ENIGMATIC MYSTIC -

THE great 15th century painter Hieronymus Bosch was much obsessed with sin and hell; his best-known paintings are populated by griffons, scarabs and demons in a fantastic landscape in which sinners ride on mice, embrace pigs, are bound, speared and tortured by horrifying monsters. Lustful monks and covetous priests are spied on by lurking demons. Only rarely, as in The Crowning with Thorns in London's National Gallery, did Bosch allow himself to show the tenderness that was the obverse of his savage indignation about the human Bettmann Arc condition.

At first glance, the painting seems a straightforward depiction of the moment, two hours before the Crucifixion, when Christ was beaten, spat upon and mocked. But as in all Bosch paintings, the viewer becomes aware of overtones that disturb and echo in the mind.

Christ appears rapt and detached. His four tormentors gather around him in seeming viciousness. But a closer look reveals that his assailants are gripped by compassion. Perhaps some of their ornaments are meant to symbolize their incipient conversion from tormentors to believers. For instance, one of the upper figures wears a sheepdog's collar and carries a peasant's staff--signs of protection for the flock. And the old man's leer may be hateful or tearful, but his gentle hand reaches for Christ's in a gesture of sympathy. The ironclad warrior, who is about to jam the huge prongs upon Christ's head, seems caught up and driven by some outward imperative of duty even as his lips tighten in remorse. The bulldog-faced assailant who tears at Christ's robe might also be gesturing in supplication. The German scholar Wilhelm Franger contends that Bosch was really a free-spirited nature worshiper; if so, the message of The Crowning might be that man acts through compulsions that are beyond his control. Or perhaps Bosch is saying: Christ is not mocked. But whatever the message, this painting lacks Bosch's usual tormented agony, and may have been his moment of peace.

Almost nothing is known of Bosch's life except that he was a member of a semi-monastic lay community, lived in The Netherlands in a house overlooking the marketplace of 's Hertogenbosch, married, and died in 1516. He was undoubtedly an ascetic, probably a mystic, possibly an astrologer.

To the numerous scholars who have vainly searched for more clues, he remains like his painting--enigmatic, but endlessly evocative.

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