A vision of Bosch and the death of Philip II
'What do you see, Jerónimo, your astonished eye?
What the pallor of your face ?.
Do you see before you the monsters and ghosts of hell ?.
It would seem that you passed the boundaries and entered the dwellings
of Tartarus, it painted so well
hand how much there is
in the depths of hell '
[Dominicus Lampsonius]
They say that he suffered gout since he was thirty-six years old; that he was the carrier of hereditary syphilis and that he had a long, horrible and very painful agony, in which his body, terribly wounded, gave off unbearable and rotten stenches, more typical of the holes in Avernus, than of austere rooms, although However, regal. It is also said - although perhaps, his biographers at that time were somewhat flattering - that he not only ordered the construction of the monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, following the patterns of the famous Temple of Solomon - in whose construction, stonecutters from the mysterious Cantabrian area of the Trasmiera, whose descendants still speak today that encrypted language that has the curious name of 'pantoja'- and that also chose the exact place -which had a reputation for being the most Catholic of the kings, although no library of the world had better and greater collection of treaties of Occultism - that to say of the bad tongues and later corroborated by the contemporary writer Javier Sierra, was located above, possibly as an exorcism, one of the many Gates of Hell existing in the world.
Even at the end of August and the beginning of September, it is not difficult to imagine a stormy night in El Escorial, given the proximity of that imposing Sierra del Dragón - that the names are not so casual, as it seems - a reference that in the Middle Ages to the current Sierra de Guadarrama. Imagine then - although History, perhaps one day corrects us severely, telling us that that particular night was unbearably hot, because perhaps Pedro Botero had lit the boilers of Hell - that in the last morning of the monarch, the storm, far from ceasing , it grows; that the rain falls with an unprecedented persistence and force and that the drops of water slide sinuous through the glass of the window, as if they were serpent dioceses - such honor, for example and tradition, the writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft, would have granted to the terrible nightjars of the impenetrable forests of Massachussetts- that sought to cross the threshold of the room, dimly illuminated by the flickering flames of the chandeliers, to seize the soul of the dying monarch, whose singular - if not incomprehensible - desire during his frightful transit, it was no other than to continue contemplating - with the longing with which in old age we contemplate ourselves in the mirror, waiting in vain to see the vital young man and the world we once were? - a particular work, of an incomprehensible teacher.
They are wrong, my esteemed readers, if you think of El Greco -although it were true that on this stormy night in which I pretend they are situated, the sky will undoubtedly paint their colors of mourning and chaos- a painter whom in the end he despised and that perhaps -I say only, perhaps- he took refuge in Toledo, fleeing from his barbarous and famous real dissatisfactions. Forget momentarily, then, this Byzantine shadow coming from the Homeric orchards of the marginalized Hellas and think of a painter, whose 'madness' would possibly have freed him from the suspicions and terrible punishments of the Holy Mother Inquisition, unable to see in their paintings more than an eternal confrontation of allegories, where vices and virtues settle their differences in the quartering of the impossible: Hieronimus Bosch, Bosch. After all - the king is silent and therefore grants - even the inquisitors admitted in the madness the hand of God. And perhaps, it was not also a Madman that singular Major Arcana of the Tarot, generally represented with a zero, a circle, the symbol that determined, without beginning or end, the perfect, the eternal and therefore God, in the Age Media, whose symbolism he studied secretly in the forbidden section of his ineffable library, even against the advice of Father Benito Arias Montano, one of the few people he really trusted?.
The painting is probably not named in these imperious moments in which Philip - who still on his deathbed, remembers bitterly - or perhaps curses? - that the art of John Dee, the magician and official astrologer of the Queen Elizabeth I of England - God always punish the perfidious Albion! - had burst their Invincible Armada in front of the cliffs of Dover - observes it with unheard-of fixation from her bed, torturing her soul with the penitent lashes of remorse, that the they make tremble and exude ectoplasms of commiseration -either metaphorically- of the same, brutal and heartrending way in which the sackcloth applied to the 'picaos' of Saint Vincent de la Sonsierra in Holy Week, open furrows in their bodies, from which the blood gushes forth, as the central source of the work: the Garden of Earthly Delights.
There, in the center, seated on a throne similar to his own -except for his beloved stone chair, which might have been an ancient pre-Christian altar where his thirst had been quenched by chthonic deities like Ataecina, the Cybele Celtiberian and from where he gazed with a keen eye. the progress of his Solomonic imitation - the Devil himself, with the head of a bird and eyes without emotion, possibly tired of looking without seeing - as centuries later a poet, who had no better luck - would devour the penitents as if they were mere crumbs of bread. Or beyond, but not so far as to be free of his magnetic influence, perhaps the beautiful Francesca of Rimini, devouring the heart of his lover with passionate fire uncontrollable, the same that had led them both to wander through a hell that came out even dazed Dante himself, in his visit accompanied by the soul of the poet Virgil.
Do you think, in those moments, seeing the impassive eyes of the owl, perched on theirs with willful determination, in the cyclopean eye of Lady Pimentel, that Princess of Eboli, whom she fervently desired and to whom, consummated the betrayal of the perfidious scribe, he ordered to be walled for life inside his splendid palace of Pastrana ?. Do you think, perhaps, when you see that unbridled cohort that rides on the backs of angry spawns, in the cream of some Thirds, finally bled in the dunghills of Flanders? Do you understand what you see or simply believe you understand, because an inner voice - are you, damn fever? - tells you that in reality, you are contemplating yourself ?.
'What do you see, Felipe, your astonished eye? What the pallor of your face ?. Do you see before you the monsters and ghosts of hell ?. It would seem that you passed the boundaries and entered the dwellings of Tartarus ...
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