Showing posts with label Leap by Terry Tempest Williams. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Leap by Terry Tempest Williams. Show all posts

Saturday, June 25, 2011

The Wolf and the Little Nun: a Faery Tale


That Hieronymus Bosch, what a kidder. In trying to find images for my last post (which, by the way, I photographed myself, so don't make any stupid comments), I found this. I can only look at Bosch a little piece at a time, for the horror of his dark world disturbs me too much. I remember reading a remarkable book called Leap by Terry Tempest Williams, a Mormon writer who decided to analyze and decipher the hidden meanings in Bosch's masterpiece, The Garden of Delights. When I first saw it, I thought, OK then, if this is delight, I'd like to see purgatory!

This little detail of one of his paintings, I don't know which one, just caught me. I isolated the figure of the nun (for surely that's a nun) who might be doing one of several things: holding her hands up in surrender, keeping the wolf at bay, or gesturing it forward.

In the foreground, a wolf ravages a figure that I at first thought was female, but upon closer inspection is a man. He appears to be offering little resistance (i.e. he is either caressing the wolf, or half-heartedly pushing it away, though his hand looks red and mangled.) The wolf has a knife weirdly stuck through the skin on its back. 


But this other bit, the wolf and the little nun: I had to isolate her and do my usual color invert and see what happened. Most of the time this doesn't do anything but make a picture look weird, but once in a while (as with my very ordinary amateur paintings), something unexpected pops out.

Bosch was a subtle fellow, and he may have known something about the negative of a picture, even if such a thing did not remotely exist in his time. For who do we see when the painting is inverted?


It's all too strange, too strange to be comprehended. I'm glad I didn't know the fellow.

(Postscript, from the next day: Jesus! If this really is supposed to be The Man, he's in the classic pose of crucifixion. All that's missing is the cross. That Bosch. Such a kidder.)