Book Description
For decades, Hieronymus Bosch’s brilliant, hallucinatory paintings have mystified viewers as well as art historians. Questions about the artist’s use of symbols, his preoccupation with man’s sinfulness and hell, and even details about the Bosch’s own life have been the source of speculation and frustration. Wilhelm Fraenger’s masterwork, the culmination of twenty years of meticulous research and scholarly detective work, reveals his fascinating discoveries about Bosch’s patrons and the secular and religious climate in which he painted. This classic monograph available for the first time from Prestel looks beyond the bizarre nature of Bosch’s images to decipher their true meanings and purpose. Written in an eminently readable and entertaining style, and illustrated with more than more than two hundred reproductions, the book invites readers to enter the painter’s phantasmagoric universe, and deepens their understanding of this often misunderstood artist.
