In a painting in Rotterdam, St Christopher appears in a
landscape similarly charged with evil. His
red cloak bunched up behind him, the giant Christopher
staggers across the river, with the Christ Child on his
back. According to legend, Christopher had served a king and
the Devil himself in a search for a powerful and worthy
master, a search which ended only when a hermit converted
him to Christianity. The hermit stands at the edge of the
water at lower right, but his treehouse has been transformed
into a broken jug which houses a devilish tavern; above, a
naked figure scrambles up a branch towards a beehive, a
symbol of drunkenness. Across the river, a dragon emerges
from a ruin, frightening a swimmer, while a town blazes in
the shadowy distance. These and other sinister details
recall the landscape on the exterior of the »Haywain«
triptych, but unlike the »Haywain« pilgrim, Christopher is
well protected by the passenger he bears.
No less secure against the wiles of the Devil is St John the
Evangelist
in a picture in Berlin. The youthful apostle
is depicted on the island of Patmos, where he had been
banished by the Emperor Domitian and where he composed the
Book of Revelation, presumably the volume on his lap. His
mild gaze is lifted towards an apparition of the Virgin
enthroned on a crescent moon, the Apocalyptic woman
described in Revelation 12:1-16. She is pointed out to him
by an angel whose slender figure and delicately plumed wings
appear scarcely more substantial than the misty Dutch
panorama behind. Perhaps influenced by earlier
representations of this subject, Bosch for once restrained
his predilection for demonic spectacles. There are, to be
sure, several ships burning in the water at lower left, and
a little monster can be seen at lower right, both details
probably suggested by St John's Apocalypse, but neither
seriously disturbs the idyllic landscape in which the saint
enjoys his vision.
But the evil thus suppressed in the Berlin »St John« bursts
out on the reverse of the panel, painted in grisaille, where
monsters swarm like luminous deep-sea fish around a great
double circle. As in the Prado »Tabletop«,
Bosch employs the mirror motif, this time, however, showing
a mirror of salvation: the Passion of Christ unfolds within
the outer circle, culminating visually in the Crucifixion at
the top. The Mount of Golgotha is repeated symbolically in
the inner circle, in the form of a high rock surmounted by a
pelican in her nest. The pelican, who supposedly fed her
young with blood pricked from her own breast, was a
traditional symbol of Christ's sacrifice. She appears very
appropriately on the back of this picture devoted to St
John, the beloved disciple who had rested his head, as Dante
tells us (»Paradiso«, XXV), on the breast of the Divine
Pelican himself.
