Hieronymus Bosch is perceptive and critical. He takes his own environment on the grain and leaves little on the good fellow Christians. Take the triptych of The Hay Wagon, one of the last panels, painted between 1515 and 1516.
Bosch condemns scrabbling. A wagon full of hay stands for the pursuit of materialism. Devils pull the wagon. He spares no one. Rich and poor, all positions run after them and withdrawn hell. A procession of the pope, the emperor and the king, drunken monks, tooth pullers and Gypsies is tempted. The suffering Christ looks on in the cloud, but nobody except the angel has an eye for him.
Greed, folly and transience seem to overcome, is the message of Hieronymus Bosch. The Spanish King Philip II bought the panel in 1570 for his private collection. Philip was a great lover of Bosch. Who does not want to see up close this panel? The grabbers?
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