Sicut in utrem aquas maris: Jerome Bosch's Prolegomenon to the Garden of Earthly Delights

Abstract

In 1953 Kurt Wolff, the owner of Pantheon Books (publishers of the Bollingen series that had been established by Paul and Mary Mellon), suggested to Huntington Cairns at the National Gallery of Art that Erwin Panofsky might be an appropriate candidate for the Andrew W. Mellon Lectureship, inaugurated only three years before. 1 Although Wolff recommended Panofsky as a "brilliant lecturer," and even though the nomination was heartily endorsed by Bernard Berenson, Cairns rejected the proposal. He wrote in reply that, while he foresaw the time would soon come when professional art historians might be asked to lecture, he did not think the moment yet ripe for technical specialists to be entrusted with so prestigious and ambitious an assignment. Cairns' rationale is astonishing, given that Panofsky's Studies in Iconology, one of the most widely read and influential art-historical books of the last century, and which had already made a permanent impression throughout all areas of humane studies, had originated as the Mary Flexner Lectures at Bryn Mawr College. Nay, it becomes astounding in light of the fact that Panofsky's monumental Early Netherlandish Painting had been published, with the support of [End Page S247] the Bollingen Foundation, only the year before. This had originated as the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, on the direct model of which the Mellon Lectures had been conceived and established at the National Gallery of Art with the intent of doing for the visual arts what the Norton Lectures had done for the study and criticism of poetry. Early Netherlandish Painting is still, as it was from the day it first appeared, awe-inspiring for its learning (or technical mastery, as Cairns might have said), and it is beyond dispute one of the greatest, if not the greatest, art-historical books of the twentieth century. It is as famous for its breadth of vision, prose style, unflagging pace, accessibility, and its humor as it is for the depth of its scholarship. And anyone who has read Early Netherlandish Painting will always remember the book's famous ending, where, paraphrasing Ficino's German translator Adelphus Mülich, Panofsky with magisterial diffidence declined to treat of the work of Jerome Bosch. "This," he wrote, "too high for my wit, I prefer to omit."

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