Through full spreads and carefully curated details, we explore the full reach and compelling inventions of the artist's genius as well as disturbing imagination. This edition offers the complete and haunting Bosch world in one compact format. 500 years on from his death, his works continue to inspire scholars, artists, designers, and musicians, death metal band names and designer dresses. 1450-1516) but in their fantastical visions they have secured his place as one of the most cult artists in history. by Stefan Fischer Only 20 paintings and eight drawings are confidently assigned to Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch (c. Art historian and acknowledged Bosch expert Stefan Fischer examines just what it was about Bosch and his painting that proved so immensely influential.Description - Hieronymus Bosch. 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. He continues to be seen as a visionary, a portrayer of dreams and nightmares, and the painter par excellence of hell and its demons.įeaturing 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. Today only 20 paintings and eight drawings are confidently assigned to Bosch's oeuvre. In his pictorial translation of proverbs, in particular, Bosch was very much an innovator.īosch-whose real name was Jheronimus van Aken-was widely copied and imitated: the number of surviving works by Bosch's followers exceeds the master's own production by more than tenfold. 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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