Review by Choice Review
The 2016 exhibition this volume catalogues commemorates the 500th anniversary of the death of this Renaissance artist from the Netherlands. Ilsink and Koldeweij bring to the discussion the results of an extensive research project that included scientific analysis and restoration of about 50 paintings and drawings. That new documentary research provided more information about Bosch's origins and early career, his patrons, and his early influence. More important, microscopic examination clarified issues of attribution in the works, thereby confirming what Bosch himself completed versus the work of his collaborators. The book's six chapters outline Bosch's biography and provide detailed analysis of Bosch's unique subject matter and his religious paintings made in his hometown of 's-Hertogenbosch, works that allowed viewers to observe how the sins of the world caused great suffering. Though Bosch depicted both good and evil, his paintings demonstrate how easy it was to fall into sin, following the path of Adam and Eve. Although he is best known for his surrealistic images and dreamlike landscapes, including the fantastic views in End of Days, Bosch's drawings reveal the artist's close examination of nature. Bosch is one of the few Netherlandish artists with an extant oeuvre of drawings, and they receive special attention in this catalogue. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Allison Lee Palmer, University of Oklahoma
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT, we're coming to the end of "Bosch Year 2016," the quincentenary celebration of the death of the late-medieval Dutch master known for his surrealistic images of the hereafter, and particularly for the fantastical hybrid demons that populate his hell. Global commemorative events throughout the year have included major retrospectives in the artist's hometown, 's-Hertogenbosch, in the Netherlands, and at the Prado in Madrid. In the run-up to the year, scholars raced to complete new examinations of Bosch's artworks all over the world and to advance new theories about his life and art, and the result is a profusion of hefty Bosch tomes, which range from authoritative technical analyses to a novelist's art travelogue. The landmark achievement of these efforts is a comprehensive catalog raisonné, produced by the Bosch Research and Conservation Project in 's-Hertogenbosch, through an exhaustive examination by a group of art historians and scientists who traveled the world to examine and document every single work attributed to the artist. The 600-page illustrated catalog is accompanied by a 460 page volume of technical studies of the paintings (but not the drawings), made using infrared photography, infrared reflectography and X-radiography. Hewing to academic methodology, the monograph makes for rather dry reading, but it contains revelations that have led to controversial new attributions, irking some in the museum world and pleasing others. (The Prado took exception to the downgrading of two of its works formerly attributed to Bosch, while a Kansas City, Mo., museum was thrilled to learn it had a genuine Bosch.) The wealth of new data and ideas will no doubt keep scholars busy for decades. For the lay reader, the more exciting element is the edition of technical studies, which reproduces the paintings alongside images of the layers beneath (shot with infrared and other technologies), providing a thrilling opportunity to climb inside each Bosch painting, to see the draftsman's hand at work as he creates his underdrawings, to witness how he changes his mind and erases or adds imagery, then builds up his canvas layer by layer. In addition to these two weighty books, Matthijs llsink and Jos Koldeweij, the leaders of the Bosch project and curators of the Noordbrabants Museum exhibition "Hieronymus Bosch: Visions of Genius" (which closed in May), have also authored a show catalog of the same name, which is much easier to carry and lushly illustrated with descriptions of the works in accessible - if a bit lackluster - reader-friendly prose. In the less visually alluring but more contextually illuminating "Jheronimus Bosch: The Road to Heaven and Hell," the art historian and author Gary Schwartz explores Bosch's links to the institutions of his hometown - including a particularly fascinating look at the secret society the Illustrious Brotherhood of Our Dear Lady, in which Bosch was a sworn brother, cleric and possible exorcist - and to the larger religious, literary, institutional and artistic touchstones that charged his wildly creative imagination. "If the work of Bosch is an island, it is like the water-surrounded town of Den Bosch itself," Schwartz writes, using the shortened name of 's-Hertogenbosch, "connected by bridges, roads and sea routes to more than one mainland." Departing from the realm of scholarship and art historical debate, the Dutch novelist Cees Nooteboom, invited to appear in a documentary to be broadcast in Bosch Year, uses the occasion to take a personal tour of Bosch paintings in various European museums. He is granted exceptional access to "The Garden of Earthly Delights" at the Prado, and follows up with trips to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam and the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent, among other locations of Bosch masterpieces. The resulting slim volume of meandering, loosely philosophical observations is really an extended essay with five postscripts printed in a large font, illustrated with details of key paintings, in which he puzzles over Bosch's imagery, in awe of the sheer originality and complexity. "Now that I am standing close to them, the abundance of details assaults me," he writes. "I would need a year merely to see everything, let alone to penetrate within." Nooteboom maintains this awkward remove from the artworks throughout, and the book ends, after much traveling, viewing and musing, in a note of conciliatory defeat. He writes: "With a variation on a famous Dutch line of poetry, you might say, 'Just look, you do not see what you see.' And that is exactly what I saw in Lisbon, Madrid, Ghent and now here : all that I saw, and yet perhaps not." The Harvard professor Joseph Leo Koerner offers a more gratifying exegesis in his eloquent and rich exploration, "Bosch and Bruegel," in which he compares Bosch to his Netherlandish successor Pieter Bruegel the Elder, writing that they both "captivate and overload our sense of sight, entangling the eye in anomalous objects, actors and activities, and ensnaring the mind's eye in enigmas and seeming secrets that arouse but never satisfy interpretive curiosity." Based on Koerner's A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the series of talks seamlessly form a book of linked essays that discuss individual paintings with magnifying precision, while simultaneously advancing a broader theory on art in a Europe emerging from its dark ages. Koerner proposes that Bosch created what he calls "enemy painting" and "teaches contempt for the world by showing the rest of humanity sinfully enthralled by the world and at the brink of judgment and damnation." Bosch's didacticism, he observes, evolves with Bruegel, who later in the 16th century presents a vision in which devilish characters roam free, but "no one is against man except man himself." These observations bring Bosch's work into relevance today, beyond the obvious promotions of the Bosch Year, and we begin to grasp why those little hybrid demons still feel so contemporary to us 500 years after they were created. NINA SIEGAL is a freelance arts journalist based in Amsterdam and a regular contributor to The Times. Her latest book is "The Anatomy Lesson," a novel.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 15, 2017]
Review by Library Journal Review
The 2016 exhibitions in the Netherlands and Spain and this accompanying publication are the result of nine years of research leading to the 500th anniversary of the death of the artist. Using high-resolution photography, microscopic examination, and onsite sampling, the researchers studied the approximately 50 paintings attributed to Hieronymus Bosch. These works are included in the catalog, some of which are compared to works by his peers. After the introduction, Netherlands-based art historians Ilsink (Bosch Research and Conservation Project; Radboud Univ.) and Koldeweij (art history of the Middle Ages, Univ. of Nijmegen) include six chapters in this well-illustrated volume, tracing the personal and artistic life of Bosch in his home city of 's-Hertgogenbosch. The influence of his membership in the spiritual movement Modern Devotion is evidenced in his early triptychs Haywain and Wayfarer, which show the virtues of Christianity. The last chapter, "The End of Days," is much darker, both in subject matter and in Bosch's depictions. In Way to Heaven and Way to Hell, Bosch painted with light colors on an evenly black background. VERDICT Written in an easy-to-read style, this title will be of interest to art historians and Bosch fans.-Nancy J. -Mactague, formerly Aurora Univ. Lib., IL © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
