Bosch and Bruegel Card Art

Art history is a major inspiration. I like researching the technical and aesthetic reasons artists of the past made work the way they did. However I also am influenced by more naturalistic, cinematic illustrations and how those formal choices came to be and are now somewhat entrenched in the medium. Also ever since I started drawing, I have been influenced by MTG cards. For this project I took the imagery and subject matter from Hieronymus, And used it as the designs for a card art illustration set in a surreal late 15th century landscape. For the decisions I made in the process I tried to think about what an MTG art director would want, largely by reverse engineering the card art themselves, as well as my familiarity with the final images.

I will also be writing about each of the pieces of Bosch and Bruegel's original art, and the continuum of imagery between Bosch to Bruegel, and then to me.

Tree Man

The Garden of Earthly Delights is the most famous work of art from Hieronymus Bosch’s body of work. The single most recognizable character is the Tree Man, in the right hand side’s hell panel. He consists of an egg shaped body, a disk shaped hat, literal tree trunk arms with branches from them piercing his egg body to create ribs. He seems to be a figure amalgamated from different medieval symbols. His egg body could represent lost innocence as the pieces can't be put back together. The bag pipes on his head are a phallic symbol associated with foolish and rowdy behavior; his arms, which are trees, also have sores and bandages which could relate to skin diseases and their association with sin. When i reinterpreted him i wanted to show him suffering, and tried to do this the gesture of the peeling skin/bark emphasizing the sort of body horror inherent in the concept.

When I adapted him into this format I also wanted to both emphasize his scale. I wanted him to be big but not so big that you can't comprehend the scale from the image. How I did this is mostly by placing the humans trying to run away from him very close to him, because we can all relate to the scale of a person, and with them physically close to or on the same plane as parts of him the viewer can more easily relate to the size. I also wanted to emphasise tactility in the image. I like it in films when tactility is emphasized; it makes the film more immersive in a psychologically haptic way. I've noticed this done by emphasizing shots that show humans interacting with the objects specifically in closeups. But more generally having characters interact with and be affected by the environment in specific relatable ways that relate to the sense of touch. With this in mind I wanted the composition to emphasize the way the characters are slogging through the mud in the scene. As when walking through thick mud one moves differently than one walking on other substrates.

Sketches

Tree Man

Based on: Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, c. 1490–1510, oil on oak panel, 220 × 389 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid.

Putrefaction Demon

When designing this MTG style Bosch inspired card art illustration, I wanted to think more about what this character does. This is because I was looking at examples of card art which works well to explain why the cards function the way they do. A quick example is any creature card with reach. Reach gives the creature the ability to block creatures with flying while a creature without reach or flying could not. However creatures with reach can be blocked by creatures without these abilities. Oftentimes the card art portrays someone with a projectile weapon to explain the ability. They can also sometimes show giant fantasy spiders spinning webs to catch flying creatures. I wanted to come up with how to create this relationship between form and function in art, while also keeping the important elements from the Bosch creature design.

Ultimately what I came up with is a creature that is chained down and that the viewer simply stumbled across. He is also really gross with a decaying foot on his helmet and an ominous emission of purple smoke through the vent holes in his helmet. He is so gross the ground turns to worms at his touch (in medieval belief worms in decaying matter were believed to the matter itself corrupting into a lower state). So he i think of the hypothetical card as having deathtouch (any amount of damage a creature deals to another creature is lethal), but since it is weighted down it when another creature blocks or is blocked by this creature the other creature gains first strike (creatures with first strike deal their combat damage before creatures without it).

Putrefaction Demon

Based on: Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, c. 1490–1510, oil on oak panel, 220 × 389 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid.

The Haywain

Bosch's The Haywain Triptych is most often understood through comparison with his more popular and enigmatic triptych, which is now known as The Garden of Earthly Delights. If the Garden is a condemnation of the sin of lust depicting the sinners in the center panel with the left panel depicting the first original sinners Adam and Eve being expelled from the garden and the end for all sinners on the right hand panel hell. The Haywain is in the same format eden on the left, hell on the right, and in the middle an original scene not depicted in the bible or other mythic stories. It depicts a giant wagon being pulled by demons into hell while people of all ranks fight for scraps of the hay all being seen by Jesus in the man of sorrows format looking down from the clouds.

The original piece is ambitious in scope showing dozens of stories at once all in procession across three panels that are 2 yards tall! I love scenes like this but for my project I needed something simpler that focused on one facet of the story and could be told on 2 inches of canvas. Paintings painted as processions like this are almost always painted to some extent from the side because of all that surface area to tell many stories. They therefore also go right to left or left to right. I would explain left to right pointing paintings as having more kinetic energy while right to left thrusts in an image seem more like the potential for movement or like a snapshot depending on the subject matter. This naturally only works for people reading and writing in languages which go left to right. With my image realized I wanted the cart to go screen left to screen right while also going back in space because the people fighting over the hay against a flat backdrop of the cart wasn't going to have the dynamism I was looking for. So I built the composition around these facts to focus on one part of the original image. I would focus on the people getting stuck in and going under the wheels.

Based on: Hieronymus Bosch, The Haywain Triptych, 1512–1516, oil on panel,135 cm × 200 cm Museo del Prado, Madrid.

Mad Meg

Heironymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the elder lived in culturally distinct worlds. Bruegel lived through the height of protestant reformation and catholic counter reformation and worked in the tense cultural conditions of Spanish martial law in the Netherlands many see his work as a quiet critique of both the rich and powerful, and poking fun at the foolish masses, though any really dangerous work was destroyed by Bruegel's wife Maycen Coceke per his request when he died; so as not to have the danger of the authorities coming after her. Bosch on the other hand recently has been seen to reflecte catholic orthodoxy of the time; more than previously thought. In general I would say whereas in Bosch’s paintings the world was organized on theological truths that revolved around the nature of sin. Bruegel’s paintings show the world as gone topsy turvy but not that people were inherently sinners by nature, just flawed. He has a very humanist philosophy of humility and self knowledge, being core values. With this world view he really paints an individual humanity into every one of his characters, which Bosch definitively does not do. No one comes to Bosch's work for pathos.

However Bruegel does have a very similar technique and deliberately channels Bosch's aesthetic and imagery into his paintings, but to reiterate, Bruegel uses the imagery of Bosch not to create monsters that warn us and scare us. In Bruegel's demons I see a humor, I see pessimism, and I see a world gone out of whack.

Based on: Bruegel the Elder, Pieter. Mad Meg (or Dulle Griet). c. 1563. Oil on panel,117.4 x 162 cm.. Museum Mayer van den Bergh, Antwerp.

Sketches

Mad Meg

Mad Meg was a Flemish cultural character, Best known in Bruegel's 1563 painting. She represented the old shrewish woman. In the painting Meg dressed in male armor and a normal sort of woman's skirt, leads an attack on a hell mouth. While her female followers raid and loot a town in the background. Meg has an apron wrapped around all the treasure she can carry and more spilling out besides. She has more treasure that she could carry but continues onto hell for more loot.

In my reinterpretation I wanted to focus on the more treasure than she could carry, demons falling at her feet, while showing her backed up by her followers. All those seemed essential, However she needed to still be the focus and that became the main idea behind the composition having the leading lines of everything in the composition circle around the composition, and or pointing towards meg.

The Haywain Drivers

As I wrote in a previous paragraph, when I was adapting Bosch’s Haywain Triptych the scope of the original is too grand, and it tells too many stories at one time to cram into my small card art images. In this portion I focus on the demons pulling the cart. When researching for this image I came across an article which looked to define demons' place in late medieval theology. Ultimately a unifying feature of demons wasn't horns or wings or talons. Demons act as laborers using tools to torture souls. This idea of hell as work reveals that in popular thought on demons they are beings based in an order similar to that of earthly economic and political systems. This also fits nicely with the shift of devotional practices being more and more common with lay people and focusing on specific things in a personal way. The common example is the images of Jesus becoming more natural while the wounds inflicted on him become even more specific and gory.

Based on: Hieronymus Bosch, The Haywain Triptych, 1512–1516, oil on panel,135 cm × 200 cm Museo del Prado, Madrid.

The Haywain Drivers

In one of maybe half a dozen examples of art featuring laboring demons, one is the Haywain Triptych in the hell panel; the demons are now construction workers; building a tower. But the demons pulling the cart are also an example of this. This whole concept gave me another reason to make the demons personalized and empathetic. (I probably would have done it anyway.) They are each very different and hopefully you the viewer can imagine what it would be like to be them based on the specificity of their expressions and body mechanics. I did want them unified in one aspect though and that is color. Bosch does some interesting work with black silhouettes of creatures merging together with individual eyes and teeth and clawed limbs emerging from the darkness with dark neutral colors. But I went the halloween devil direction mostly for clarity.

Layla Seale, “Work is Hell: Demon Laborers in Late Medieval Art,” Different Visions: New Perspectives on Medieval Art 10 (2023).

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