Jérôme Bosch
vers 1450 (Bois-le-Duc (Pays-Bas)) / 1516 (Bois-le-Duc (Pays-Bas))
As Panofsky puts it, Rogier 'subordinates naturalism of detail to his supernaturalist design'. It is this same supernaturalism, but brought to a boil in nightmarish visions, that Hieronymus Bosch exalts in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. His world of dreams, bubbling and buzzing with apparitions and hallucinations, may be anchored in reality and continue to borrow the vocabulary of realism, but this time it denies all value to the individual and drowns the human race in undifferentiated deluges and collective tortures. Seeming to want to stop the springtime of the Renaissance and return to an autumn of the Middle Ages, Bosch, by humanizing hell and animating painting with a movement of swarming worms, no longer freezes in front of the world that has become an image: on the contrary, he pushes this world into the throes and cauldrons of his time in order to extract an image of unspeakable humanity.
Image:
Jacques Le Boucq.
Portrait de Hieronymus Bosch
Vers 1550. Arras, Bibliothèque Municipale.
As Panofsky puts it, Rogier 'subordinates naturalism of detail to his supernaturalist design'. It is this same supernaturalism, but brought to a boil in nightmarish visions, that Hieronymus Bosch exalts in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. His world of dreams, bubbling and buzzing with apparitions and hallucinations, may be anchored in reality and continue to borrow the vocabulary of realism, but this time it denies all value to the individual and drowns the human race in undifferentiated deluges and collective tortures. Seeming to want to stop the springtime of the Renaissance and return to an autumn of the Middle Ages, Bosch, by humanizing hell and animating painting with a movement of swarming worms, no longer freezes in front of the world that has become an image: on the contrary, he pushes this world into the throes and cauldrons of his time in order to extract an image of unspeakable humanity.
Image:
Jacques Le Boucq.
Portrait de Hieronymus Bosch
Vers 1550. Arras, Bibliothèque Municipale.
