Bosch e un altro Rinascimento: Museum Loans · Palazzo Reale, Milan

The Last Judgement

The legacy of Hieronymus Bosch in the Andes

Leonardo Flores · The Last Judgement
17th century · Oil on canvas · 208.5 × 153.7 cm

Loan to Bosch e un altro Rinascimento
Palazzo Reale, Milan · 9 November 2022–12 March 2023

Lent by Gonzalo Eguiguren Gallery, this Last Judgement was the only work of Spanish American viceregal art in Bosch e un altro Rinascimento. Its inclusion in the “Apocalyptic Visions” section demonstrated the reach of the Boschian tradition in the Americas and the role of Flemish prints in transmitting and transforming its imagery.

Begin at the foot of this Last Judgement. Inside a great orb, life continues with remarkable intensity: people make music, drink, court one another and display their clothes and rank. A pope, a bishop and crowned figures share the space with musicians and lovers. Death stands among them. Above, Christ presides over the judgement. The painting draws much of its power from this unsettling proximity between familiar human pursuits and an ending that the people below seem unable to acknowledge.

Leonardo Flores worked in La Paz and the Collao during the closing decades of the seventeenth century. His paintings are associated with churches across an extensive Andean region, including communities near Lake Titicaca. The gallery’s study brings together comparisons with works in La Paz and Cohoni, among other places, to situate this canvas within his production. Oval faces, animated figures and sumptuous clothing help identify a personal manner, equally attentive to the unfolding story and to the smallest descriptive detail.

The composition rewards several kinds of looking. From a distance, the separation between heavenly light and the fires of hell establishes its solemn order. Approach the canvas and that order becomes crowded with individual stories. The eye descends from Christ through the angels before entering the world of the living, where one gesture leads to another. On a canvas more than two metres high, Flores combines the monumental scale of a devotional image with a storyteller’s close attention to human behaviour.

In the upper register, the Virgin and the saints surround Christ the Judge. Below them, angels announce the end of time. The blessed advance towards the viewer’s left, while the damned are driven into flames on the right. Bodies, clouds and changes of light guide the eye through this division. Religious teaching becomes visible through movement, colour and emotion: a viewer can follow the course of the drama even before identifying each of its participants. The whole composition encourages a sustained movement between the fate of the crowd and the experience of individual figures.

The orb below holds one of the painting’s most compelling ideas. It contains an entire society, together with its hierarchies, entertainments and attachments. The insignia of power remain unmistakable, yet the skeleton’s presence reminds us that no earthly dignity provides an exemption from death. Near the lower edge, a child blows soap bubbles. This familiar activity introduces a traditional image of human frailty: a bubble briefly catches the light, then vanishes. Through an apparently modest detail, the painting gives the viewer an immediate way into its larger meditation on the passing of life.

Flores pays close attention to the appearance of his figures. Shining fabrics, embroidery, jewels and elaborate headwear distinguish their roles and give the painted surface an almost tactile richness. Gestures carry meaning too. The man who tilts his head back to drink has a counterpart in Autumn, at the Museo Nacional de Arte in La Paz, a comparison discussed in the gallery’s study. Such correspondences help establish the attribution to Flores through recurring motifs and recognisable habits of painting. They also allow us to follow the artist’s interest in a particular pose across different subjects.

The canvas also allows us to follow the movement of images between Europe and the Andes. In the Milan catalogue, Bernard Aikema proposes possible sources in prints by the Wierix brothers, including a composition after Marten de Vos, and the Last Judgement engraved by Pieter van der Heyden after Pieter Bruegel the Elder in 1558, with its pronounced Boschian character. This graphic repertoire brought ways of imagining hell, demons and human destiny to the Americas. Flores reworked them in a canvas whose crowded figures and episodes reveal his own distinctive narrative ability.

The Milan exhibition brought this dimension of the painting into particular focus. Introducing the “Apocalyptic Visions” section, Fernando Checa Cremades noted references to The Haywain in the canvas and placed it within the continuing history of Bosch’s models. Its presence contributed evidence of the vitality of these images in seventeenth-century viceregal painting. The significance of the loan lies in that encounter: a European visual tradition transformed by an Andean painter into an ambitious vision of human destiny, built from faces, fabrics, music and gestures that remain familiar to us.

Selected bibliography

Gonzalo Eguiguren, The Last Judgement. Leonardo Flores, gallery study, n.d., pp. 1, 4–6, 16–18, 22–32 and 38–54.

Fernando Checa Cremades, “Visioni apocalittiche”, and Bernard Aikema, cat. 40, in Bosch e un altro Rinascimento, ed. Bernard Aikema, Fernando Checa Cremades and Claudio Salsi (Milan: 24 ORE Cultura, 2022), pp. 73 and 81; see also cat. 38, p. 79.

The Pangolin Fan

Ivory, diplomacy and collecting in the Renaissance

The Pangolin Fan
Kotte, Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka), c. 1540–1551
Carved ivory, silver and carnelian · Height: 57 cm; diameter when open: 29 cm

Loan to Bosch e un altro Rinascimento
Palazzo Reale, Milan · 9 November 2022–12 March 2023

Gonzalo Eguiguren Gallery lent The Pangolin Fan to Bosch e un altro Rinascimento, where it featured in the section devoted to curiosity and encyclopaedic collecting. Within an imagined cabinet of wonders, the fan helped explain the courtly taste for extraordinary creations that the exhibition placed in dialogue with the world of Hieronymus Bosch.

Opened out, this fan seems to unfold a surface of light. Its exceptionally thin ivory blades form an almost circular silhouette, while the handle contains a dense world of relief carving, stems and small creatures. The contrast between the broad, quiet expanse above and the intricacy below invites a change of distance: first the eye takes in the whole, then searches for a route through the details. This delicacy brings us close to the expertise of the ivory carvers working at Kotte, in present-day Sri Lanka, in the middle of the sixteenth century.

The name The Pangolin Fan refers to an animal rarely encountered in this decorative repertoire. A pangolin appears in a heraldic-shaped device on the upper handle. Its identification gave the object a distinctive name and supplied the title of the monograph by Hugo Miguel Crespo and Annemarie Jordan Gschwend. The precise meaning of its presence remains an open question. That uncertainty is part of the fascination: a tiny animal makes this fan recognisable, while reminding us how much remains to be understood about the images selected by its makers.

The carving asks for patient observation. Openings in the handle separate and connect forms that seem to grow from one another; light passes through the ivory, revealing its different planes. The blades pose another technical challenge through their remarkable thinness. Studying such work brings a highly specialised workshop into view, although questions remain about how tasks were divided among its craftsmen. Each part preserves the outcome of decisions about the thickness, strength and visual effect of the material, and about how these qualities could work together in a single object.

The fan belongs to the artistic context of the court workshops of Bhuvanekabahu VII, king of Kotte from 1521 to 1551. During his reign, finely worked ivories formed part of the gifts sent to the Portuguese royal family. These exchanges served political ambitions: the king sought to secure his position and the succession of his grandson Dharmapala. An object of this kind made the accomplishments of the sending court visible. Its refinement, demanding workmanship and richness of imagery could communicate prestige across a considerable distance.

In Lisbon, Catherine of Austria, Queen of Portugal, played a central role in receiving and collecting these works. Her collections brought together objects from regions linked by Portuguese trading routes. The fans from Ceylon entered a setting in which possessions were displayed, described in inventories and sometimes circulated as gifts among relatives and courts. Following the history of this group reveals how a work made in Sri Lanka could acquire further meanings and new roles in the representation of power when it reached Europe.

Comparison with related examples is essential to understanding this fan. Crespo places it within a sculptural group distinguished by deep openwork and an abundance of living forms. Annemarie Jordan Gschwend discusses its relationship to a fan in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The foliage, figures and animals connect with Sri Lankan artistic traditions, including architectural decoration. Such continuities allow the object to be approached through the knowledge and visual repertoire of its makers, and help situate its intricate ornament within a larger history of local artistic practice.

One detail examined by Crespo brings different traditions into close focus: a small figure seated on a lotus flower plays a European lute. He relates aspects of this decoration to Renaissance ornamental prints, without identifying an exact prototype. The combination shows how a travelling motif could find a place within Sri Lankan carving.

The authors propose a connection between this example and the Portuguese royal treasures, although gaps remain in its complete provenance. The documented history of the group of fans and comparisons with museum objects provide the context for examining its trajectory and placing it among the courtly creations of Kotte.

In Milan, this context took a concrete form. The exhibition brought together objects of different origins to evoke a cabinet of wonders and set them alongside an early copy of The Garden of Earthly Delights. The fan thus contributed to a reflection on curiosity, knowledge and the expression of power through collections. Its importance within the exhibition lay in making this international court culture visible through a work created in Sri Lanka: an object whose details allow us to trace the distance between the workshops of Kotte and the horizons of Renaissance collectors.

Selected bibliography

Annemarie Jordan Gschwend, ‘The Pangolin Fan: A Rediscovered Imperial Ivory Fan from Ceylon’, in Beyond Borders, pp. 47–56, gallery digital edition.

Hugo Miguel Crespo and Annemarie Jordan Gschwend, The “Pangolin Fan”: An Imperial Ivory Fan from Ceylon, Jaime Eguiguren Art & Antiques, 2022, pp. 21, 194–197.

Bernard Aikema, section 10 and cat. 74, in Bosch e un altro Rinascimento, 24 ORE Cultura, 2022, pp. 121 and 128.