Hieronymus Bosch, one of the major interpreters of European painting in the Sixteenth century, is an artist easy to love but overly complex to understand. From 9 November 2022 to 12 March 2023 at the Palazzo Reale in Milan, a great Bosch retrospective will be on display.
He was born in mid fifteen hundred in a family of artists in the Brabant region, present-day Netherlands. With his deeply visionary and fascinating painting, he influenced many contemporary and later artists. The themes and fantasies in his production influenced Titian, El Greco, Bramantino, Savoldo, and others. In the Twentieth century, Salvador Dalì, Max Ernst, and the surrealists, in general, acknowledged him as a genius and inspiration. Moreover, it’s Bosch’s world that inspired the terrible, grim, and visceral Bacon’s universe and some studies of Lucien Freud.
In the exhibition, the viewer will be able to immerse in a wild, dreamlike, and visionary world in which all the elements are symbolic, ambiguous, and ambivalent. Human vices, virtues, damnation, the possibility of being saved, dreams, fears, and human ambitions are major themes investigated by Bosch. They are represented through the uncanny appearances of hybrid beings and symbolic creatures for which a univocal interpretation has not yet been found, today, leaving the artist’s works immersed in a mysterious but endless fascination that marked his genius over time.
