Hieronymus Bosch’s art featured in two exhibits 500 years after his death
Hieronymus Bosch, who gave us many of our modern visions of hell, has inspired episodes of The Simpsons, rock ’n’ roll lyrics, a children’s book character, movies The Exorcist and Seven, and Dr. Martens boot designs. How does an artist who has been dead for half a millennium pull off such a feat?
Two major exhibitions this year mark the 500th anniversary of Bosch’s death. The first was in the spring at the Noordbrabants Museum in his hometown of ’s-Hertogenbosch (Den Bosch) in the Netherlands. The show shattered records for the museum, attracting more than 400,000 visitors during its three-month run, in a city of only 140,000. On May 31, Bosch: The Fifth Centenary Exhibition opened in Madrid’s Museo Nacional del Prado.
Most of Bosch’s surviving works are on display, showing how he painted in new ways for his day. Paintings such as the triptychs The Garden of Earthly Delights (permanently installed in the Prado) and The Temptation of St. Anthony (on loan from the National Museum of Ancient Art in Lisbon) are large, colorful visions of life on earth, with its sins and temptations, and a potentially tormented afterlife.
