Anonymous Bosch
I first encountered the weird and wonderful art of Hieronymus Bosch when I noticed his enigmatic masterpiece The Garden of Earthly Delights adorning the cover of R. D. Laing’s indispensable volume, The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise. At first glance, Bosch seemed to out Dali Dali in the extent of his surrealism. My encounter with these extravagant images fired up my ambition to see at first hand the huge triptych (13 feet wide and 7.25 feet in height) which embodies the original, hanging in Madrid’s, El Prado.
My eventual encounter with Hieronymus Bosch came via a somewhat picaresque travelogue, winding through various international chess competitions, starting in the Basque Country, via Tuvalu and Moscow, and ending up in El Prado itself. In Madrid I finally attained my goal and came face to face with the unsigned masterpiece of a most intriguing artist, about whose life we know next to nothing.
Travelling to chess tournaments has traditionally opened up bonus perspectives for the itinerant grandmaster. A classic case was that of Dr. Siegbert Tarrasch, a name well known to every chess enthusiast. Tarrasch was the unchallenged ideologue of chess in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A follower and refiner of the strategic principles and theories of Wilhelm Steinitz, Tarrasch represented the face of dogmatic pseudo-scientific teaching for chess, much as Sigmund Freud had done for psychology and Karl Marx for economics. So great was Tarrasch’s reputation at that time, as the supreme authority in advanced chess theory and correct chess practice, that he earned himself the exalted soubriquet of Praeceptor Germaniae, perhaps best rendered as the “Lawgiver from Germany”.
In actual over-the-board combat Tarrasch was also formidable, scoring wins against all those who held the World Championship title from 1866 (the date which Steinitz preferred to identify as the start of his reign) until 1946, when Alekhine died in possession of the title. Those illustrious victims of the Praeceptor’s skills were Steinitz himself, Emanuel Lasker, Jose Capablanca, Alexander Alekhine and Max Euwe.
At the elite tournament of San Sebastián (Donostia in Basque) of 1912, Tarrasch, according to his own high standards, seriously underperformed. In particular, he had to endure a humiliating loss to his archrival as player, teacher and theoretician, Aron Nimzowitsch. To rub salt into the wound, this setback came in a variation of the French Defence (1e4 e6) in which Tarrasch had previously been considered as the world’s leading expert.
Unsurprisingly, in view of his predilection for their eponymous chess defence, Tarrasch loved Paris, which he visited as frequently as he could, both en route to and returning from his chess forays. However, in order to punish himself for his poor performance at San Sebastián, Tarrasch cancelled his planned post-tournament trip to the French capital and travelled straight back to Munich. This act of mental self flagellation had more serious consequences than he could possibly have envisaged, since events of 1914-1918 were to curtail further trips, and when the war (in which Tarrasch lost a son) was over, his own star was in the wane, while that of the despised Nimzowitsch was soon very much in the ascendant.
As seen from the Tarrasch case, before the pandemic outbreak of Covid-19 enforced the switch of elite chess tournaments to being played online, remote from physical contact with the opposition, participation in chess events entailed extensive travelling to foreign destinations. Instead of being ensconced in one’s own study, far from the madding crowd, as has now become the norm, exclusive opportunities, while travelling, did indeed constitute an attractive add-on for grandmasters on the international circuit.
I have personally visited 84 separate countries, including Tuvalu, that ultima thule of the Pacific, and, on my second attempt, Fiji. On my first attempt my travel agent forgot about the international dateline and booked me to arrive in Suva, the Fijian capital, on a day which technically did not exist.
My globe trotting record, however, is as nought, when compared to that of Nigel Short, World Title Challenger in 1993 and now Vice President of FIDE (Fédération Internationale des Échecs), the World Chess Federation. Nigel must have lost count of the number of prime ministers, presidents and curators of illustrious institutions in the 129 countries which have welcomed him, primarily as a player of global renown, and now, additionally, as a Plenipotentiary ambassador for chess across the planet.
I have also enjoyed my own share of privileged access and opportunities which would not have been normally available. For example: a private tour of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, where I saw the travelling chess set owned by Czar Peter the Great. In similar vein, I was granted behind-the-scenes insights into antiquities in the British Museum, accompanying Garry Kasparov, where the eminent resident expert on board games, Dr. Irving Finkel regaled us with his unrivalled expertise into the celebrated Isle of Lewis chess pieces. Then there were receptions, cocktails and dinners with Prime Ministers: James Callaghan, Margaret Thatcher and John Major; an audience in The Vatican with Pope John Paul II, dinner (pork with black bean sauce) with Fidel Castro in the Palace of Justice in Havana, tea with Prime Minister Menachim Begin in the Knesset, and morning coffee with President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines. The last of these took place in the Malacanang Palace, Manila, during the 1978 Karpov vs. Korchnoi World Chess Championship, and in the evening the First Lady Imelda, she of the quasi infinite shoe ownership, sang for us in person.
The meeting with Mr. Begin proved to be of huge practical benefit, when I was leaving Israel and had to face the notoriously thorough security checks at Ben Gurion airport. Rather than submit to having all my suitcases opened and dissected, swift production of a photo with myself and the Prime Minister, led to us being waved through, without resorting to the minutiae of a tedious inspection.
Meeting authority figures during chess tournaments was not the only source of extra curricular excitement. While in Moscow for the 1982 World Qualifier, won by Kasparov, I was invited to dinner by the notorious Soviet dissident, Boris Gulko, then lobbying furiously, but in vain, for an exit visa to Israel. During dinner at his apartment, Gulko asked me to take back to the west a letter for FIDE President Fridrik Olafsson, pleading the would-be emigre’s cause.
I knew that in Moscow I was being tracked by the KGB, in fact I even got to know the man who was tracking me, a jovial fellow by the name of Colonel Konstantin Kulyashov. Whatever the state of our relations during the Moscow tournament, I knew full well that the colonel would do his duty and have my luggage more than thoroughly searched when I departed from Sheremetyevo Airport. Accordingly I formed a cunning plan: this entailed opening Gulko’s envelope, memorising its contents and then destroying the original without trace. I should point out that I have a particular interest in Memory techniques and nine years later in 1991, I was to found the World Memory Championship with Tony Buzan.
On reaching the suspiciously well-staffed security desk at Moscow International Airport I was, indeed given special attention by a considerable cohort of state security operatives. Both my cases were unlocked and microscopically searched. The border sentinels’ conclusion, having taken apart my first case, was that I had far too much caviar and that they were going to confiscate it. I certainly did not consider ten jars of caviar excessive and would have packed an even greater quantity, space permitting.
As the guards enthusiastically turned their attention to the second case, in their desperate quest to find a non existent letter, mentally inscribed on my own brain cells, rather than committed to paper, I surreptitiously repacked my ten jars of caviar into the first bag. This bag, of course, was no longer of any interest to the Myrmidons of Soviet Security, since it did not contain the much sought after incriminating letter. As their fruitless search for anti-Soviet literature concluded, the first case had been repacked and closed, by me. Diversionary tactics are, of course, a standard chess ploy!
Result: I boarded my Aeroflot flight to London with my hoard of caviar intact, and, with Gulko’s letter perfectly memorised, I later transcribed the text and duly delivered it in full to President Olafsson at FIDE HQ in Amsterdam. Gulko and his equally dissident wife, Grandmaster Anna Akhsharumova, did make it to Israel and thence to the USA. Gulko went on to later earn the distinction of having won the chess championships of both the USSR and the USA.
But perhaps my most memorable bonus during a trip abroad to a chess tournament was my exclusive visit to El Prado Art Gallery in Madrid. El Prado is the home of that most quintessential artwork of the Hieronymus Bosch canon, The Garden of Earthly Delights triptych. Originally it had been kept in El Escorial, that peculiar combination of monastery and fortress designed for Philip II of Armada fame, but during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s it was removed to Madrid for security reasons, and there it has remained. It had been one of my ambitions, since going up to Trinity College Cambridge in 1967, to witness the triptych in the flesh, as it were. And here, at the Madrid Tournament, that opportunity had finally arrived.
“The Garden” appears to be a giant morality piece, commencing in Paradise, continuing through a licentious earthly orgy, such as might have appealed to Spencer Tunick, the New York photographer of mass nudity, and ending in hell with its exquisitely ingenious levels of tormenting damnation. In every panel a quizzical and sinister owl observes events, the owl and the cormorant (see Milton, Paradise Lost Book Four) being synonymous with Satan along with the notorious serpent, as eloquently expressed by Alexander Pope in his Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot
“Eve’s temptress thus the Rabins have expressed,
A cherub’s face, a reptile all the rest.”
The owl even appears in the Paradise panel. Owls, in classical terms, being the sacred bird of Athena, can, in a parallel universe, also represent wisdom, but that quality is in short supply in the triptych. Paradise also seems to have been invaded by some particularly nasty life forms at the foot of the first panel.
The owl representing evil may seem anomalous to a modern audience, but it was a commonplace of mediaeval bestiaries, with which Bosch would have been familiar. Thus the learned Hrabanus Maurus, Abbot of Fulda and Archbishop of Mainz, in his ambitious 22 volume De Universo circa 845 AD (an early Christian forerunner of Douglas Adams’s Life the Universe and Everything) book eight De Avibus (“On Birds”) says that the owl denotes those who have surrendered to the darkness of sin and fled from the light of righteousness.
The opposite interpretation, that of the owl as a symbol of wisdom, notably absent from the Garden of Earthly Delights, does however, surface in various other guises, for example that of Wol, in the Winnie the Pooh stories. Wol is regarded as something of a sage by the other inhabitants of Hundred Acre Wood, who regularly defer to his judgment. In German the phrase: “Eulen nach Athen tragen” taking owls to Athens, is the equivalent of our connotation of otiose superfluity, “taking coals to Newcastle.”
Finally, the prankster, Till Eulenspiegel, derives his name from the German portmanteau word for owl and mirror, thus implying that Till is a reflection of owlish wisdom, in other words, the mirror image of wisdom, a clownish buffoon.
Apart from a preoccupation with owls, we know little of the life of Hieronymus Bosch, the artist. There is, though, one clue as to Bosch’s personal appearance. The Bosch expert and art critic, Hans Belting, claims that Bosch has placed a prominent portrait of himself in the Hell panel of The Garden triptych. According to Belting, Bosch appears as the man whose torso represents an admixture between a withered tree and a cracked eggshell. The face bears an expression of resigned irony, embodied in a sideways gaze at right angles to the body. The effect is as follows: while we are looking at the picture, the picture, through the artist himself, is looking straight back at us.
Belting (born 1935) is a German art critic, whose Alma Mater, in common with Hrabanus Maurus, is coincidentally Mainz.
As my modest proposal to learning more about a remarkably secretive, indeed quasi-anonymous individual, a far cry from the hero artists of the Italian Renaissance, I now offer, I believe for the first time, my own humble contribution to Boschian scholarship. Having come face to face with the original in El Prado, I not only subscribe to the view that Belting’s supposition is correct, but that it is further reinforced in the central panel by one of the male characters. This figure can be located, leaning forwards, somewhat to the left of the lower river, beside and to the right of an outsize…er…finch?
The human character in question appears to be fending off the attentions of a naked female, whilst adopting the tell tale pose, rare in Bosch, of looking out at us, with the face twisted so as to be at right angles to the body. Indeed, I believe that the hair style, face and right-angular posture so closely mirror that of eggshell/ tree man in the Hell Panel, that this must also be a representation of Bosch himself. Although the gigantic work remains unsigned, not one but two portraits of the Master himself, gazing directly at us, the now complicit observers of his hallucinogenic universe, more than compensate for his otherwise seeming anonymity. Like Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and that highly effective recruiting poster for Lord Kitchener in the First World War, the eyes of Hieronymus Bosch are always with us.
This week’s game is a win of mine against Viennese Grandmaster Karl Robatsch, in academic life, a professorial expert on the classification of orchids. The game was played on top board in the England v Austria match in Madrid, during the time when I had been permitted first hand examination of one of the world’s most ambitious and truly enigmatic artistic creations.
The game is a sacrificial maelstrom, which I dedicated to my then girlfriend, who was sufficiently impressed to marry me four years later. Sacrificing a rook to gain a queen, as it were!
