Georg Simmel e a arte grotesca de Hieronymus Bosch: a superação do dualismo corpo e espirito na obra O Jardim das Delícias Terrenas

Abstract

Art presents itself not merely as a means of seeing and reflecting the world, but of interpreting, understanding, and (re)signifying it, which highlights art's ontological potential to discuss and engage with metaphysical issues and problems of that which pertains to the human. Passing through the transformation from the understanding of art as mimesis in Classical Antiquity to art as meaning in the German Romanticism, and taking into account Georg Simmel's contributions concerning art and its relationship to dualisms, a path is opened for the study and interpretation of art as a way of overcoming the dualism between body and spirit. This work aims to investigate how the grotesque art of Hieronymus Bosch in The Garden of Earthly Delights succeeds in harmoniously articulating the dualism between body and spirit, showing itself as an example, beyond Simmel's argument about Michelangelo in the Renaissance as presented in Philosophical Culture, of the overcoming of modern dualism and the momentary recovery of meaning in modernity. Through an immanent reading of the selected corpus and the interdisciplinarity between Social Theory and Aesthetic Theory, three strategies used by Bosch in his work to achieve this are identified and discussed: the indivisibility between elements referring to the body and the spirit; the recourse to vitality expressed through movement; and the mixture of the human and the non-human. It can be concluded that Hieronymus Bosch, in his Grotesque Art and in his work The Garden of Earthly Delights, presents another moment, prior to and contemporary to Michelangelo, in which harmony and balance were achieved through art and in which the dualism of body and spirit was momentarily overcome.