Overview

"In the midst of the realist-leaning artistic climate of the Late Gothic and Early Renaissance, Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450-1516) was more than an anomaly. Bosch's paintings are populated with grotesque scenes of fantastical creatures succumbing to all manner of human desire, fantasy, and angst. 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. 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. Many subsidiary scenes illustrate proverbs and figures of speech in common use in Bosch's day. 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. In his pictorial translation of proverbs, in particular, Bosch was very much an innovator. Bosch--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. Today only 20 paintings and eight drawings are confidently assigned to Bosch's oeuvre. He continues to be seen as a visionary, a portrayer of dreams and nightmares, and the painter par excellence of hell and its demons.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. 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. Art historian and acknowledged Bosch expert Stefan Fischer examines just what it was about Bosch and his painting that proved so immensely influential."

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9783836526302

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Reviews

... the most comprehensive study to date... This book offers an unprecedented insight into how the work of this erudite artist has been viewed under Catholic dogma. A book and a half. I admit from the outset that the book I am going to tell you about falls outside the scope of my normal recommendations, on account both of its format and its weight (4.1 kg on my long-suffering bathroom scales). It is hardly an obvious choice of reading material for the beach at the height of summer. But the fact remains that Hieronymus Bosch. Complete Works by Stefan Fischer, the extraordinary volume from TASCHEN ( Who else? as George Clooney would say if he were a fan of art books), represents an excellent commemoration of the fifth centenary of the death of Jheronimus van Aken... A book to cherish (although not on the beach). This contemporary of Johannes Gutenberg and Christopher Columbus was, with brush in hand, already as modern and as monstrously playful as the Swiss science-fiction surrealist H.R. Giger 500 years later. He was as sensually sinful as the gallant Helmut Newton and as imaginative as Spain's ingenious top eccentric Salvador Dal . Here for the first time all his paintings are published in one book. A measured, scholarly and referenced account of the artist, his period and his workshop practices... An artwork in itself. TASCHEN's new book on Bosch is surely the most lavishly produced monograph ever published on the artist. Weighing almost ten pounds, its three hundred pages include superb colour reproductions of Bosch's paintings and drawings, supplemented by numerous enlarged details that allow us to examine the details of Bosch's fantastic imagery with a clarity seldom possible, even when we confront them in a museum gallery. Our absolute favourite... a magnificent book... The book is as impressive for its size as for the quality of its reproductions, whose goal is to permit the reader finally to grasp the most beautiful triptychs in their totality... Here truly the magic and precision of the artist are revealed, along with his entire symbolology.

Author Information

"Stefan Fischer studied art history, history, and classical archaeology in Münster, Amsterdam, and Bonn. In 2009 he completed his doctoral thesis ""Hieronymus Bosch: Malerei als Vision, Lehrbild und Kunstwerk."" His specialist fields are Netherlandish painting of the 15th to the 17th centuries and museology."

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