Still sick, hopefully rounding the bend on the infection though. My friend has convinced me to go to a book launch. I’m also invited to a seperate book launch but even the people who are putting it on seem annoyed by the whole thing. I hope I won’t regret losing the chance to rest and recover.
Yesterday1 I worked this little film festival at the hotel, and it went fine all things considered. It honestly may have been the easiest shift I’ve ever had there. The festival’s tagline was “Art is Better When it Movies.”
Pretty clunky piece of copy, that. It makes slightly more sense in the context of the trailers which preceded the three features: each was a little introductary short film which featured someone in an art gallery examining a painting. A voiceover would narrate their inner thoughts as they described a movie that the painting could plausibly be a stilll from, or otherwise a movie plot which the painting might inspire. Then, a title appeared which said “Art is better when it moves.” Shortly thereafter the last word stretched in a little animation to become “Movies.”
Whatever. I think its a strange idea to compare the two art forms, and it felt a little insulting to the true function of good painting, but it was a cute enough little introduction video.
However- the painting featured in the third and final of these trailers was a work by Hieronymus Bosch entitled Jakob the Scribe. I love Bosch. We all love Bosch, he’s great. Excellent painter. I figured I knew about every significant Bosch work, and I have a particular liking to many of his paintings. For this reason I was surprised to see Jacob the Scribe, a painting I had never seen before. I was quite taken by it too- it featured a large man (the scribe) in the center left, speaking to a woman whose head was made out of a barn. A woman in the background was screaming furiously at the pair. Very weird, surreal image with a striking composition. I really liked it. I tried to look it up to see more and take a closer look, but I couldn’t find it. I googled “Jakob the Scribe Hieronymus Bosch” and nothing came up. I tried some variations on the name and then tried “Hieronymus Bosch Woman Head Barn Painting” or something and found nothing as well.
I eventually looked through every single surviving Hieronymus Bosch painting, but found that none looked even remotely like what I saw. I searched for other paintings named “Jacob the Scribe,” but none seem to exist.
The only thing I did find was this Austrian/Slovenian visionary and mystic named Jakob Lorber. I am going to look into him in case I am being called to find him, but in the meantime I cannot find this painting. I don’t think it exists. I looked for other paintings involving a woman whose head is a barn, but I have yet to find any.
Very curious. I don’t know why they didn’t use a real Hieronymus Bosch painting, as they are all generally well liked and recognizable. Alternatively why didnt the film festival choose another painting by a different painter? Were they unable to use any extant paintings for rights issues? Did they make the painting with AI?
I won’t be able to find the answers to these questions, unless I email the coordinators. I suppose that wouldn’t be an unreasonable thing to do, but the main contact seemed to be in a bad mood when I spoke to her.
The weird thing about the search for the missing Bosch is that something incredibly similar happened to me over my trip to Europe. When I visited Wawel Castle in Krakow I saw in their collection a nice Bosch triptych I had never seen before, but that looked similar to other triptychs. Later at some point I was trying to show someone the triptych and I realized I couldn’t find it. There were some with similar elements, but none that looked the same. I knew because I had a picture of it on my phone. Similarly to yesterday I searched through every single Bosch painting that is still around and couldn’t find it. I found some that had similar elements- which made me feel like I was going insane. It seemed like a combination of The Last Judgement and The Garden of Earthly Delights.
I had to resort to looking through the collection of Wawel Castle until I could find it. It turns out that the painting I saw was this one:
As it turns out, what I had seen was a painting titled The Last Judgement credited to Naśladowca Hieronymus Bosch, which in Polish means “Imitator of Hieronymus Bosch.” Bosch was very popular and apparently had many people trying to remake his distinctive style as well as to profit of his popularity. I’m always curious how the spread of aesthetic and visual culture worked back before mass networking technologies, so I can’t totally understand what it even means to be an imitator of such a rarefied type of production. Nonetheless I still have a weird Bosch mystery to solve, and I’m not precisely sure how. It’s fitting that its Bosch, given his surreal and eschatological subject matter- it makes my confusion feel much more monumental than it is.
I think the best way to push the medium of substack (and not Medium) would be to start hyperlinking to myself. I’ve been trying to start thinking about the diary as a more coherant project now that its been going for over a year, and I think trying to keep track of throughlines and the long term plot elements of my life would go a long way towards this. I’m already finding footnotes useful as a way to multithread narratives together, like this footnote for example, but I think it ought to be done at a higher organizational level as well. I worry about the difficulty of navigating hyperlinks to the website. I can imagine a way to do it- just replace urls with javascript anchors, but I’m really lagging on finishing the diary auto updater, and havent manually updated in several days for fear of dealing with blank pictures and so on.
Very interesting! I'm not big on art but I was 100% along for this ride. Had to google Bosch only to find out he's from my home country lol