Hieronymus Bosch. Virginia Pitts Rembert

in this interpretation. Fränger had previously demonstrated in his analysis of the central panel of Earthly Delights his belief that this fabulous display of erotic activity was in celebration of an actual marriage event. Therefore, he assumed that this also became the occasion for a pictorial revelation of the “society’s” mysteries – including all of the levels of knowledge members could attain by instruction and by which they could finally reach full association in the group. Since he thought the painting such a “unique pictorial creation, in which the whole universe has been assembled to sing praises such as no king and queen ever heard on their wedding day”, it must be a truly “god-like couple” who are being married; Fränger went on to find them in the lower right corner of the panel, half-hidden in a cave. The man is the only clothed figure among the abounding nude ones, he said, and proposed further differentiations as well.

      A man who exalts himself by such self-awareness as this one exhibits, and who is further being exalted by such a wedding celebration, could be one of only two people to Fränger – either the painter Bosch, or the man who inspired the triptych. Since this is not a portrait of Bosch, it must be according to the writer:

      The face of the man who commissioned such an extraordinary work of art and inspired its intellectual conception, [and] we can go even further and make the conjecture that this portrayal of the bridegroom is also that of the Grand Master of the Free Spirit, who meets us with a piercing, scrutinising gaze on the threshold of his paradisiacal world.

      Having established the leader’s identity and personality from this “evidence” of the painting, Fränger asserted other instances in which his invention revealed himself. The author saw his face in that of the egg-tree monster placed in the centre of hell as if to demonstrate allegorically a basic doctrine of the cult – that one must make a public confession of sin before being able to return to a “state of purity”. Because a crow can be seen near the man’s “portrait”, Fränger believed this to be his symbol; therefore, wherever there was a crow (as at Adam’s feet in the Garden of Eden), there was the “Grand Master” participating in a cosmic event important to the whole revelation.

      The Adoration of the Magi, c. 1470–1475.

      Oil and gold on wood, 71.1 × 56.5 cm.

      The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

      The Adoration of the Magi (detail), c. 1470–1475.

      Oil and gold on wood, 71.1 × 56.5 cm.

      The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

      Fränger understood the cave of the bride and bridegroom not only to symbolise the consummation of their marriage, soon to take place, but the tie-in with Neo-Pythagorean philosophy, since caves had figured strongly in the history of Pythagorianism. The scholar’s purpose in making these Italian connections was obviously to justify finding such an esoteric community in the North as is known to have existed in Renaissance Italy. (Fränger had stated earlier, when first introducing the idea of the Adamite cult, that it was of particular importance in the early Renaissance period when: “Ideas of Platonic, Augustinian, Neo-Pythagorean, and Gnostic origin fused to form an attitude that saw Original man as the archetype of spiritual renewal and hence of a pure, free state of human life.”)

      To explain his cult’s mysteries according to those of the Italian societies, and their appearance in this Netherlandish cult, Fränger had to introduce the “Grand Master” and show cause for this man’s having brought these ideas back from his own schooling days in Italy – thus the author’s assertion that the man has the look of an Italian intellectual and the further strengthening point that the woman behind him (his “bride”) has Italian colouring and features. Having so thoroughly convinced himself of his assertions, Fränger introduced the elusive “Grand Master” into “early Dutch social and art history [as] a powerful spiritual personality, hitherto completely unknown, one who is worthy to rank with those three great men of the same country and the same century, Erasmus Desiderius of Rotterdam, Johannes Secundus, and Johannes Baptist van Helmont”. Thus, Fränger not only endowed his invention with physical aspect, personality, bride, and philosophy, but he bestowed greatness on him. In the process, he destroyed Bosch not only as a personality but also as an artist.

      He did this first by declaring that the altarpiece’s symbolism was a “system of sexual – ethical teachings, in which the pictorial motifs were didactic symbols, clear reflections of Renaissance natural philosophy, and hence patterns of a modern intellectual kind, pointing towards the future”. The author’s more devastating conclusion was that since there was a personality behind the painter’s inventions, his “pictorial ideas were not his own at all, but were laid down for him by a mentor of encyclopaedic erudition, with an exquisite sense of detail, yet capable of planning on a magnificent scale and imperturbably sure of his purpose”.

      It was not merely subject matter dictation that Fränger believed Bosch had received, but that the “mentor” had even designed the colour and formal composition. He had obviously designed the colour because it bears symbolic relationship in every instance to the idea involved, but he strongly influenced the composition by allowing Bosch to break with his previous practice of placing dominant ideas along the axes of the panels, as in the two “Paradise-panels”, and to disorganise the hell scene in a manner planned as a symbolic reverse of the very order of the other two “worlds”.