Up close and personal with The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch
 

cdnyul has posted a link to a high tech photo of The Night Watch from the Rijksmuseum. We saw it there in 2018 but seeing it in this high tech photo was incredible. Thanks cdnyul for posting the link.

It made me wonder about other paintings that might be viewed this same way and I stumbled across the link below to The Garden of Earthly Delights from the Museo Nacional del Prado. We saw it there in person in 2006 but just like The Night Watch, seeing it in closeup detail is incredible. Warning – viewing this painting may trigger some pretty crazy nightmares. LOL.

BOSCH

We traveled to Den Bosch for a special exhibit of Hieronymous's paintings a few years ago. It was a magnificent, and expectedly weird, exhibit, and the town of Den Bosch is absolutely lovely.

StCirq - I'm sure it was both magnificent and very weird to see a whole exhibit of Bosch paintings. Here is a link to more of his paintings - some of which can be viewed in detail.

BOSCH

Thanks for this link! We saw this painting in 2015 at the Prado - love it and other Bosch paintings that we’ve seen elsewhere.

St.Cirq - I can only imagine the special exhibit in Den Bosch - it sounds like it was a remarkable event.

Thanks for the link, john183. It will be great to look longer at the details. I too saw this at the Prado and was well and truly amazed and terrified. What do you suppose that guy was like IRL?!

Here's what we went to see: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/d...ry-exhibition/

progol - I don't think I've seen any other Bosch paintings in museums but this one is certainly memorable.

TDudette - I wouldn't look at the details of this picture for too long. Like I said above it may trigger some wild and crazy nightmares. HA. I can't imagine what this guy would be like IRL. There aren't many records at all about him and he lived all his life in the town StCirq visited. I think I would be a little afraid of him.

StCirq - What a rare opportunity to see so many of his paintings in his hometown. It sounds like an interesting and pretty town.

In the Prado room, there was a collection of boxes with oddities (they used another word) and it was speculated that he and others were inspired (ha) by them.

I saw this at the Prado with my children in 1986, My younger daughter, aged 10 at the time, was mesmerized by the painting, and became a Bosch (El Bosco) afficionado.

TDudette - I did a quick search and was not able to find anything about the boxes you refer to. If the "oddities" inspired some of the scenes in his paintings maybe I don't want to know what they are.

bvlenci - This painting is definitely mesmerizing. How great that you were able to visit places like the Prado with your young children. We took our two granddaughters on different trips to France when one was 12 and the other was 13. I wish now that we would have done more trips to Europe with them.

At the time we were living in the Netherlands. I took advantage of the long Easter holiday to take a trip to Spain. We spent only part of one day in Madrid, and a visit to the Prado and to see Picasso's Guernica were the only things we did. (At that time, the Guernica was displayed in an annex to the Prado.)

We saw the Guernica in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in 2006. Another very interesting painting.

I was very lucky. My children loved museums and churches.

One thing that impressed them in Spain: They had learned in their history class in the Netherlands that Philip II of Spain was a tyrant, from whom William I of Orange led the Dutch to freedom. In Spain they saw him presented as a saintly king. It taught them something about the subjectivity of history.

John, try "curiosity boxes". Sorry for wrong word!

bvlenci - We were lucky too that both of our granddaughters liked visiting museums, churches, castles, D-Day sites and more. It's interesting how subjective history can be isn't it?

TDudette - Thanks. I learned some interesting things while searching for curiosity boxes (or cabinets). "From the Renaissance to the 18th century, the cabinet of curiosities celebrated the act of collection for its own sake, in an almost haphazard accumulation of natural-history specimens and other bizarre objects. A cabinet of curiosities was part-witches' cave, part-apothecary's chamber and part-science lab. Cabinets of curiosities were a strange bridge between atavistic myth and dawning scientific reality. Only with the advent of strictly demarcated disciplines – science in one corner, art in another – would the cabinet come to be outmoded in the 19th century" They sound pretty cool to me.

Glad you found some info, john183. There were a couple of the boxes in the same room as "Garden..." when I was there in 2014. Weird insects if memory serves.

OK I just can't resist posting this. Last night my wife and I were watching an episode of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (please don't judge - we are in the middle of a pandemic and the show is really very well done) and we heard this line (or something close to it) from Mrs. Maisel. "Even Hieronymus Bosch couldn't conjure up anything as crazy as what my life is now". I'm wondering what percentage of people watching the show have any idea who Hieronymus Bosch is. Kudos to the writers.