February 1, 2016

Do you know your seven sins? Test yourself with Hieronymus Bosch

Filed under: Art,History by Branko Collin @ 11:32 pm

7-deadly-sins-screenshot

There was never a better time to get your Bosch on.

The Noordbrabants Museum in Den Bosch, the town that one of the Netherlands most famous mediaeval painters was named after, has a major exhibit of most of Hieronymus Bosch’ works coming up in less than two weeks.

The Guardian calls it “the impossible”, an exhibition of 20 of Bosch’s 25 surviving panels in a small, local museum. The exhibit will run from 13 February to 8 May 2016.

If you are unable to make it to the museum, the Bosch fever sweeping the country ensures you can engage with the great painter in several other ways. The local newspaper, Brabants Dagblad, has an online quiz that will let you spin the wheel to find out how much you really know about the seven deadly sins. The questions are in Dutch and cover topics as varied as Doutzen Kroes, Roy Donders, frikandels, Mike Tyson, Snow White, civil servants, Louis van Gaal, FIFA, the biggest hamburger in the world, plastic surgery and David Beckham.

The paper has five other games for you, each one based on a different painting by Bosch, which can be reached through the quiz’s main menu.

If Dutch isn’t your forte, broadcaster NTR lets you explore the triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. There are spoken versions of the interactive tour in Dutch, Dutch for children and English. If you just want to admire the painting, Wikimedia Commons has a huge photo of 30,000 × 17,000 pixels (223 megabytes). Should you print that file, you would need a wall of five metres wide and almost three metres high to display it.

(Illustration: screenshot of the Brabants Dagblad game, edited to convey the impression of spinning motion)

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May 5, 2015

Spanish museums feuding over Bosch painting

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 7:32 am

Two Spanish museums, both located in Madrid, the Prado Museum and the newly built Museum of Royal Collections, are having a ‘Mexican standoff’ that involves fighting over four paintings, including the world-famous tryptich ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ by Dutch medieval painter Hieronymus Bosch. The new museum is scheduled to open in 2016 and has been told by many experts that it won’t attract the number of visitors expected with the pieces it currently has in its possession.

The Spanish royal family have owned the Bosch painting since 1593 and had it restored in 1933 then stored at the Prado in 1936. The painting has been on loan for a long time, but now that the Museum of Royal Collections wants to have it, the Prado won’t budge. The chairman of the Prado’s board said that if the country’s public heritage agency who owns the painting wanted to have it for its new museum, they’d have to “wait until hell freezes over”. Other museums around Spain are on alert because some of their paintings could be next.

(Links: www.nytimes.com, www.omroepbrabant.nl, Illustration: fragment of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Conjurer)

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February 16, 2014

Hieronymus Bosch’ buttock music brought alive

Filed under: Art,Music by Branko Collin @ 11:22 pm

garden-delights-bosch-pdTumblrer Chaoscontrolled123 decided to transcribe the music written across the buttocks of one of the characters in Hieronymus Bosch’ famous painting The Garden of Earthly Delights. You can hear the results here.

Chaoscontrolled123 appears to be unimpressed by the tune but I see promise in it. Surely techno DJs or metal band Within Temptation should be able to do something with the melody?

Hieronymus Bosch was a mediaeval painter who was born and lived his entire life in ‘s-Hertogenbosch (hence the last name Bosch). The Garden of Earthly Delights is perhaps his most famous painting consisting of three panels, the right-most of which depicts hell. Our trouserless friend is part of a scene in which the sin of lust is depicted as music—Wikipedia says lust was considered the ‘music of the flesh’ in those days.

By the way, I don’t know if any art historian ever noticed this, but there is a diptych in the right panel of the triptych. Huh-huh.

(Link: Trendbeheer; illustration Hieronymus Bosch)

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