Bosch and Bruegel From enemy painting to everyday life

An extremely thoughtful, wide-ranging examination of Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516) and Pieter Bruegel (1525-69), who have been considered together almost from their own time, this volume attests to the layers of meaning invested in these artists and to Koerner's erudition. Both painters are fascinating. Their imagery and symbolism pose puzzles to the viewer, who seeks to decode their often-esoteric meanings. Koerner (Harvard) contextualizes the artists within their own time and in relation to each other. By looking closely at details in their paintings and by associating them with historical events and religious controversies, the author is able to offer valuable insights and interpretations. His examination of Bosch's grandest triptychs, The Haywain, Adoration of the Magi, Temptation of Saint Anthony, and The Garden of Earthly Delights, is rewarding; he integrates the outer wings of these triptychs with their inner scenes, offering nuanced observations of liturgical, historical, and structural things hitherto overlooked. Bruegel, who was regarded as a second Bosch, provides both a continuity of overall values and a marked contrast in approach. For Bosch, enmity and evil are ubiquitous, and for Bruegel the world is full of danger but humanity is its own worst enemy. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals. --Amy Golahny, Lycoming College

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.