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HALL CURRENTLY CLOSED

The original nucleus of the famous Grimani collection, which belonged to one of the most powerful patrician families in Venice, was put together by the cardinal Domenico Grimani in the sixteenth century and gradually augmented over the centuries by his descendents, who transformed the family palazzo at Santa Maria Formosa into an authentic art gallery. Dedicated to humanist studies and fascinated by Roman antiquities, Domenico Grimani collected cameos, intaglios, and sculpture, a passion to which he added his interest for Flemish painting. There were many Netherlands painters and their works in Venice, and these works were appreciated above all for their meticulous renderings of landscapes and scenes from daily life. Domenico Grimani’s collection contained examples of these, and probably also the works of Hieronymus Bosch displayed here.

Complex and dense with meaning, the Flemish master’s painting goes well beyond a mere taste for landscape or grotesque detail. It is permeated by the ideals of spiritual renewal of the so-called devotio moderna, a rather popular religious reform movement in fifteenth-century Netherlands that promoted the idea of faith based on humility, simplicity, and obedience to the word of God. Bosch’s famous visions are very likely fed by his reading of mystical texts filled with figurative expression that he imaginatively translated into the medium of painting. For example, the contrast of light and shade, a metaphor for spiritual salvation often found in devotional texts, is the generative principle behind the Visions of the Hereafter, conceived as a powerful conceptual and visual set of antitheses. The image of hell does not derive from a sense of delight in the macabre, but is a necessary counterpart in the purification of the soul: ascent contrasts with falling, and for each blessed soul there is another writhing in remorse. By the same token, in the Saint Liberata Triptych the martyrdom of Saint Wilgefortis is being observed by an imperturbable group of spectators on the right, in sharp contrast with those on the left who are so appalled they require the physical and spiritual assistance of a friar. Bosch’s details, even the most minute, are functional to reinforcing the meaning of the images. In The Hermit Saints Triptych, the centrally placed Jerome is not holding his usual book, a symbol of his erudition, but simply the stone he uses to beat his breast as he contemplates the crucifix. His is a psycho-physical struggle for chastity, symbolised by two emblems of purity in the reliefs on the throne before him: the unicorn a man is unsuccessfully trying to mount and the biblical heroine Judith holding the head of Holofernes.