Christ Crowned With Thorns (Bosch, London) - The Tormentors Around Christ

The Tormentors Around Christ

The devout of the Middle Ages did not see the Passion of Christ as just a distant historical event. They believed that their own sins continued to torment and wound the actual Body of Christ in a perpetual Passion. When Christ's sufferings were acted out in the Mystery Plays, the performers dressed in contemporary clothes, not the costume of the Biblical Holy Land, and the contemporary costume leads to contemporary references in the painting. In the early 16th century it seemed to many Christians that the Passion of Christ was being reenacted in scandalous attacks upon the Body of the Church by the Papacy itself. Bosch was painting Christ Crowned with Thorns only a few years before the outcry against corruption in the hierarchy of the Church reached a climax in 1517, when Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five propositions to the church door at Wittenberg, precipitating the Church into Protestant Reformation. Bosch had often singled out the religious orders and upper echelons of the Church for sadistic treatment in his depictions of Hell. This painting implies the same criticism. The standard medieval representation of the Emblems of the Passion showed the face of Christ surrounded by four heads representing the church, the ruling class, the bourgeois and the peasant - the blame for the Crucifixion of Christ was apportioned between all classes of society, lay and spiritual. Bosch exploits the familiarity of this arrangement of heads in his composition but points the finger at specific targets of his day. The oak leaves worn in the hat of the tormentor in the top right hand corner of the picture would have been instantly recognised as the badge of the della Rovere family, in particular of Giuliano della Rovere (1443–1513) who had become Pope Julius II in 1503. Julius II had sought to strengthen the temporal power of the Papacy by 'devious diplomacy' and military force. In 1509 he joined with the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I and Louis XII of France against the Republic of Venice. He took upon himself the role of a general. Erasmus made frequent derogatory comparisons between Pope Julius II and Julius Caesar, his namesake. In Julius Exclusus, usually attributed to Erasmus, Julius is shut out of Heaven for his earthly sins. At the gates of Heaven St.Peter voices the revulsion of Europe: "While you wear on the outside the splendid attire of a priest, underneath you are utterly horrendous with the clatter of bloody weapons." The tormentor with his badge of oak leaves is thought to depict a hired soldier or official in the pay of the Pope himself.

In the standard medieval layout of the faces around Christ and the Emblems of the Passion the representatives of spiritual and temporal power were the upper figures. By this analogy the second upper figure in Bosch's painting should represent temporal power, and indeed he does. This tormentor, with the bolt of a cross-bow through his hat, also appears in both Bosch's other versions of the Crowning with Thorns. The tondo in the Escorial shows him wearing a badge of the double-headed eagle of the Holy Roman Empire. So in these two tormentors the alliance of the Pope and the Emperor against the Body of the Church may be seen. The lower figures in the standard layout were representatives of the bourgeoisie and the peasantry. In Bosch's painting the lower left-hand figure wears the costume of a rich merchant, and the tormentor on the right wears the everyday dress of the period. But here again Bosch is more specific. Among the accusations levelled against Pope Julius II, the most vehement were that not only did he borrow money from the Jews, and thereby encourage usury, but he was even prepared to make alliances with the infidel Turks. "So Bosch further identifies the right-hand figure as a Jew by his physiognomy, and the left-hand figure as an infidel by the crescent moon and star of Islam on his headdress."

A contemporary layer of meaning however, is not the only layer. The tormentors around Christ may further be viewed as personifications of the four temperaments. According to medieval medicine, defects of body and mind were caused by the imbalance of the four fluids which were thought to govern the constitution of the body, the four humours: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. The ideal man had all four humours in perfect balance. In imperfect human creatures the varying mixture of humours accounted for differences of personality and physique: an excess of blood made a man sanguine; phlegm, phlegmatic; black bile,melancholic; and yellow bile, choleric. According to this scheme then, the choleric temperament is possessed by the tormentor on the top left of the painting, the sanguine, by the tormentor on the top right, the phlegmatic, bottom left, and the melancholic temperament, bottom right. And Bosch would not have been the only artist to employ this personification of the temperaments. Albrecht Dürer produced a woodcut called The Mens Bath House around 1496 and used the subject to explore the differences between the physiology of the four temperaments. Thirty years later, in what was probably his last painting, he applied the same device to his twin panel paintings of The Four Apostles, each of whom represents a particular temperament. St. John represents the sanguine type, St.Peter, is the phlegmatic, St.Mark is the choleric and St. Paul, the melancholic. By assigning one of the temperaments to each of the Four Apostles, Dürer was making them stand as representatives of all Mankind.

But Bosch's metaphor does not end with the four temperaments. In the medieval world picture, everything connected. The body of Man was seen as a microcosm of the macrocosm. Every medieval almanack, like the Shepherds Calendar or the Guildbook of the Barber Surgeons of York usually included a diagram of the human body showing which parts of the anatomy were governed by which signs of the Zodiac. Inevitably, the four human temperaments were seen to be subject to a particular planet. Jupiter presided over the sanguine man, who wears in his hat a sprig of oak leaves, the emblem Julius II had appropriated from the God Jupiter. The phlegmatic temperament, being watery, was governed by the moon. Mars, the war-bringer was the planet ruling the choleric temperament, and the melancholic came under the shadow of Saturn. Finally, as our temperaments reflected the celestial workings of the cosmos, so they were subject to the material nature common to the whole of visible creation. The four temperaments 'are referred unto the four elements' - that is the four primary elements of which all matter was believed to be composed - Fire, Air, Earth and Water. Though there was some variation in the relating of the temperaments to the four elements, the most common was that Fire inflamed the choleric; Air breathed vitality into the sanguine; Earth weighed down the melancholic; and Water dissipated the phlegmatic. In Bosch's painting the ideal man, within each of us, is hedged about and confined by the human limitations of the four temperaments and the material limitations of the four elements. (Whilst it might be thought that such speculation leads away from Orthodox Christianity of the Low Countries in the early 16th century, in fact Christian dogma and pagan beliefs were all integrated parts of the medieval world picture. A Compendium of Christian Faith, for example, written in 1404 for Duke Albert of Bavaria, Count of Holland, one of many such popular compendia, interweaves the signs of the Zodiac, the four temperaments and the four elements between concepts of God and the Trinity and the story of Creation).