Bosch and Palladio, to modern eyes

Hieronymus Bosch and Andrea Palladio have long been two of my favorite artists. Bosch is probably seen as quintessentially medieval with his demons, angels, and Hell scenes. Palladio is seen as thoroughly renaissance with his classical architectural vocabulary. Yet their lives overlapped by eight years: Bosch died in 1516 and Palladio was born in 1508. Here we are nearing the end of the overlap period and I was thinking of that overlap as I drove home from Sunday morning with pancakes and the Times in my car Hieronymus, named after the painter. In their honor ...

Hieronymus Bosch, Four Visions of the Hereafter, exterior of Ascent into Heaven, after 1486. Oil on oak panel, 88.8 x 39.9 cm. Palazzo Grimani, Venice. Photo courtesy of Rik Klein Gotink for the Bosch Research and Conservation Project

(http://www.getty.edu/foundation/initiatives/current/panelpaintings/panel_paintings_grants_awarded.html)

Andrea Palladio

Villa Foscari, also known as Malcontenta

on the River Brenta outside Venice

(photo from Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Parigi website)

The Bosch image above is taken from the Getty research grants page. The grant is to the Noordbrabants Museum which is working on an exhibition in honor of the 500th anniversary of Bosch's death. While I have seen many Bosch paintings, the thought of seeing many of them together in 's-Hertogenbosch, his birthplace, is pretty exciting. Thank you, Getty grant program. They are also "supporting the innovative website Bosch Online, an interactive tool that will allow art historians, conservators, and the public to compare detailed images of nearly 40 Bosch paintings from 26 museum collections across Europe and the United States." I picked a Bosch painting now in Venice to heighten the connecting in my brain though the Bosch Online site says the first documentary evidence of the painting in Venice is 18th century. Still, those Habsburgs who collected early Netherlandish paintings hung out in Mediterranean countries and they probably didn't classify their empire as medieval or renaissance though they may have thought of themselves as thoroughly modern.