![]() ![]() Architecture that seems to be modelled on human organs suggests interests in anatomy, exotic worlds, even science fiction the giant fruits suggest legends of opulent places far away. This curiosity fills his precise, detailed painting. Just like Da Vinci, Bosch has watched birds carefully. Another Leonardo-like touch is the spiralling host of birds rising from a rocky mountain in Paradise. It is painted as three superbly convincing perspective landscapes, not unlike Leonardo da Vinci’s contemporary works. Knowing this, look again at The Garden of Earthly Delights. Was Bosch totally immune to those ideas? Was he completely unaware of the printing press, the discovery of the Americas and the swirl of new knowledge and curiosity sweeping Europe? That puts it at the heart of the Renaissance, when new ideas were changing Europe. The latest evidence, from scientific dating of the wooden panels to visual connections with other works of art, establishes that it was created between about 14. It is a very simple fact: the painting’s date. One fact made very clear by this book offers another way to consider The Garden of Earthly Delights. In the 16th century, it was seized by the Spanish monarchy and taken to Madrid, where it was revered as a gloomy picture of the consequences of sin. This is not a secret attack on orthodox religion but a work that pleased the establishment. The chances of The Garden of Earthly Delights being a heretical vision of freedom have got a lot smaller in the light of the discovery in the 1960s that it was painted for the princely House of Nassau. This is a long way from 20th-century interpretations that tried to connect him with heretical movements and subversive ideas. The seductions of gargantuan fruit and nudity are false, argues this volume of state-of-the-art scholarship, for Bosch is an artist warning of the punishments awaiting all who indulge themselves. They see this mysterious painter as a grimly conservative medieval Christian for whom earthly life is a spectacle of folly and sin with only one destination for those who succumb to its temptations: the horror show that is hell. No such luck, say the authors of the Thames & Hudson book Bosch. Was he some kind of heretic, speculating on an alternative lifestyle of free love and fruity fun with no thought of tomorrow? ![]() What strikes us when we look at it is the sheer joyous excess and mad profusion of this painter’s mind. Those giant strawberries are like free narcotics at a music festival. Since the 1960s, it has been hailed as a psychedelic romp. The Garden of Earthly Delights is popular because we can see surreal images of our own, modern existence in it. What on earth is going on?Ī detail from the ‘hell’ panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights. The most hypnotic and perplexing scene, however, is the huge central panel, which depicts a dreamlike landscape of carnal bliss where people cavort naked, consume giant strawberries, explore pink flesh palaces and ride barebacked on fantastic creatures. In the one on the right, Bosch imagines all the sufferings and monstrosities of hell, including a bird-headed creature eating a naked man, a pig dressed as a nun and a hollowed out giant with trees for limbs and an inn inside his pale egg-like torso. In the left panel, God introduces Eve to Adam in the Garden of Eden. Open the tall side panels on their hinges and you are confronted by a world – or rather three worlds – of lurid colour and hallucinatory invention. When closed, it shows a monochrome painting of the creation of the world, with God looking down on a flat landscape sealed inside a giant bubble. The Garden of Earthly Delights is a triptych that can be folded open. The full triptych of The Garden of Earthly Delights. It explores the latest discoveries and theories about Bosch’s most stupendous work with accurate colour images of many of its hypnotic details and infrared images of the three wooden panels that make up this religious – or pseudo-religious – painting. A book of the Prado’s own Bosch quincentenary published this month by Thames and Hudson makes up for that absence. The Garden of Earthly Delights does not travel from Madrid, where it hangs in the Prado museum. Last year, the 500th anniversary of the death of Bosch was marked by a thrilling exhibition of his paintings and drawings in his home town Den Bosch, in the southern Netherlands. What is happening in this outrageous display of unfettered imagination and what can it possibly mean? It is also something we wonder at, astonished, like a rare relic in a cabinet of bizarre curiosities. By that I don’t just mean it is one of the world’s greatest paintings. The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch is a wonder of art. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |