The Race is not to the Swift

The circle of riders in the center of the triptych represents just part of a verse from Ecclesiastes:

9:11 I turned myself toward another thing, and I saw that under the sun, the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor wealth to the learned, nor grace to the skilful: but there is a time and an end for all these things. (Verti me ad aliud, et vidi sub sole, nec velocium esse cursum, nec fortium bellum, nec sapientium panem, nec doctorum divitias, nec artificum gratiam: sed tempus, casumque in omnibus.)

How many ways are there for a swift animal and rider to lose a race? Starting at the lower left, an animal and rider could be looking up at something distracting, and the goat in front of them could be distracted by birds making noise. Every contestant in the whole circle seems to have a different problem.

The circle of riders appears to be the password for unlocking the rest of the triptych, even though I have found it fairly late in the game, after deciphering the inside and outside panels in some detail and identifying the overall subject as the book of Ecclesiastes. A more alert interpreter might have seen that all of the riders and animals were showing different ways to lose a race, remembered the part of a line from Ecclesiastes, and proceeded from there. Different interpreters might come up with different numbers if the question were about exactly how many ways to lose a race are shown in the picture, but there seem to be enough examples to make it clear that “the race is not to the swift” is the answer to a puzzle. This one extremely redundant example demonstrates how the rest of the puzzles are to be solved, by guessing the answer and then finding more detail or context based on the answer, or new questions. For José de Sigüenza the next step was to identify the vices symbolized by each animal, but for this interpretation it will be to continue with the project of establishing that the triptych dates from 1528 or later and show how it relates to more news-like events and issues, even though Sigüenza may have been right in suggesting that casting blame is a major theme in the triptych.

Henry VIII, main part of the triptych

Once the Nahuatl chronology is in place and the king and island on the outside are shown to relate to Henry VIII and his situation as of 1528, interpreting the central panels is amazingly easy. The three main topics in the triptych are the conquest of Mexico, shown year by year in annals style and in hieroglyphics, problems with Martin Luther, shown in an equally obscure fashion, and Henry VIII's pending divorce, which is shown as a matter of big, simple issues that do not go away.
To start with, the left panel shows Adam and Eve, with no replacement in case Adam wants to try again with another woman. On the other hand, the right panel shows the sack of Rome (labeled in the Nahuatl chronology as happening in 1527) which would continue to affect the divorce one way or the other.
The most obvious divorce-related image in the center panel is the scene showing a woman inside a sphere, where the man outside the sphere cannot see another man who is inside the sphere with her. Was Katherine of Aragon's marriage with the king's older brother consummated? Who knows.
Artistically, the late Hieronymus Bosch (who died in 1516) is less important than the Franciscan Thomas Murner, who had a system of teaching based on sets of pictures, sometimes playing cards. The idea was that pupils could connect words to pictures of things they liked (horses, spiders, scorpions) and also remember larger, complicated pictures. Like the "new math" of the 1960s, it made no sense to anyone but the pupils, which may have made it more effective. Murner was also the one to translate Henry VIII's book into German. The humorous side that José de Sigüenza called macaronic seems to derive more from the late Peter Martyr who was Katherine of Aragon's tutor, and the late Antonio de Nebrija.
The present interpretation has been going along CSI-style, starting with the iconographic equivalent of looking at footprints under a microscope, but like a CSI mystery, it is revolving into a situation where some of the most implausible or fragmentary early interpretations turn out to be correct. These include:

• Paul Vandenbroek's 1000-page explanation of how (paraphrasing very loosely) the center panel shows marriage as boring but necessary;
• Isabel Mateo Gomez's identification of the person at the lower right as John the Baptist (since he was beheaded for objecting to a case of bigamy);
• Derek Wilson's identification of the skull in Holbein's Ambassadors as a pun where memento mori stands for memento (Thomas More)i;
• the anonymous French inventory that described a tapestry version as follows: "…Une aultre pièce en laquelle est figuré le Monde, l'Enfer et le Paradis terrestre, enchassé en ung tableau contrefaict de menuyserie comme les précédans, sauf qu'il y a deux colonnes par voye…" The two columns made it absurdly obvious that it showed Charles V's view of the world. The associated motto "plus ultra" (farther out) applies fairly well to the process of interpreting the very complicated picture.

Also, to add something new, the fish in the center has to represent John Fisher. Saint Thomas More and Saint John Fisher, both shown as important here, were canonized later.
The artist is still unidentified but it is starting to look as though the triptych went to Breda with Hendrick III of Nassau (as various scholars claim) rather than his wife Mencía de Mendoza since Hendrick was a crony of Charles V and seems to have had more of a sense of humor than his more literate wife.
For those who long for CSI type evidence, the paw of the lizard that was discovered when the right panel was x-rayed has a remarkable resemblance to the hand of a small boy in a tapestry that was made for Hendrick III, based on a design by Raphael and Giovanni da Udine but more ridiculous than the average Raphael.

Henry VIII

The picture on the outside panels is based on an illustration in the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493), with several changes.

Subtractions include:

1) the bambini at the top building a tabernacle from cut branches
2) the crystal orb representing the earth
3) the two columns at the sides, which since about 1516 had been a personal emblem of Charles V
4) the blank shields that could be filled in by the owner of a copy of the book.

Additions include:

1) a pope's crown
2) a book
3) a circular island, resembling the map in Thomas More's Utopia.

These are updates: around 1528, against the advice of Thomas More, the island king Henry VIII, who had written a book that was well received by the pope, was on the way to divorcing the queen and breaking with the Catholic Church.

The circa 1528 date comes from the allegorized Nahuatl picture writing on the inside panels, but perhaps the English connection is enough to suggest an approximate date on its own, at least to a time window when the king's decision was still up in the air.

added note: An object on the throne in the Nuremberg Chronicle illustration might be a book, but it is more prominent and recognizable on the triptych.

Vanitas (continued): lines from Ecclesiastes

This is a follow-up to an earlier post about how in a 2006 article, José Manuel Cruz Valdevinos noted that the original title of The Garden of Earthly Delights/El Jardín de las Delicias appears to have been "La Banidad del Mundo," The Vanity of the World.

More so than the better known “vanitas” still life paintings that often include skulls and/or flowers and expensive objects as a reminder of death, The Garden of Earthly Delights/El Jardín de las Delicias is about the whole book of Ecclesiastes. To start to show how the two outside panels and three inside panels relate to the book, I have picked out some verses that seem to match the different panels.

Whether its audience found them entertaining or annoying, the purpose of the innumerable seemingly nonsensical details in the painting was apparently to illustrate things that seem impossible to show in a picture, including Ecclesiastes 1:11, "There is no remembrance of the former things. Indeed, neither shall there be any record of past things in the future, for those who will exist at the very end." The exceptions include the Bible, illustrated by the picture with Adam and Eve, and the Latin Vulgate edition of the Bible, exemplified by the verse from Psalms on the outside panels. Almost everything else is obscure, leading to disagreements among art historians, but in many places things are not too obscure to decipher. Explanations tend to sound pedantic because "all is vanity" and because the artist chose some good examples of things that would be forgotten by many, including Nahuatl histories of Mexico.

I have included only the first few verses that seem relevant to the large center inside panel and the hell scene because it is easier to read the original Latin and English text separately than as a long picture caption running several pages. The text shown here is copied from an online Latin English Study Bible that shows the whole book of Ecclesiastes on one page in an easy to read format with only a little commentary. There are larger pictures of both the inside and outside panels on Wikipedia, and on newer computers the inside panels are shown in amazing detail in Google Earth (at the Museo del Prado, Madrid). The detail here, from Google Earth, shows how "the race is not to the swift" (Ecclesiastes 9:11) maybe because a swift horse is faster than a swift bear, or vice versa, or because winning has to do with motivation, or for whatever reason. If "La Banidad del Mundo" was the original title, it seems clear that the painting was not meant to be completely enigmatic.

I am working on an article that will look at one of the riddle-pictures in detail by way of texts familiar to art historians including Ovid's Metamorphoses. The picture represents Minerva turning Arachne into a spider.

Clarification

“Al hooi" (all hay; in modern English all hooey and in Spanish nonada) is a translation of Martin Luther’s stroern (straw). In the introduction to his 1522 translation of the Bible, Luther called the Epistle of James, which supports the doctrine of salvation by works, “a real epistle of straw” (eyn rechte stroern Epistel). Luther’s downgrading of this and other parts of the New Testament was regarded as heretical, although it should be noted (even though the issues are complex and I am not expert in these matters) that as of 1999 the Catholic church no longer regards the doctrine of salvation by grace as heretical. In any event the haywain pictures are connected not just to Luther’s discourses in general (“all hooey”), but also specifically to his calling part of the Christian Bible “straw.”
The following is from Luther’s introduction:

Summa, Sanct Johannis Euangeli vnd seyne erste Epistel, Sanct Paulus Epistel, sonderlich die zu den Romern, Galatern, Ephesern, vnnd Sanct Peters erste Epistel, das sind die bucher, die dyr Christum zeygen, vnd alles leren, das dyr zu wissen nott vnd selig ist, ob du schon kein ander buch noch lere nummer sehest noch horist, Darumb ist sanct Jacobs Epistel eyn rechte stroern Epistel gegen sie, denn sie doch keyn Euangelisch art an yhr hat, Doch dauon weytter ynn andern vorrheden.

The reason for making the paintings look like the work of Hieronymus Bosch, and for the fake Hieronymus Bosch signatures, was to make it appear as though they came from a more innocent age, from before Martin Luther had begun to publish what the artist of the haywain pictures evidently considered to be his heresies. The paintings were made to be obscure in their meaning so as not to introduce new audiences to Luther’s ideas. The parts of the paintings that make sense to any viewer show people engaged in good works, for instance the child leading a blind man. The hay represents a good thing (part of the Bible) that Luther said was of no value, and this is why the painting shows nuns faithfully collecting hay and bringing it to their superior. The deception implied by the fake Hieronymus Bosch signature was minor compared to the potential harm of publicizing a heresy that threatened the Catholic church.

proposed triptych, revised

 May 20, 2012 update:
This doesn't make sense anymore now that the haywain triptychs are identified as studies for the tapestries etc.

(updated August 6, 2007)
For this version of the proposed reconstruction, The Miser, NGW, Ship of Fools, Louvre, and Allegory, New Haven are regarded as copies of larger lost originals. The change is based on iconography, scale, and style.
Outside: an image of poverty with a scene from the life of St. Martin (outside panels, The Haywain, Madrid, replacing the previous version's The Pedlar, Rotterdam)
Inside, left: St. Francis, suffering an illness as a teenager, from which he recovered (panel painting, The Death of the Miser, Washington, DC)
Inside, center: St. Clara continuing the work of St. Francis (lost panel painting, perhaps approximately copied in the tapestry shown here, The Haywain, Madrid)
Inside, right: an uncertain future since the allegory could represent either the marriage of Martin Luther and Katharina Von Bora in 1525 or innocent Franciscans and Poor Clares; possibly cut in half to separate the St. Martin’s Day barrel from the lute associated with Martin Luther (panel painting, The Ship of Fools, Paris, and panel painting, Allegory of Intemperance, New Haven)


Notes on the revised “new triptych” (click on links):

• scale: (1) Benjamin Binstock's "digital connoisseurship," (2) panels and tapestry
• previous studies of Bosch triptychs
• the dendrochronological analyses of The Pedlar (Rotterdam) , The Miser, The Ship of Fools, and Allegory of Intemperance
• transparent paint
• the theory that The Pedlar (Rotterdam) was formerly in two parts
  
• interpretations of The Pedlar, The Miser, the Haywain tapestry, the Haywain triptychs, The Ship of Fools, and Allegory of Intemperance
• previous reconstructions, including a previous suggestion that the center panel was a Haywain picture
• Haywain triptychs, Haywain paintings, and lost Haywain paintings
• the complete series of tapestries
• Franciscans in pictures by Hieronymus Bosch and imitators
• Luther and lute players

proposed triptych of sts francis and clara

May 20. 2012 update:
Not at all sure if the Rotterdam Pedlar or Wayfarer might be early Pieter Bruegel, the inside right and left might be Hieronymus Bosch, and the tapestry might be Pieter Coecke van Aelst and workshop making a hash of a Raphael workshop cartoon. The mixup from five years ago still shows that Franciscan art somehow stayed pretty consistent.
This reconstruction has been modified; see above.