypnotic way, provided of a malignidad that gave the sensation of being able to leave the surface of the picture and to become onírica reality.

“It does not include/understand that `dog negro' is an invention of populacho uncultivated” The harangue of Sigüenza father, located next to the bed that still conserves in the heat of heart of that magical temple that is the Dump, did not cause effect some. Not only the monarch, but each and every one of the members of the real retinue that were on duty in that one dreary place, had heard speak and they had even seen the frightful figure of a starving and etéreo dog that always vagaba by the environs before some important misfortune took place. Like an emissary of the evil. Others swore to have seen the image of a boy burned, advancing solitary until evaporating at certain moment.

And thus, whipped by the deepest fears, it stopped existing Felipe II one night of September of 1598 before the pictures that he himself had persecuted during years by all Europe, paying them to price of gold and desoyendo the advice of his committee of experts in art. There is one who assures that the king, strong defender of the catholic but loving Orthodoxy of the alchemy, the hidden astrology and sciences, knew very well what did.

We, and the historians who still interrogate themselves by the obsessive picture presence of a heretical painter in the aposentos of the great guardian of the faith we do not know, it completely.

The last night of that one king tormented before provided pictures of authentic “dark soul” was only one of the pieces of puzzle of mysteries that I was discovering in the elaboration of my book Cementery.
In 1994 my parents, specialists in flamenco art and proprietors of the Theotokopoulos gallery, managed to buy a small composition of one of the few followers of the Bosco. He was then, while he observed in her the fantastic figures that appeared rambling in a species of imaginary city of high crystal towers, when I listened to speak for the first time of the theories of the specialistic major in the Bosco, Wilhelm Fraenger, that always defended the property of this teacher to one of the more disquieting heretical groups of the antiquity: the adamitas.

This sect arose in fact in very remote times, that the specialists locate around century III of ours was. They believed in the return to a paradise pure, previous to the original sin, a moment governed by Adam, figure to which rendered devotion and for which carried out sacrifices in some zones of North Africa.

With diverse modifications, the heresy resurged in century XIII like by art of magic, impelled by an enigmatic woman, Marguerite Porète, executed and crucified in 1310 by revivir this doctrine and to write damn books, like the mirror of the simple bores. That event gypsy dialect deeply in many of its followers, who founded a heterodox and complex division denominated Brotherhood of the Free Spirit, well well-known in all the catalogues and manuals of cults and religions, that were persecuted of fierce way by the catholic Church even in Spain, where there were burning fires of herejes in Biscay, Burgos and Toledo.

The main cause of this repression was the creed of the group, a faith submissive the primary instincts, the satisfaction of all the pleasures, the practice of communal sex and even the violence and murder of the enemies. A compendium of more or less delirious beliefs for the time, supported by the security of which it is only managed to agree with the divinity through sin.

Adamita paradise?

Indeed one of the most famous pictures of history, the garden of the delights - name imposed by successive catalogadores centuries after it was painted, always has been under the suspicion to be the image of the paradise dreamed by the adamitas. In him, with an iconographic profusion never view until then, emphasizes a central table - flanked by other two in which creation and hell where tens of bodies of all the races recreate in thousand group sexual games, with homosexuality scenes even imagine. In addition, in different parts from the work they appear elements, symbols and signals of knowledge of high magic that, without a doubt, could immediately have taken to the Bosco to the bonfire: the hand of God crossed by a dagger, a pig dressed in nun hairdo, a clergyman with the rotten guts…

The historical investigations arrive at a very suggestive point in all this history. The Brotherhood of the Free Spirit was led by a shady called individual Jacobo de Almaigen. This great master was a well-off nobleman who stops to celebrate the ceremony in which he red-baptize himself in the doctrine of the sect chose a very concrete place: Hertogenbosch, where was a sinister painter who, according to seems, never left its dark study.

Those are not few that, after the verification of this coincidence, assure that the fantastic triptych of the garden of the delights went an order of that one to the artist. Then, for that it has certain detective sense, two obvious questions arise: why bought Felipe II this work to price of gold, protecting it of those who they saw in her an insult the values of the Church and making take it until his I milk of death at its last moment? , and how he survived and he was not burned, after the death of the king, by the inquisidores ones persecuted that it a long time ago?

Visions of further on

The death of the teacher of Hertogenbosch has obsessed to me throughout all this time of investigation. It is another enigma. Officially its death took place in 1516, but the unique thing than really certainty is had is of the appearance, in this date, of the legajos of misas pronounced by its soul in the parish of its native city. The place and the form of the death continue being a complete mystery. For many specialists, it could have triggered after the last and unique trip from the painter to a magical and forced enclave for the artists of his time: Venice.

There is a great discussion on which it was the last composition of the Bosco. Some assure that it is the adoration of the kings, that is exposed in the Museum of the Prado; a harmonious and reassuring picture that alleviates to who it verifies that, at least for a moment, the artist left his nightmares.

Nevertheless, I am of that think that the key of the final straight line of its life is in terrible works, full of being able: tables that make you shake to postrarte in front of them; pieces that, without still nobody knows how nor why, appeared inside the feared prisons the more of their time: pozzi of the Ducal Palace of the Italian city, humid and dark conduits by which one note how oxygen is being scarce while it walks next to mazmorras where as soon as it fits a man, inscriptions of agony recorded with the nails in the walls and rest of torture apparatuses that were working to total yield during several centuries.

And it is that in them, right under the famous Bridge of the Sighs, a known elite troops acted very ruthlessly as Signori I gave Notte - gentlemen of the night, a series of repressive commandos of the heresies and excesses that as much abounded in a city cheer and licentious like Venice. In pozzi thousands of people died and to ramble by that framework under earth is to do it by an authentic labyrinth of the death.

There, indeed there, it appeared the creation of the Bosco that the experts called Visions of further on and which, personally, he left me without air that to take me to the lungs, astonished and crushed before an authentic chronicle of the trip to the other side of the death. But what did in that place? It painted the Bosco in one of pozzi? It looked for a experience limit? It used the methods of ensoñación and visualization with fasting and watch that practiced the members of the sect to see the faces of the “another side”? Perhaps it was catched and jailed by the Signori I gave Notte?

We cannot confirm nothing, only observe the picture and its tunnel of light - a pioneering three-dimensional composition in that one time, surprising to us before the trip of the bore -perhaps the own one brings back to consciousness of the Bosco? - that vague by a spiral towards the point of prodigious irradiation where, without seeing the factions, they advance figures that raise the hands in welcome signal… or indicating that not yet it is the moment.
While it found me on pozzi, writing down in my notebook deep sensations cheers and before that one composition, I did not have doubts with respect to the sense of the picture: one is the shape of a Experience Near the Death, or electronic counter measures, that as much people have had in the five continents in comma critical moments. It has been the testimony to brush, drawing up for exactly five hundred years - in 1505-, of which it returned of the other border after a experience between two worlds.

After those outlines we know to more envelope he little. And, as in all the work of this teacher, only have left to contemplate we in silence and to feel the soul that still resides in full pictures of secrets that wait for a last solution patiently.

Source: Writing by Iker Jimenez