![]() Yet there are infinite bizarreries at play in Bosch’s imagination. So that’s clear, right? If you sin, you go to hell. ![]() This grotesque progress is headed straight for hell, where in the next panel of the triptych the damned suffer such fates as being hung from a pole and gutted, or hung to roast in the burning sky. In his great painting The Haywain, lent by the Prado, a cart loaded with yellow hay and pulled by rodent-headed creatures is mobbed by people trying to join the lovers carousing on its summit, while others fight with fists and knives. There is no avoiding the strangeness of his ideas. This exhibition, rigorously based on the latest research, puts paid to the idea – popular in the 1960s, when he was hailed as a hippy prophet – that he belonged to a covert sect.īut it must have been a very tolerant place, old ‘s-Hertogenbosch, to take him to its heart. In its gothic sanctuary, one thing is clear: Bosch was no heretic, not even an outsider like Vincent van Gogh, who would be born centuries later in this same region. You can visit the chapel where this jokey self-portrait was once displayed, just down the road from the museum at St John’s Cathedral. Spot the artist: Saint John on Patmos (detail) by Hieronimus Bosch. Clearly he was a respected local citizen whose fellow burghers thought his madly inventive art a great laugh, for he put this bespectacled face on a monster with lizard legs and a bird’s wings. That is almost certainly the face Bosch presented to the world, in the corner of a painting of Saint John on Patmos he made for the Brotherhood of Our Lady, the city’s poshest religious fraternity, of which Bosch was a leading member. There he is, a pair of spectacles balanced on his nose, his piercing eyes gazing out of a gaunt face. You feel you are meeting him on the streets of Den Bosch – or ‘s-Hertogenbosch as he knew it – and getting the measure of the man. It is no exaggeration to say that in this exhibition, Hieronymus Bosch finally steps out from behind his surreal triptychs and speaks to us directly. This deeply absorbing and revisionist show is not just an astonishing organisational feat: little-known regional museum borrows almost all Bosch’s greatest works from galleries including the Accademia in Venice and the Metropolitan in New York. The Noordbrabants Museum in Den Bosch has put on one of the most important exhibitions of our century. Photograph: Corbis The Noordbrabants Museum has put on one of the most important exhibitions of our century Fascinating and confounding … The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch.
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