The Besieged War-Elephant: a Boschian Moralized Antiwar Discourse

CHAPTER 4 The Besieged War-Elephant: A Boschian Moralized Antiwar Discourse

Yona Pinson

For Larry Silver, an esteemed colleague and dear friend ∵

The Besieged War-Elephant (c. 1490; Fig. 4.1), an enigmatic Boschian allegory, was engraved by Alart du Hameel, an architect-engraver from ‘s-Hertogenbosch who was also the first designer of Boschian prints. Hameel was an important figure in the city and belonged to the same social and artistic milieu as Bosch, so it is likely the two artists knew each other. Whether Hameel was directly inspired by a lost work by Bosch or followed models that emerged from the artist’s workshop is still being debated.1 Nevertheless, Hameel’s emblematical

1 Like Bosch, Hameel was also a member of the Brotherhood of Our Lady. Already in 1927, Max Jakob Friedländer suggested that Hameel elaborated a prototype derived from either a drawing or a painting by Jheronimus Bosch; see his Early Netherlandish Painting, Vol. 5: Geerten Tot Sint Jans and Jerome Bosch, trans. Heinz Norden (Leyden: A. W. Sijthoff, 1969), 70. Friedländer’s view was later adopted by D. Bax, Hieronymus Bosch. His Picture-writing Deciphered, trans. M. A. Bax-Botha (Rotterdam: A. A. Balkema, 1979), 275. According to Jane Campbell Hutchison, ed., The Illustrated Bartsch, Early German Artists (New York: Abaris Books, 1981), Part 2: 242, it might be derived from a Boschian prototype. This view was adopted by Paul Vandenbroeck, “Wisdom of the Riddle,” in Hieronymus Bosch: The Complete Painting and Drawings, ed. Jos Koldeweij, Paul Vandenbroeck and Bernard Vermet (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2000), 117–19; idem, “Meaningful Caprices. Folk Culture, Middle Class Ideology (ca. 1480–1510) and Aristocratic Recuperation (ca. 1530–1570): A Series of Brussels Tapestries after Hieronymus Bosch,” Jaarboeck Koninklijk Museum voor Schonen Kunsten (2009): 212–69, esp. 254. Vandenbroeck (214) mentions a lost Boschian tapestry of the Elephant from a series of tapestries after Bosch, produced in Brussels, c. 1530–40, previously in the collection of Francis I; see also Larry Silver, Hieronymus Bosch (New York: Abbeville, 2006), 362–64. According to Marisa Bass and Elisabeth Wyckoff, “Sons of ‘s-Hertogenbosch: Hieronymus Bosch’s Local Legacy in Print,” Art in Print 5 (2015), http://artinprint.org/article/sons-of-s -hertogenbosch-hieronymus-boschs-local-legacy-in-print, accessed 03/02/2016, the print

Figure 4.1 Alart du Hameel, The Besieged War-Elephant, c. 1490 , (20.3 × 33.6 cm) , Vienna, Albertina, Graphische Sammlung (art work in Public Domain). composition reflects ideas that preoccupied Bosch. Images of warfare, violence, and military assaults consumed his thoughts and became a leitmotif in his antiwar ethical discourse.2 In the engraving The Besieged War Elephant, the teeming battlefield pan- orama includes a combination of human warriors and emblematic animals that recall Bosch’s vocabulary.3 The warring parties advance toward the war elephant from every direction, creating a turbulent, almost centrifugal composition that forces the viewer to scrutinize the scene from the center outward, in order to make sense of all its puzzling pieces.

raises the question of how closely Hameel collaborated with Bosch; see also Marisa Bass and Elisabeth Wyckoff, Beyond Bosch. The Afterlife of a Renaissance Master in Print, exh. cat. (Saint Louis: Saint Louis Art Museum, 2015), cat. no. 15, 141–43. According to Erwin Pokorny, “Alart du Hameel, The War Elephant,” in Bosch. The 5th Century Exhibition, Pilar Silva Maroto ed. (Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2016), 178, although strongly influenced by Bosch, Alart du Hameel saw himself as the author of the engraving, and he signed it in the sky. 2 See Yona Pinson, “Images of War and Violence as Moral Lessons in the Work of Jheronimus Bosch,” in J. W. M. Timmermans, ed., Jheronimus Bosch. His Patrons His Public, (‘s-Hertogen- bosch Jheronimus Bosch Art Center, 2014), 230–50. 3 Ibid., esp. 235 and 239.