The Temptation of St Antony

c. 1530 - c. 1600

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 68.7 cm × width 86.9 cm
frame: height 89.0 cm × width 107.5 cm × thickness 5.0 cm

Technical notes

The support consists of three horizontally grained oak planks (21, 23.7 and 24 cm), 0.8-1.0 cm thick. They are butt-joined with four dowels. There is gradual bevelling on all sides. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1519. The panel could have been ready for use by 1530, but a date in or after 1544 is more likely. The white ground was applied up to the edges of the support. A ‘Burning of Troy’ was painted under the present composition, for which the panel was turned 90 degrees to the left (see Entry). For the first composition an underdrawing was applied in a dry medium. In the X-ray photograph it appears to be partially painted in. The underdrawing for the present composition was executed in a dry medium and is visible with the naked eye and with infrared reflectography. The lines in this underdrawing are made up of small dots, which indicates the use of a pricked cartoon. The figures at bottom left, the fish/boat and the burning village show no traces of such preparation. The figures were reserved. Slight deviations from the underdrawing are seen in the outlines of the figures. The paint layers were applied thinly and transparently.

Scientific examination and reports

infrared reflectography: P. van den Brink / M. Wolters [2], RKD, nos. RKD 173:23-174:24, January 1998
X-radiography: A. Truyen, RMA, 2001
infrared reflectography: P. Van den Brink / M. Wolters [2], RKD/RMA, no. RKDG135, 23 March 2001
dendrochronology: P. Fraiture, RMA, 8 July 2002
condition report: G. Tauber, RMA, 25 September 2006
dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 22 November 2006
infrared reflectography: M. Wolters / M. Leeflang [2], RMA, 19 March 2007

Condition

Fair. The panel has a convex deformation and there is some raised paint along the joins.

Conservation

L. Kuiper, 1974: complete restoration; panel joins glued
L. Kuiper, 1974
L. Kuiper, 1974
G. Boevé-Jones, December 2004: complete restoration

Provenance

...; from the dealer Frederik Muller, Amsterdam, fl. 200, as Jheronimus Bosch, to the museum, March 1899; on loan to the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, 1999-2001; on loan to the Noordbrabants Museum, ’s-Hertogenbosch, since December 2001

Object number: SK-A-1795

The artist

Jheronimus Bosch (’s-Hertogenbosch c. 1450 - ’s-Hertogenbosch 1516), copy after

Jheronimus Bosch came from a prodigiously artistic family. His great-grandfather, Thomas van Aken, his grandfather Jan and his father Antonius were all painters. His grandfather left Aachen for Nijmegen and then moved to ’s-Hertogenbosch, where he is first documented in 1427. Four of his sons became painters as well. The youngest, Antonius, married Aleid van der Mynnen, and their three sons, Goessen, Jheronimus and Jan all once again followed their father’s profession.

Bosch is mentioned – usually with just his forename Jheronimus or Jeroen – in a number of documents drawn up in ’s-Hertogenbosch between 1474 and 1516. In the earliest of them, dated 5 April 1474, he acted together with his father and brothers as witnesses for his sister Katherijn. The artist used the toponym Bosch to sign a few of his works ‘Jheronimus Bosch’. He probably trained in his father’s workshop.

Between July 1477 and June 1481, Bosch married Aleid van der Meervenne, who was born into quite a well-to-do family in Oirschot, a village south of ’s-Hertogenbosch. In the city they moved into her house, ‘Inden Salvator’ (In the Saviour), but it is not known precisely when. Bosch became prosperous, thanks to his wife, and began moving in the city’s higher social circles, which included the influential Brotherhood of Our Lady. He became an ordinary member in 1486-87, and was elected a sworn brother the following year, 1487-88. That Jheronimus Bosch was quite well off can be deduced from tax returns. Bosch was probably one of the victims of an outbreak of the plague in ’s-Hertogenbosch in the summer of 1516. He was buried in the churchyard of the city’s St Janskerk. His patrons belonged to the circle of the Burgundian Habsburg Court and the wealthy bourgeoisie in Brabant.

Regrettably, the surviving documents contain little information about Bosch’s activities as an artist. The only documented commission for a painting dates from September 1504, when he was asked to paint a Last Judgement for Philip the Handsome, Duke of Brabant, which indicates that he was a recognised artist. Apart from that, only a few minor commissions are recorded, among others for polychroming an altarpiece and for designing a crucifix.

Opinions on the attribution of the paintings differ considerably. None of the paintings are dated, and their chronology is the subject of much discussion. Until 2010, more than 30 paintings were attributed to Bosch, of which nine are signed ‘Jheronimus Bosch’. Between 2010 and 2015 the Dutch Bosch Research and Conservation Project (BRCP) investigated most of them and concluded that whereas 21 are works made by the master himself, four are from his workshop, seven were executed by followers, and two are either made by his workshop or by a follower.¹

Eight of these 21 paintings are triptychs: The Garden of Earthly Delights triptych,² probably commissioned by Engelbert van Nassau (1451-1504), the two versions of The Haywain,³ The Last Judgement, signed,⁴ The Last Judgement with Saint James the Apostle and Saint Bavo (or Saint Hippolyte),⁵ The Temptation of St Antony, signed,⁶ Hermits Saints Triptych Sts Jerome, Antony and Giles, signed,⁷ The Adoration of the Magi,⁸ and The Martyrdom of St Wilgefortis, signed ‘Julia’ (?).⁹ Three individual panels are also signed: St John on Patmos,¹⁰ St Christopher,¹¹ and Tabletop of the Seven Deadly Sins.¹²

Although most specialists now agree that other members of the workshop participated in the execution of many of Bosch’s works, Koreny attributed a number of major works, such as The Haywain triptych, the Lissabon triptych and The Last Judgement in Bruges, to his pupils.¹³ To complicate matters, several works are known only through copies. Jheronimus Bosch was hugely popular in the second half of the 16th century, and this gave rise to the large number of copies and pastiches executed long after his death that have survived. The latter group (see SK-A-3113, SK-A-1601, SK-A-3240, SK-A-1673, SK-A-4131) consists of new inventions in Bosch’s style using elements or quotations from his paintings.

References
Van Mander 1604, fols. 216v-17r; Cohen in Thieme/Becker IV, 1910, pp. 386-90; Friedländer V, 1927, pp. 70-106; De Tolnay 1937, pp. 75-82; Baldass 1943, pp. 5-82; De Tolnay 1965, pp. 407-08; Gerlach 1967; ENP V, 1969, pp. 45-58; Marijnissen 1987, pp. 11-14; Miedema III, 1996, pp. 48-58; Gibson in Saur XIII, 1996, pp. 160-62; Vandenbroeck in Turner 1996, IV, pp. 445-54; Van Dijck 2001, pp. 139-205; Vink 2001; Silver 2006, pp. 127-59; Huys Janssen 2007; Koreny 2012, pp. 86-113; ’s-Hertogenbosch 2016, pp. 11-12; Schwartz 2016, pp. 36-52; Ilsink et al. 2016, pp. 13-32; Madrid 2016, pp. 17-41; BoschDoc

J. Bogers, 2010
Updated by J.P. Filedt Kok, 2016

Entry

This painting is a copy after the central group of figures on the main panel of Bosch’s Temptation of St Antony triptych in Lisbon (fig. a).¹⁴ There are many known copies after the Lisbon triptych.¹⁵ The best one, in Brussels, is signed, and is regarded as the earliest (c. 1520-30) and most faithful.¹⁶ It could thus have served as the model for many of the later copies. Most of them reproduce the centre panel alone and have a vertical format. Being horizontal, the Amsterdam version is an exception, as are one or two others.¹⁷ Like the version in Amsterdam, they lack the foreground of the Brussels panel, with the water and the fishing boats.

Technical examination has revealed that the scene of St Antony’s temptation in the present painting was executed over a partially painted Burning of Troy.¹⁸ A face can be made out with the naked eye at the top right of the panel. Infrared reflectography revealed that it belongs to a standing figure, on the left when the panel is rotated 90 degrees counter-clockwise (fig. b). The X-ray photograph showed that the artist had already begun painting that scene in (fig. c). The overpainted composition had no connection at all with Jheronimus Bosch. It was intended to reproduce the left part of The Fire in the Borgo, one of the frescoes in the Stanza dell’Incendio in the Vatican, which was probably painted by Giulio Romano between 1514 and 1515 under the supervision of Raphael.¹⁹ The fresco incorporates motifs relating to the fall of Troy. The X-ray photograph of the Amsterdam panel shows Aeneas carrying his father Anchises on his back, with his son Ascanius by his side. That underlying composition was probably copied from a drawing or engraving based directly on the fresco. The Centraal Museum in Utrecht has a Burning of Troy attributed to Lambert Suavius (fig. d) that closely resembles the composition beneath The Temptation of St Antony.²⁰

Much of the present scene was extensively prepared with the aid of a pricked cartoon. The contours accordingly take the form of small dots (fig. e) which were mostly followed in the painted surface. By and large the colours correspond to those in the original, with only the clothing of the figure with the pig’s head and a lute by the table not being dark blue but a very faded blue or yellow. This copy was probably made for the free market some time between c. 1550 and 1570, probably in Antwerp, where there were several workshops that specialised in the mass production of copies.²¹

J. Bogers, 2010
Literature updated by J.P. Filedt Kok, 2016

Literature

Lafond 1914, p. 70; Friedländer V, 1927, p. 149, no. 90e; ENP V, 1969, p. 85, no. 90e; Unverfehrt 1980, p. 273, no. 89c.a; Van den Brink 2001, pp. 36-39; Van den Brink 2003, pp. 92-101; Helmus ‘et al.’ 2007, pp. 14-26; De Vrij 2012, pp. 480-81, no. B.24.18

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Collection catalogues

1903, p. 59, no. 588 (as Bosch); 1934, p. 58, no. 588 (as old copy after Bosch, possibly by Joachim Patinir); 1976, p. 135, no. A 1795 (as school of Bosch)

Citation

J. Bogers, 2010, 'copy after Jheronimus Bosch, The Temptation of St Antony, c. 1530 - c. 1600', in J.P. Filedt Kok (ed.), Early Netherlandish Paintings, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.6189

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