Incredible paintings with HIERONYMOUS BOSCH!

 

 

 

          Hieronymus Bosch born Jeroen Anthoniszoon van Aken,was an Early Netherlandish painter. His work is known for its use of fantastic imagery to illustrate moral and religious concepts and narratives.

           He produced some of the most inventive fantasy paintings that have ever existed. His obsessive and nightmarish vision has its antecedents in the Gothic twilight world of the late Middle Ages and, although the allegorical medieval world view is now lost, there have been many recent attempts to 'read' his pictures, not least by those who have attempted to interpret Bosch by dream analysis. Bosch lived during a time of turbulence in western Europe. Just before the Protestant Reformation, there was widespread discontent with Roman Catholic clergy, who were believed to have become corrupt and immoral. The populace was increasingly losing respect for the moral tenets of these leaders, which, without strong moral leadership, led them to hedonistic and greedy behavior.

           He produced several triptychs. Among his most famous is The Garden of Earthly Delights. This painting demonstrates Bosch's dazzling ability to build up a hugely detailed landscape through a series of bizarre exaggerations and distortions. The complete work consists of four paintings on a series of folding panels the outer panel reveals the Third Day of Creation when closed, depicting  paradise with Adam and Eve and many wondrous animals on the left panel, the earthly delights with numerous nude figures and tremendous fruit and birds on the middle panel, and hell with depictions of fantastic punishments of the various types of sinners on the right panel. In this painting, and more powerfully in works such as his Temptation of St. Anthony (Lisbon), Bosch draws with his brush. The central panel to us has an air of innocence, the gentle lovemaking, naked young people creating a mood of joy. A wild sexual orgy features, where lust is, is shown to be the cause of man's downfall.  A few examples of this are the water birds, fish, and ripe strawberries that signify lewdness and lust. To Bosch, with his medieval mind, this world was brimming with symbols of sin. The left panel represents evil invading the world. The creation of man; Adam and Eve are represented here. In the right wing we are shown a vision of hell. The flames, demons, and complete horror invade this space giving tangible shape to the fears that haunted humankind throughout the Middle Ages. There are over a thousand figures in this work altogether. Standing alone in its lifetime, Bosch's work has a timeless and modern quality that greatly endeared him to Surrealists in the twentieth century.

          There are still many argument about  Bosch's idea in those paintings. In the twentieth century, when changing artistic tastes made artists like Bosch more palatable to the European imagination, it was sometimes argued that Bosch’s art was inspired by heretical points of view as well as of obscure hermetic practices.  While the art of the older masters was based in the physical world of everyday experience, Bosch confronts his viewer with, in the words of the art historian Walter Gibson, "a world of dreams and nightmares in which forms seem to flicker and change before our eyes. In the early seventeenth century, the Dutch art historian Karel van Mander described Bosch’s work as comprising "wondrous and strange fantasies"; however, he concluded that the paintings are "often less pleasant than gruesome to look at.In recent decades, scholars have come to view Bosch's vision as less fantastic, and accepted that his art reflects the orthodox religious belief systems of his age. His depictions of sinful humanity, his conceptions of Heaven and Hell are now seen as consistent with those of late medieval didactic literature and sermons. Most writers attach a more profound significance to his paintings than had previously been supposed, and attempt to interpret it in terms of a late medieval morality. It is generally accepted that Bosch’s art was created to teach specific moral and spiritual truths in the manner of other Northern Renaissance figures.