Voces del Prado

Controversies Regarding Hieronymus Bosch

Pilar Silva Maroto, Head of the Department of Conservation of Flemish Painting and the Northern Schools up to 1700, 1997-2017

We were presented with an enormous challenge when the Dutch, totally out of the blue and without telling us anything, suddenly decided that three of the six works by Hieronymus Bosch that are exhibited at the Museo del Prado could not be attributed to the painter. We had produced our catalogue with texts of 2,500 words in length and featuring equal studies for each of the works. However, in view of this development, it was necessary for the Museum and for the press to explain a number of things. As I always say, we respond at an academic level through the catalogue. So it was essential to study the works and to produce the corresponding technical documentation.
We hadn’t completed the reflectography process for The Garden of Earthly Delights, given that such a large scan had never been carried out before. They had to do it at night, without removing the work from the wall. Two teams worked over an entire week, entering the hall at eight in the evening and coming out at ten in the morning. Such a large number of scans of a work had never been carried out and we discovered a number of extraordinary things regarding the changes that Bosch had made to The Garden of Earthly Delights from the very beginning. We produced reports – well I drew up reports of 10,000 words in length instead of 2,000 or 2,500 – and we had to work on all of our works, especially the ones whose authorship had been called into question. The Garden of Earthly Delights hadn’t been called into question because they weren’t going to contest the legitimacy of this painting, even though it wasn’t signed. But some of the others had been. Actually, we were very happy because we were able to study the works and demonstrate that they were paintings created by Hieronymus Bosch. But two of them gave us a lot of trouble, because they were always exceptions: Table of the Seven Deadly Sins and the painting on panel entitled The Cure of Folly, or the Extraction of the Stone of Madness.