Bosch's Flood Panels
by Hannah Behrens
The Flood Panels are two double-sided panels attributed to Dutch Painter Hieronymus Bosh circa 1514. The painting can be found in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam.
I. Four allegories show their age
With lace up to her neck and a crown atop her head, a princess flees a besieged fortress. The darkness of the smoldering night sky conspires with a long strip of exposed wood, erasing the hand of the waiting valiant; all eyes are on the preservation of tactile innocence.
A line of exposed wood has cut away a demon’s face, but the gloomy talons and absinth green skin tease in the light from behind the absent paint. Weary as ever, the team drags on with their beholden work. The farmer’s plight is muted with silence.
As if in a nightmare, the inhumane assailants tighten their black eyes into an angry haze; an armored Spoonbill holds a man by the hair while Pig Face and Growling Monkey raise their clubs above their heads for the ensuing beat down. The damaged wood appears as claw scratches through the scene.
The savior’s gaze looks out at the world while the assaulted man keeps his eyes fixed on Christ’s navel. His blessing is a deliverance from the bullies, who are out of sight, perhaps already cast into the distant sea. An angel delivers a fresh garment, for which the humble is thankful to reclaim his dignity.
II. Hell
A party of hallucinatory demons
dance in view of a burning city.
Red fire roars into black smoke.
The charcoal grey, frog-like bodies
twirl into mayhem.
Heads of men,
planted on disembodied limbs,
appear to argue
and plot their petty perversions.
Comically fat silhouettes
of bat-winged frogs and fish,
moon their little silvery bums
gracelessly at the sky.
Uncaged birds revel in their night of freedom.
The little creatures swoop aimlessly
over the charred ruins of a wasted landscape.
Among the wreckage below,
a white ghostly face
screams a song into the night,
his claws clutch the strings of a white mandolin,
toned with the same hollow ghostliness
of his body.
A barely visible figure of an old woman
waits out the demon party
in an underground grotto.
Time has damaged the lower remains of her den.
Wood grains shine through the darkness
like oncoming flames.
III. And the Flood
Advertising its human ingenuity, the Ark rests in a hailing light over the grassy dunes, The Lowlands’ Mount Ararat. A little ghost of Noah is opening the window of the Ark to let out the cooped-up animals onto the drying earth. Full-horned stags, sleek-coated lions, hulk-backed camels, and a curious long-necked giraffe peer around at the changed world as they emerge from their fortified existence.
As the animals stride into the foreground, they greet the catastrophe of what the receding waters have left. Man, woman, and child alike, strewn amongst fellow perished creatures; living and dead are all mangled among the fallen branches and receding pools of water. The surviving living walk among dead. The sky bears the last trace of breaking clouds, falling away to the quickly clearing day. The silhouettes of birds on the wing rise like little souls toward the light.