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拍品專文
Few artistic imaginations have cast a longer shadow over European art than that of Hieronymus Bosch. In the decades after his death, his infernal landscapes and hybrid beings became a resource for artists confronted with subjects that resisted naturalistic description. Bosch invented a visual grammar for the marvellous: a repertory of chimeras, metamorphic creatures and ambiguous forms that allowed painters to picture the unseen. Disseminated through drawings, copies and workshop modelbooks, these motifs moved easily between Antwerp, Brussels and Prague, sustaining a tradition that remained fertile well into the seventeenth century.
The present painting situates itself at the point where this Boschian inheritance intersects with one of the most charged narratives of classical antiquity: Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid. Having escaped Troy, Aeneas descends to the Underworld in search of his father Anchises, guided by the Cumaean Sibyl. The artist chooses the moment after their passage across the Styx. Aeneas, wrapped in a red cloak, advances into the realm of the dead; the Sibyl gestures forward with quiet authority. To the right, Charon transports a cargo of unjudged souls towards the gates of Hell, his boat navigating a sulphurous expanse in which the terrain seems to fracture and dissolve.
If Virgil provides the narrative foundation, it is Bosch who supplies the pictorial imagination. The foreground is populated with creatures whose anatomy strains the boundaries of taxonomy: forked reptiles, part-avian predators and insectoid hybrids rendered with descriptive care. Their forms derive not from direct observation but from the Boschian premise that the limits of imagination may be made visible through the distortion of nature. Such imagery circulated widely among Netherlandish painters of the early seventeenth century – figures including Frans Francken the Younger, Jan Brueghel the Elder and David Teniers the Younger – who adapted Bosch’s inventions to histories, allegories and erudite cabinet pictures.
The authorship of the panel remains anonymous, yet the composition reveals an artist deeply conversant with post-Boschian repertories transmitted through workshop sketchbooks and small-format coppers. Its resonance is confirmed by the existence of related versions: a smaller copper (44 × 66 cm.) recently appeared on the Paris art market attributed to Jacob Isaacsz. van Swanenburgh (Artcurial, 27 March 2025, lot 202), and another copper of similar format is preserved at the Slovenská národná galéria, Bratislava, attributed to Jan Brueghel the Elder (inv. O 3003). Bosch’s art inspired, fascinated and horrified his contemporaries, and works such as this demonstrate the enduring force of his imagination.
The present painting situates itself at the point where this Boschian inheritance intersects with one of the most charged narratives of classical antiquity: Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid. Having escaped Troy, Aeneas descends to the Underworld in search of his father Anchises, guided by the Cumaean Sibyl. The artist chooses the moment after their passage across the Styx. Aeneas, wrapped in a red cloak, advances into the realm of the dead; the Sibyl gestures forward with quiet authority. To the right, Charon transports a cargo of unjudged souls towards the gates of Hell, his boat navigating a sulphurous expanse in which the terrain seems to fracture and dissolve.
If Virgil provides the narrative foundation, it is Bosch who supplies the pictorial imagination. The foreground is populated with creatures whose anatomy strains the boundaries of taxonomy: forked reptiles, part-avian predators and insectoid hybrids rendered with descriptive care. Their forms derive not from direct observation but from the Boschian premise that the limits of imagination may be made visible through the distortion of nature. Such imagery circulated widely among Netherlandish painters of the early seventeenth century – figures including Frans Francken the Younger, Jan Brueghel the Elder and David Teniers the Younger – who adapted Bosch’s inventions to histories, allegories and erudite cabinet pictures.
The authorship of the panel remains anonymous, yet the composition reveals an artist deeply conversant with post-Boschian repertories transmitted through workshop sketchbooks and small-format coppers. Its resonance is confirmed by the existence of related versions: a smaller copper (44 × 66 cm.) recently appeared on the Paris art market attributed to Jacob Isaacsz. van Swanenburgh (Artcurial, 27 March 2025, lot 202), and another copper of similar format is preserved at the Slovenská národná galéria, Bratislava, attributed to Jan Brueghel the Elder (inv. O 3003). Bosch’s art inspired, fascinated and horrified his contemporaries, and works such as this demonstrate the enduring force of his imagination.