Opinion: Covid-19 isn't a Boschian Nightmare. We'd do better to learn from Bruegel
Death is around us on an unfathomable scale. There are daily headlines of health services running out of hospital beds and mutations that render scientific miracles useless. More death, more suffering. How did we get here? To find an answer, it may be tempting to reach out to the prophetic works of Hieronymus Bosch, but Pieter Bruegel the Elder offers us a more challenging and inexcusable explanation for our troubles.
The Garden of Earthy Delights
“Devil Maker” Hieronymus Bosch is famous for his dark, monstrous, and deeply spiritual work. Painted between 1490 and 1500, Bosch’s triptych- a painting with 3 distinct sections- The Garden of Earthly Delights depicts our world’s descent into chaos.
Despite Bosch being a devout Catholic, many Dutch contemporaries could not appreciate his blasphemous creations and therefore many of his paintings were destroyed in the Reformation. Bosch, born as Joen van Aken (From Aachen), painted under a pseudonym based on his city of birth, Den Bosch. An admirer of his work was the Spanish King Philip II, who purchased The Garden of Earthly Delights several decades after it was painted and brought it to Spain, where it is today.
Bosch’s level of detail is both fascinating and disturbing. Hundreds of creatures are depicted; Human, animal, and demonic. The size of the painting too is worth noting, spanning over 12 feet. Folded together we see the third day of creation in black and white, when God separated land and water and Eden was created. In Latin, the inscription reads: For he spoke, and it was done and For he commanded, and they were created (Psalms 33:9 and 148:5).
On the left panel, in the Earthly paradise of Eden, Adam is seated on the grass and looks up to Jesus dressed in a pink robe. He holds Eve by the palm of her hand and introduces her. Adam gazes upon her as she falls down on her knees. This is the beginning of mankind in spectacular colours, but it is also the beginning of its demise. Straight above Jesus’ head, we see an owl hiding in a dark circle within the pink fountain. In the Middle Ages the light- shunning owl was considered both “an emblem of the Devil, sin and heresy and a cunning lure”.¹ The Devil is there from the start. Under the owl’s watchful gaze, the moment Adam and Eve lock eyes, they become embroiled in sin. The sin of lust.
With the Devil’s introduction, the other animals in the painting begin to turn on each other. Seemingly a paradise of peace and plenty, Eden has already become spoilt, but Bosch decides to hide this in plain sight with an eye- soothing composition and bright and uplifting colours.
On the centre panel, after which the artwork is named, hundreds of naked men and women act on this carnal lust. Fornication is abundant. Men and women shamelessly help themselves to the forbidden apples on the trees.
The owls no longer need to hide in darkness, an altar of human legs and fruit has been constructed for one of them. Another owl is being hugged by a naked man in a pool. The panel is littered with animals, humans, fruits, and other strange compositions. The colours of the first panel are still there, giving the illusion of paradise. But this paradise is false, and literally breaking down before our eyes. Five fountains have been constructed on the waters, the eye is drawn to the dark dark oculus where the owl was hiding in the first panel. In the oculus a man reaches for a woman’s genitals. The water carefully hides what kind of blasphemy happens under the surface, drawing-in the onlooker to wonder, or even fantasise about the acts. Making not Bosch, but the onlooker the blasphemous one.
Gazing to the third panel, Bosch immediately punishes the onlooker with eternal damnation. The huge tree man looks back down to his backside where the gluttonous are served beer by a toad, but also to Adam on the first panel. Whereas The Garden of Earthly Delights depicts the sin of lust and blasphemous sexual acts, Hell punishes all the sinners. Those who dedicated themselves to earthly music are punished on their instruments. The city ablaze in the background may refer to Sodom, burning through God’s wrath for acts of homosexuality. The gamblers are tortured on a table by rabbits and other creatures. The avaricious are eaten by an owl-like creature on a golden toilet and immediately excreted into a lower layer of hell. Is that Eve under his feet looking in the mirror (on a green man’s bottom)?
In Bosch’s universe, damnation is nigh. Humanity is profoundly susceptible to the devil’s vices, who is hiding in plain sight. We are weak-willed, sinful creatures, and it will not be long before God punishes us. From the moment we were created, we were already corrupted and therefore suffering will justly befall us all.
The Tower of Babel
Early March 2020, The Bruegel Room in Vienna was deserted. “Is it always this quiet?” I ask a gallery employee. “Normally it’s a lot busier”, he says. Despite the disease spreading across the globe, it would take more than a week for the WHO to declare Covid-19 a pandemic. Three weeks later we would be in lockdown.
A few decades after Bosch, Pieter Bruegel quietly starts a revolution in art. Born in the city of Antwerp between 1525 and 1530, Bruegel (sometimes referred to as “Peasant Bruegel”) began his career as an imitator of Bosch. Quietly, he changed the perspective of art from the Medieval focus of the divine to a secular, humanist view. Even though his works sometimes feature biblical tales or myths, the human condition and everyday life are in focus. From The Peasant Dance to his Netherlandish Proverbs, he gives rise to what is now called “Genre Painting”. Bruegel lived in deeply uncertain times. Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Thesis had been written only a decade before his birth. The Protestant movement was rapidly gaining ground, and the Netherlands (The Lowlands ruled by the Spanish Habsburg dynasty) were on the brink of a national and religious rebellion against their rulers.
In 1567 The Duke of Alba had been sent to the Netherlands to restore order. Spanish Habsburg troops seized the country with emergency powers. He set up a “Council of Troubles” (referred to in The Netherlands as Bloedraad, Blood Council) and hundreds of members of the nobility were tried and executed. Bruegel died unexpectedly in 1569, his legacy was by no means secure because of the secular nature of his work. Some of his work was also particularly critical of Spanish rule, see for example his “Massacre of the Innocents”. Legend has it some of his works were burnt on his deathbed to spare his wife the trouble².
In 1594 much of Bruegel's work fell into the hands of Archduke Ernst of Austria, bringing the works into Habsburg possession. Emperor Franz Joseph I constructed the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna in 1891, where they are now. The Bruegel room houses 12 paintings of the master, The Tower of Babel is probably the most famous.
The Tower of Babel depicts the biblical story of the construction of a tower by the Babylonian King Nimrod. As offspring of Noah, a united humanity seeks to defend themselves against God’s wrath. “Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.’” (Genesis 11:4). Human ambition and the tower with its “top to the heavens” has clearly gone too far. Like in the Garden of Earthly Delights, punishment must be exercised. God introduces different languages to disunite humanity and frustrate the construction of the tower.
On the painting, we see an immense unfinished structure, remarkably resembling the Colosseum in Rome. The eternal city had fallen into decay and Bruegel visited the city in 1552. The choice of the Colosseum was by no means accidental. Just like early Protestants in The Netherlands, early Christians were persecuted in Ancient Rome, some of them put to death in the Colosseum. Bruegel sets his painting in a distinctly Netherlandish river port, with designs of houses and ships that would have been recognised by his contemporaries. Under Catholic rule, people in the Netherlands and Germany shared a common understanding of the universe and truth. Bruegel’s decision to place his tower in a Netherlandish river port would have been particularly poignant to an audience who, for the first time in generations questioned the very nature of their beliefs. Just like Babel, Bruegel’s city of Antwerp was undergoing rapid development and demographic increase. Some years later the Duke of Alba would describe the city as a “Babylon”.³
Even though Bruegel’s subject matter is an Old Testament myth, he modernises the story. He puts humanity and the human condition at the forefront. Yes, divine punishment is exercised on humanity, but it is in fact humanity and it’s decisions that are cursed. Watch how the tower is crumbling down from the bottom. In our ambition, in a race to the heavens, we have neglected the foundations of our world. Klaus Demus noted that because of the design of the tower, it was “inevitably lopsided”⁴ and would have most certainly collapsed, crushing the town behind it. This critical design flaw had nothing to do with God’s punishment, it is a disaster of humanity’s own making.
In his book “Bosch and Bruegel From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life”, Joseph Leo Koerner writes:
“For Bruegel the folly resides less in the building’s plan than in human planning per se. The worlds we imagine are impossibe and doomed. The apocalypse isn’t coming soon; it is well under way ”.⁵
Bosch, Bruegel and Covid-19
As anticipated, the WHO mission to Wuhan this month did not provide exact evidence as to which pathway the Covid-19 took to infect more than 100 million people across the globe. Early reports indicated the virus had originated on a fish market, where trade in exotic animals also took place. Soon after, the theory of lab creation also circled news-outlets. This theory has now been marked by the WHO as “extremely unlikely”. According to the research team, the most likely pathway the virus followed was from bat to another animal, to a human. However, many scientists believe it was human activity in the first place that unleashed the tragic chain of events leading to the disease.
Kate Jones, chair of ecology and biodiversity at UCL, interviewed for an article in The Guardian, says that:
“These zoonotic diseases are linked to environmental change and human behaviour. The disruption of pristine forests driven by logging, mining, road building though remote places, rapid urbanisation and population growth is bringing people into closer contact with animal species they may never have been near before.” ⁶
Covid-19 is by no means the first zoonotic disease to cause alarm. Virtually all emerging diseases stem from human contact with animals. By creating the opportunity for diseases to cross over from animal to humans, we inevitably increased the likelihood of disaster. The outbreak of SARS in 2003 was believed to have also originated from bats, the 2012 outbreak of MERS was linked to camels. In Bosch and Bruegel’s time, it was the outbreak of plagues that wreaked havoc on the population.
David Quammen author of Spillover, Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic wrote in early 2020 for the New York Times:
“We invade tropical forests and other wild landscapes, which harbor so many species of animals and plants — and within those creatures, so many unknown viruses. We cut the trees; we kill the animals or cage them and send them to markets. We disrupt ecosystems, and we shake viruses loose from their natural hosts. When that happens, they need a new host. Often, we are it.” ⁷
Like in Bruegel’s The Tower of Babel, it is through our ambition that we have created disaster. There is no divine punishment waiting around the corner, no owl or devil corrupting us with his vices. To confine Covid-19 to a single calamitous event that has fallen upon us, by shaking our fists upward and asking ourselves “why us?!” we shirk responsibility.
We have to confront the reality of the situation, that by endlessly expanding into the natural world we create our own disasters. Only by acknowledging this, and by radically reducing our impact on the environment, by reducing intensification of livestock and addressing increasingly densely populated cities, can we hope to prevent ever more frequent, and perhaps more deadly diseases.
We have set in motion a chain of events that has foreshadowed this catastrophe. Like the Tower with its fundamental design flaw, we are circling upwards towards greater achievement and expansion, but ever-increasing the likelihood of collapse.
Notes:
¹ Joseph Leo Koerner, “Bosch and Bruegel from Enemy Painting to Everyday Life P.207. From Allen of Lille, De Planctu Natura 2. Authors translation
² Karl van Mander, Schildersboeck, Het leven van Pieter Brueghel, uytnemende Schilder van Brueghel, 1604, fol 33V.
³ Pistolario del III Duque de Alba, Don Fernando Álvarez de Toledo (Madrid, 1952), 2:34
⁴Klaus Remus, “Pieter Bruegel d. Ä. im Kunsthistorisches Museum. P. 57
⁵ Joseph Leo Koerner, “Bosch and Bruegel from Enemy Painting to Everyday Life”, P. 304
⁶ The Guardian, Tip of the iceberg’: is our destruction of nature responsible for Covid-19? by John Vidal, 18 March 2021
⁷New York Times, “We Made the Coronavirus Epidemic” by David Quammen, 28 January 20
