 Welcome to Barnes Takeout, your daily serving of art. I'm Robin Creran, Collections Research Coordinator at the Barnes Foundation. Today I'm going to talk to you about a small painting on the south wall of Room 5. It's a copy after a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, and it's right here. So like I said, the painting is actually a copy after Hieronymus Bosch, but Barnes purchased it in 1937 with the understanding that it was actually by the artist. Even though it's a copy after him, I think it's still worth talking a little bit about Hieronymus Bosch. So Bosch was born about 1450 in a Netherlandish town called, colloquially called Dane Bosch, near Antwerp. He came from a family of artists, of generations of artists, so he likely learned how to paint from his father, although we don't know this to be certain. We actually don't know a lot about Bosch in general. What we do know are from various archival accounts of different things that happened during his life, where he is documented in a deed or something along those lines. But a few things that we do know about him. We know that he married a relatively wealthy woman in 1481, which did seem to give him a little bit more of status. He became a sworn brother of a religious fraternity known as the Brotherhood of Our Lady. And to become a sworn brother, you needed to have a bit of power, influence, wealth, so it was clear that he gained that from his marriage, and possibly also from his painting skills as well. So we don't know a lot about his commissions, but we do a record of a few. And so he did receive both secular commissions like from the Duke of Burgundy, but also some religious commissions as well. He's probably most famous for his painting called The Garden of Earthly Delights, which is at the Prado in Madrid, which probably most people are familiar with. It's usually in an Art History 101 course or something of the like. He's well known for his visual language of his rather strange and usually almost literal translations of the Bible in his paintings. And you can kind of see some of that strangeness in this painting as well. So like I said, it's a copy after another painting of the central panel of a triptych of the Temptation of St. Anthony, which is at the National Museum of Antique Art in Lisbon in Spain. So a triptych is like a three-paneled painting or sculpture, relief sculpture, that's usually hinged and was used on an altar piece of a chapel or a church, but could also have been used for personal devotion. But this is just a center panel, and it's a bit narrow in composition, but in general features much of the same, many of the same figures and composition. So there are a couple interpretations of how we can view this painting, but they both kind of center around the Temptation of St. Anthony and the saint himself. So we'll start first by looking at the saint. So he's at the very center of the panel, and he is the only figure to look straight out at us as viewers. Everybody else is kind of engaged within the strange world in which the painting is depicting, but he is looking out at us and he is pointing somewhere. He's pointing to the back of the painting to this area right here where we see both Christ on a crucifix right here, and then we also see Christ standing next to the crucifix. So we were meant to see this and to look at Christ at St. Anthony pointing to Christ and realize that that is the true important thing that we want to get from this painting, that Christ's sacrifice is really the most important part of the painting, is to remember, to be reminded, despite all these torments and these demons surrounding it, that Christ's true sacrifice is the most important part. So this figure to the left of St. Anthony is holding this little silver dish, and so this could be read as a black mass or an unholy communion, her giving the wine to these strange figures on the right. I mean if we move around, we notice that she looks like she has some sort of rodent tail, and then we see this strange figure with a musical instrument, a horn musical instrument as a nose, this green faced figure appearing to hold a plate of maybe an owl or some strange little figure, and they all appear to be in jovial spirits celebrating something, and then over here this like snout-nosed almost like a pig, this little dog over here, it's all very odd, and then get stranger as you move down. So appearing out of this kind of fruit is this skeletal demon riding this very strange little animal, and he appears to be playing the harp, and then if you move down some water appears here, and then we're looking at a fish boat with a bird and kind of like a monkey figure laughing, and then further along we see this other demon riding a duck whose bill has turned into a musical horn. Now when we move up it gets even stranger, we see this woman over here holding what looks like a baby, and she's kind of like a tree almost like a root riding like a mouse, and then this anthropomorphic figure but has lost kind of its its humanness because it has no face, but this could be thistle and then riding a jug, so this could be interpreted as the behind or the front of the animal. It's up to your interpretation, and this these three figures or these two figures with this child have been labeled as kind of a bad version of the flight into Egypt, so a kind of a mock, a parody of that has most of what it is in here is like an unholy version of events in the Bible, and then the final set of figures almost a bear and a cow or horse-like figure reading something, reading what looks to be a Bible but is clearly not, and then the last thing to kind of point out is this city or village in fire, so this is reference to St. Anthony's fire, which was a poisoning or a disease something to thought to be a disease at the time, which was called ergotism, and it was something that the order of St. Anthony, which was the brotherhood of who venerated the saint, they helped to treat and cure this disease, so it was actually found to be a poisoning from this fungus found on rye, but at the time they thought it was a disease and they had no idea how it was being spread, so that leads into another possible interpretation, and that has to do with a lot of different references within the painting to cures of St. Anthony's fire, so one scholar has proposed that this is not actually the Holy Communion, but it is the ritual of the Holy Vintage, and the Holy Vintage was something given out by the order of St. Anthony once a year, and it was essentially like a wine brewed with various different types of healing ingredients, and then it was poured over the bones of St. Anthony, and it was reserved for those who were in the most dire circumstances, people very close to death, but also you could be given to the most important people also, so kings and queens or princes, but it was said that if you drank the Holy Vintage that you would either die within a few days or be miraculously cured, so it's possible that this is, she's actually giving this to these people, and that this painting is meant to be viewed by those with St. Anthony's fire who are suffering, who suffered from things like hallucinations and these burning sensations on the skin, so they're suffering from hallucinations, so they are seeing these strange demonic figures as St. Anthony would have seen when he was tested and tempted, and that they as viewers of this painting are meant to see St. Anthony and that he was tempted and he did not succumb to those temptations, and so they are supposed to kind of think like St. Anthony and help themselves to be cured, to be treated. There are also a couple things within the painting which were used as cures, like I mentioned, and one of them over here, this reference, this is interpreted to be a mandrake apple, so mandrake was a common ingredient. Fish were also a common ingredient as was water, which they are within, and then the last two I'll point out are thistle, which this head of a thistle, and then what could be interpreted as some kind of tree or root has been also thought to be a mandrake root, which is like I said, like the mandrake apple was very important within the curing of St. Anthony's fire. They even made small talisman out of the roots of mandrake, and this could be a mandrake talisman. So either way we look at this painting, or if you just want to look at the painting from for its like fanciful, kind of crazy, demonic imagery. We are meant to remember and to see St. Anthony and that he was tempted by these demonic figures, by these supernatural entities, but he did not succumb to this temptation, and he found his true salvation in Christ. And that is really the most important part of the painting and what they should have taken from the painting. So I hope you enjoyed looking at this very strange and fanciful painting with me today, but that's it for today's Barnes Takeout. Thanks for watching. If you are interested in seeing more of these, subscribe to our YouTube channel, and if you have any comments, please leave them below. We love to hear from you. Thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed Barnes Takeout. Subscribe and make sure your post notifications are on to get daily servings of art. Thanks for watching and for your support of the Barnes Foundation.