Paradise

Entry

In a sort of microcosm, spread out across a panoramic landscape enclosed within two concentric spheres, this relatively large tondo shows several episodes from the Bible on the Creation and the Fall of Man (Genesis 1:3). The sequence of the various episodes and days of creation has not been rigidly adhered to. The outer sphere is dark green and represents the world sea, and is a reference to the initial waste emptiness (Genesis 1:2). The inner sphere alludes to God’s creation of the sun, moon and stars on the fourth day (Genesis 1:14-19). Both the sun (top left) and the moon (bottom right) have a face. From within this firmament birds (Genesis 1:20-23, fifth day) fly out into the world. Secluded from the rest, tucked away behind dense trees, lies paradise. In its centre stands an elaborately decorated fountain, supplying the Garden of Eden with water (Genesis 2:10). The seemingly peaceful garden is teeming with different plants and animals, a lion and a monkey. Only upon close inspection does one notice the hostility between a dog and a boar on the right foreground, and a billy goat mounting a goat a little atop. Together with the water to the left swarming with sea monsters, they allude to the imminent Fall of Man. Counter clockwise are depicted God Forbidding Adam (Genesis 2:15-17), The Creation of Eve (Genesis 2:21-22), The Fall of Man (Genesis 3:1-7) and The Expulsion from Paradise (Genesis 3:22-24). The background offers an idealised combination of cultivated as well as wild nature, with fields, green hills, forests, greyish rocky mountains and the sea. The today almost completely faded farmhouse on the upper right and the working figures on the cornfields surrounding it allude to the world after the Fall of Man, where man has to toil for his living.

For the general composition Bles has found his inspiration in the woodcut The Creation of the World by master MS in the Luther Bible of 1534 (fig. a).⁶ Here God the Father is watching over his creation, with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and a river with four arms (Genesis 2:10). The prominent fountain and the episodes of the Fall of Man are not included here. However, the position of the sun, the moon and the large sea monster on the woodcut are the same as on the painting. As pointed out by Boeke as early as 1974, the sequence of the two comparable spheres, with the world sea as the outer rim, closely follows Luther’s reading of the Bible.⁷ In comparison to earlier Cologne and Antwerp woodcuts from the 15th century, where the world sea had been the inner sphere, Luther explicitly ordered the sequence to be changed as he believed that there was water beneath the earth and beyond the firmament. The underdrawing also clearly reveals the woodcut as its model. The underdrawing of the sea monster in the left foreground is comparable to the one on the woodcut, as are the clouds prepared in the inner sphere, which were not as explicitly executed (fig. b). By omitting the clouds from the painting, the birds of day five are not separated from the stars of day four, and thus the transition between the days became more fluid. Most of the animals have been executed in paint only, and are located in different places from those in the woodcut.

The Fall of Man, which is so explicitly pictured in Bles’s painting, is not included in the woodcut. Instead Bles very likely followed the iconographic tradition of the subject of the Fall of Man as developed in miniature painting in the 15th century. The page depicting The Fall of Man in the Très riches heures du Duc de Berry (c. 1412-16), for example, also shows four episodes as well as the fountain of life.⁸ Besides being much more slender, the structure of the fountain in Bles’s painting is very much in accordance with the one on the left wing depicting Paradise in the Triptych with the Last Judgement by Jheronimus Bosch in Bruges.⁹ It is likely that this is equally an important hint towards a comprehensive interpretation of Bles’s roundel. The fountain, which is not mentioned in Genesis, does not primarily visualise the well of the four rivers streaming from paradise (Genesis 2:10), but ‘the fountain of the water of life’ (Revelations 21:6), which refers to Christ as the new Adam, the Redeemer and ultimately the new Paradise mentioned in St John’s Revelations (Revelations 21:6).¹⁰

The four individual scenes with Adam and Eve were copied directly from German prints.¹¹ They were underdrawn with minute detail and left in reserve. Bles’s rendering of God forbidding Adam is closest to the engraving from Heinrich Aldegrever’s 1540 series The Story of Adam and Eve (RP-P-OB-2607),¹² which is shown in reverse on the painting. The scene of the Creation of Eve was based on two engravings by Aldegrever of the same subject: one in his 1540 series of The Story of Adam and Eve (RP-P-OB-2606),¹³ and another in reverse from a Dance of Death suite of 1541 (RP-P-OB-2753).¹⁴ To the latter, an original detail was added: Eve’s head is directly mounted on Adam’s rib in God’s hand. The Fall of Man, however, was taken from Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut in the Small Passion series of c. 1510 (RP-P-OB-1321; RP-P-OB-1357),¹⁵ albeit in reverse, and The Expulsion from Paradise was taken from the same series (RP-P-OB-1357).¹⁶ The use of Aldegrever’s prints provides a terminus post quem of 1541 for the Rijksmuseum painting.

Paradise is one of a kind in Bles’s reconstructed oeuvre. Its iconography is unique, and the choice of German printed models is unusual for the artist. Another unusual aspect is that the panel is made of walnut wood: quite exceptional for Northern paintings. Walnut wood is mostly found as a carrier for paintings in France, Spain and Italy.¹⁷ That the provenance of the aforementioned Bosch-triptych very likely goes back to Venice in the early 16th century might in this case not be without significance.¹⁸ It might cautiously evoke the question whether Herri met de Bles travelled to Italy after all.¹⁹

The attribution to Herri met de Bles first proposed in the museum collection catalogue of 1903 has been accepted ever since.²⁰ Because of the thin paint layers and the colouration of the background Gibson wanted to see a great deal of studio assistance in the painting.²¹ However, thin layers are quite typical for Bles and the now greyish appearance of the mountains is most likely due to decolouration of what were originally blue rocks. The type of underdrawing, featuring short but precise contour lines for the figures and more freely drawn egg shapes for the vegetation in the background, is similar to that of a number of other paintings attributed to Bles, such as the Landscape with Quarrelling Peasants in Liège,²² and The Road to Calvary in Princeton.²³ Based on our current knowledge of his oeuvre, there is no reason to revise the attribution to Herri met de Bles.

M. Ubl, 2016
(A previous version of this entry written by J.P. Filedt Kok in 2010 can be downloaded below)