We are the mockers, too

Hieronymus Bosch had a distinctive view of our debased humanity, most distinctly expressed in his paintings of Christ’s Passion, says Michael Prodger

Carl Jung described the painter Hieronymus Bosch as ‘the master of the monstrous…the discoverer of the unconscious’. He was, however, only half right. While it is true that Bosch has no peers as a conjurer of phantasms and grotesques, he was no proto-psychologist: he was a man of his times.

Bosch lived c.1450–1516 so his times were the late Middle Ages and there was no such thing as the unconscious then — there was the Bible. All human behaviour, good or ill, could be ascribed either to God or to the Devil. And, in Bosch’s worldview at least, the Devil was in the ascendant. His was a deeply pessimistic view of human nature and his paintings — of which there are only 25 certified examples known — all deal in one form or another with the triumph of sin and the pervasiveness of evil.