This article is based on this Dutch article of Martijn Benders

Daniel Hopfer and His St Jerome

Three days and nights in a scorching hot Venice: normally, I wouldn’t even consider it, but a promise is a promise. Even at ten o’clock in the evening, it was still thirty degrees, and in that steaming water basin that Venice is, you get what I would call a marshland experience. The city is truly one giant museum, and some would describe it as a tourist trap, but I think that’s a narrow perspective: you’re actually walking or sailing around in a world wonder, and don’t try to tell me the average tourist is even remotely an art lover, so something else is going on here.

Anyway, I visited the Biennale, and also the Giorgio Franchetti: two museums might seem scanty in a city overflowing with them, but I choose my destinations intuitively. I had initially planned to visit the Pinocchio Island, but it turned out to be a marionette shop rather than an island.

The Franchetti proved to be a hit. I found exactly what I was looking for, starting with this painting of St Jerome:

This painting immediately caught my attention because of that ‘red hat’ on the forest floor. We see St Jerome, one of the most important Church Fathers who retreated into ‘the wilderness’, and the painter, Daniel Hopfer—is it believable that he had never seen a lion before? Because it can’t be due to his painting skills.

This lion is very peculiar. In its eyes, I seem to see three swans. And all that next to the ‘red royal cloak’ and the ‘red hat’ on the forest floor, which, of course, is meant to be a cardinal’s hat, but those didn’t exist in St Jerome’s time in the third century, so did the painter of this scene get a little crazy?

And why would he add white dots to the tufts if this was just meant to be a cardinal’s hat?

Then there’s this strange detail: the cross St Jerome is looking at is not a Christian cross, but a T with something ‘odd’ on it that looks like a second, paper T:

Is that some kind of weather vane? What a peculiar painting! This instantly led me to a search for this much lesser-known contemporary of Hieronymus Bosch. And in that search, I came across this work:

GIB FRIT is written, bring peace. Not quite what we think of when we see all these demonic figures hammering each other. And with a bit of imagination, you can see the word ‘Holle’ in the animals in the sky.

Death and the Devil are harassing two ladies. What a fantastic artist, Daniel Hopfer, just look at all those details! Why is there a second little devil with a boat hook on the head of the larger devil?

And why those strangely distorted skulls, which you also find in several of Hopfer’s works?

According to unofficial sources, Hopfer and Bosch did not know each other and thus independently arrived at the same comical hellscapes.

Comical Hellscapes

Another email from the Letterenfonds. The two previous ‘jurists’ have both disappeared like snow melting in the sun, even from the website. Where is Welmoet Tideman, where is Martine Bibo? Suddenly there is ‘Richard Jackson’, ‘legal advisor of the Letterenfonds’. He eventually admitted that he is not listed on the website as a legal advisor. I asked him if Asscher and Ineke Sluiter appointed him because my search found indications that both are close acquaintances of Mr. Asscher.

I received a strange email in return with a fallacious reasoning. ‘Since Mr. Asscher is not involved in this objection procedure, it is none of your business in what capacity Ms. Sluiter and I personally know Mr. Asscher,’ I read.

But if Mr. Asscher, for example, provided advice during the formation of the committee, then isn’t there indeed some involvement in the objection procedure? He placed two of his friends there, perhaps to ensure a ‘reliable outcome’.

It’s quite a silly idea that you wouldn’t be involved in an objection procedure if you managed to get two of your friends working on it. Checkmate, Benders!

Well, I don’t think so. I want to know where the previous jurists have gone, were they suddenly not good enough anymore?

When the new ‘director’, without significant literary credentials, was appointed, I saw a big thumbs up from Maarten Asscher under the Instagram post.

I apparently have 3 days left to ‘submit new documents’ for my objection procedure. If I submit them later, they won’t be considered in the evaluation. And all this after they waited nine weeks (until it was clear I was on vacation?) to inform me that the process was delayed. And why was it so delayed? Because Maarten Asscher apparently needed nine weeks to report that, as my objection notice states, he indeed found a personal friend among the assessors who thought The Eternal Freshman was a terribly poor literary book. How did that friend get there? We still hear very little about that.

I’m already looking forward to those ‘maximum of three quarters of an hour’ soon in Amsterdam.

Martijn Benders, 16-08-2024