Modern viewers of his work will never quite feel the same level of revulsion as people in the renaissance did. My case in point for the general weirdness of his work: There was nobody who painted quite like him before he started and there was nobody in his own era that followed his style.

Not a man to be missed.īosch clearly had an extremely creative mind. I then told them to google his name and find out for themselves. Someone asked me this recently and when I said Hieronymus Bosch they asked me who he was. If you could invite anyone in the world, living or dead, to a dinner of, say, a dozen people, who would you include? Art historian and acknowledged Bosch expert Stefan Fischer examines just what it was about Bosch and his painting that proved so immensely influential.

Discover Bosch’s pictorial inventions in splendid reproductions with copious details and a huge fold-out spread, over 110 cm (43 in.) long, of The Garden of Earthly Delights. Featuring brand new photography of recently restored paintings, this exhaustive book, published in view of the upcoming 500th anniversary of Bosch’s death, covers the artist’s complete works. He continues to be seen as a visionary, a portrayer of dreams and nightmares, and the painter par excellence of hell and its demons. Today only 20 paintings and eight drawings are confidently assigned to Bosch’s oeuvre. Bosch―whose real name was Jheronimus van Aken―was widely copied and the number of surviving works by Bosch’s followers exceeds the master’s own production by more than tenfold. In his pictorial translation of proverbs, in particular, Bosch was very much an innovator. In his Temptation of St Anthony triptych, for example, the artist shows a messenger devil wearing ice skates, evoking the popular expression that the world was “skating on ice”―meaning it had gone astray. Many subsidiary scenes illustrate proverbs and figures of speech in common use in Bosch’s day. Alongside traditional hybrids of man and beast, such as centaurs, and mythological creatures such as unicorns, devils, dragons, and griffins, we also encounter countless mixed creatures freely invented by the artist.

One of his greatest inventions was to take the figural and scenic representations known as drolleries, which use the monstrous and the grotesque to illustrate sin and evil, and to transfer them from the marginalia of illuminated manuscripts into large-format panel paintings. Bosch’s paintings are populated with grotesque scenes of fantastical creatures succumbing to all manner of human desire, fantasy, and angst. In the midst of the realist-leaning artistic climate of the Late Gothic and Early Renaissance, Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch (c.

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