Hieronymus Bosch

📗 No one can look at the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch without amazement and bewilderment. What made the artist fill his canvases with such scenes of torture, such monsters, such leering devils? Why does a sense of misery and foreboding pervade all his works? Professor Gibson provides an answer by taking an historical approach to the question, arguing that what seems inexplicable to us in the twentieth century was quite intelligible to people living in the fifteenth. The subjects of Bosch's paintings were in fact the overwhelming concerns of late medieval Europe: the Last Judgment, original sin, death, temptations of the flesh. The author describes each picture in detail, explaining how the complicated symbolism can be understood by reference to medieval folk-lore and religion. He also points out that many of the acts portrayed in the pictures were visual translations of verbal puns or metaphors. Equipped with Professor Gibson's book, the reader can look at the pictures as Bosch's contemporaries would have done, and thereby appreciate both the full force of their visual imagery and the extent of Bosch's genius in transforming traditional themes and motifs.