Review: ‘Hieronymus Bosch: Touched by the Devil,’ a documentary by Pieter van Huystee

Directed by Pieter van Huystee

Although it’s more about the work and politics it takes to put on retrospective of a famous artist’s work at a museum, the documentary Hieronymus Bosch: Touched by the Devil offers a lot of insight and a surprising amount of great humour. It’s kind of a problem, though, that many of the film’s charms aren’t a direct result of the Medieval painter responsible for the works many of the subjects are so taken with.

Filmmaker Pieter van Huystee follows a team of two researchers, a technician, an art restorer, and a photographer as they band together on behalf of the Noordbrabants Museum to put on a retrospective of the works of controversial, but striking painter Hieronymus Bosch in the artist’s Dutch hometown of Den Bosch for his 500^th birthday. Despite being the birthplace of the famed artist, not a single Bosch work resides in the man’s own hometown, with many residing in Spain thanks to Philip II becoming greatly enamoured with Bosch’s eclectic, sometimes nightmarish use of religious iconography.

It’s a noble goal that brings the research team to institutions as venerable as The Prado in Madrid, Washington’s National Gallery of Art, and Venice’s Gallerie dell’Accademia to get a proper, close look at Bosch’s work. Creating paintings, sketches, and triptychs so intricate in their detail that they could never properly be exhibited for people standing five feet away behind a velvet rope, the opportunity to look at the techniques, craft, and symbolism Bosch put into his work is as indispensible for the team as it will be for art enthusiasts watching the film.

It’s not a biographical effort, which might rankle some, and it doesn’t go into too much detail documenting how Bosch had numerous assistants, students, disciples, family members, and admirers who might have finished, helped paint, or made pieces for Bosch that have incorrectly been attributed to the artist. There’s certainly some of that, but unless the team of researchers is putting the artist literally under the microscope, Hieronymus Bosch: Touched by the Devil is more concerned with the modern human element of the art world.

Huystee seems to be having more fun as the exasperated team from Den Bosch runs into constant opposition in their efforts to bring some of the artist’s most famous works back from the quincentenary. Management at The Prado almost cruelly look down upon the town’s request and never give the team a straight answer, preferring to think that their museum should be considered the premiere destination for an artist Spain has all but claimed as their own from the Dutch. The Venetians are willing to give up some of their works for the exhibition, but only if Noordbrabants and the Dutch government agree to foot the bill for the full restorations of the Bosch works in their collection. Don’t even get me started on the almost supervillain-like double cross a museum in Rotterdam pulls on these poor art historians, who are learned people trying to do something good amid a system that’s cloistered, catty, privileged, and unhelpful.

In many ways, Bosch’s depictions of doomed figures descending into hell become a metaphor for the task faced by these historians. The most interesting thing about Hieronymous Bosch: Touched by the Devil isn’t the art (which is a bit of a misfire for a doc aimed squarely at the growing market of people enamoured with big screen art exhibitions from around the world), but the lengths to which some people will protect and claim ownership over it. Huystee’s approach is a breath of fresh air in a relatively new, but growing documentarian genre that was in danger of becoming stale. There’s just enough close reading of Bosch’s work to enthrall those interested with the nuts and bolts of the artist’s work, but also plenty to engage those looking for a decidedly more human and modernist element.

Hieronymus Bosch: Touched by the Devil opens in Toronto on Friday, August 26, 2016, Vancouver on September 9, Montreal on September 16, and Ottawa on October 27.

Check out the trailer for Hieronymus Bosch: Touched by the Devil: