![]() ![]() Training our eyes to read these icons of corruption, Koerner leads us carefully towards The Garden of Earthly Delights, intent both on preparing us for the horror and on deepening our experience of it. The material painting, which might be called an “anti-altarpiece”, is an object, wood and pigment, cautioning against the love of things like itself. Those who grab at it, and throw themselves at its feet, are clutching at straws. Here is all flesh rendered grass, and the round world mere chaff. This lumpen globe may be heavy but it is spiritually empty. But this object, so gloriously revealed, is not Christ but a cart laden with hay, and so densely laden as to become sinister. Crowds gather round to admire the glowing golden object at the centre. Its shutters break open, miming the priest’s breaking of the host, to reveal an image of celebratory worship. He engineers the Haywain Triptych to look like an altarpiece. But in order to make us feel the overwhelming fertility of the world, holding us on the vertiginous brink of mesmerised attraction and repulsion, Bosch has to paint the “enemy territory” that is everyday life. To make them better, to make them beautiful, to lavish on them the attentions of art, is to risk a form of idolatry. They are worthless or worse, the products of a corrupt and doomed humanity. These apparent contraries are yoked because for Bosch our material things and common activities constitute the devil’s prop-cupboard of lures and disguises. In this revelatory new study, the US art historian Joseph Leo Koerner argues that they are – together – the originators of what would later be called “genre” painting.īizarre, monstrous, uncanny … detail from Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. Yet Bruegel (born 10 years after the elder artist’s death) was greeted by his contemporaries as a “second Bosch”, and the connections between the two Netherlandish masters have fascinated viewers for centuries. Bosch’s pale figures belong to the international gothic Bruegel’s weighty peasants dance vigorously into modern times. Turning from metaphysics and from myth, he attends to the ploughman who labours his way across a field while Icarus falls into the sea far below. Bruegel, most memorably and wonderfully, shows us a recognisable world where children lick bowls clean, bagpipers draw breath and harvesters stretch out in the sun. Bosch is a painter of medieval hellfire whose fantastical creations exceed our nightmares. H ieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder work like antagonistic muscles in the imagination, pulling with and against each other. ![]()
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