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At the time it was modern art. Matthew Collings, Renaissance Revolution: Hieronymus Bosch – The Garden of Earthly Delights, BBC 2010
The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch ... Very strange picture, hard to understand. But you can’t take your eyes off it ... Funny and sinister. And yet modern is right. ibid.
No-one is really sure today what The Garden of Earthly Delights is about. ibid.
The beauty of the picture is in its intensity of detail; but the horror is in that too. ibid.
He was probably a pupil of Albert Ouwater, and may be called the Breughel of the 15th century, for he devoted himself to the invention of bizarre types, diableries, and scenes generally associated with Breughel, whose art is to a great extent based on Bosch’s. He was a satirist much in advance of his time, and one of the most original and ingenious artists of the 15th century. He exercised great influence on Lucas Cranach, who frequently copied his paintings. His works were much admired in Spain, especially by Phillip II at whose court Bosch painted for some time. One of his chief works is the Last Judgment at the Berlin gallery, which also owns a little St Jerome in the Desert. The Fall of the Rebellious Angels and the St Anthony triptych are in the Brussels museum, and two important triptychs are at the Munich gallery. The Lippmann collection in Berlin contains an important Adoration of the Magi, the Antwerp museum a Passion, and a practically unknown painting from his brush is at the Naples museum. Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911
Hieronymus Bosch was one of the most remarkable and original painters of all time. His works were painted five hundred years ago, yet they seem astonishingly modern, anticipating surrealism. This is the art of a world in a state of turbulence, torn by contradictory tendencies – a world in which the light of reason has been extinguished and where animal passions have gained the upper hand, a world of terror and violence, a living nightmare. In short – a world very like our own. Marxism online article 23rd December 2010, ‘Hieronymus Bosch and the art of the death agony of Feudalism’
Hieronymus Bosch: The Garden of Earthly Delights c. 1500. Andrew Graham-Dixon, The High Art of the Low Countries: Dream of Plenty, BBC 2013
We’ll turn to all the other wild-eyed eccentrics who began popping up in the Renaissance in increasing numbers: Hieronymus Bosch, Arcimboldo, El Greco. Waldemar Januszczak, The Renaissance Unchained IV: Hell, Snakes and Giants, BBC 2017
When it comes to pessimism even Leonardo has some way to go to match the despair of Hieronymus Bosch. ibid.
His most famous picture The Garden of Earthly Delights in the Prado, that extraordinary theme-park of sin, is a triptych packed with so much bad news that I can’t deal with it all once. ibid.