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What does is it mean to see a painting—and is seeing it the same thing as understanding it?
Hieronymus Bosch's monumental Garden of Earthly Delights is instantly recognizable to most lovers of Renaissance art, and as Professor Catherine B. Scallen explains, it has been admired, looked on with shock, and puzzled over for 500 years. In its own time it was copied and even made into tapestries. It has been owned by a deeply devout Catholic king of Spain—and in the 1900s was cited by various scholars as representing the lost golden age of humanity, symbolizing the coded language of the alchemist, or even proving its creator's belief in sexual license. In the turbulent 1960s its images were common in dormitory rooms, delighting students eager to accept its joyful, frolicking nudes in their fantasy landscape as a proclamation of freedom and self-indulgence.
Although critics and scholars differ on what Hieronymus Bosch depicted in the Garden of Earthly Delights, it was definitely not a paean to self-indulgence or drugs. The work is one of a long line of fantastic images left by an artist who was known for moralizing on the consequences of sin and folly.
Bosch's world-view clearly intrigued his contemporaries, whether or not they understood his art better than we do. You will meet many such unique figures throughout the 36 lectures of The Art of the Northern Renaissance, as Professor Scallen guides you through 200 years of remarkable art and artists.
Although the term "the Renaissance" is most commonly associated with an era of artistic bounty in Italy, the massive cultural transformations that were remaking the world were having as significant an impact on art throughout northern Europe as well, and both traditions were highly admired at the time, with significant contact between the two. Italian artists were aware of Northern innovations. Northern artists increasingly traveled to Italy where they were exposed to the art of antiquity as well as the art of Renaissance Italy.
A Brilliant Time and Place in Art History
Using more than 300 images—paintings, woodcuts, engravings, etchings, sculptures, drawings—by well-known artists Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Albrecht Dürer, Hans Holbein, Hieronymus Bosch, and Pieter Bruegel, along with others who may be less familiar but deserve to be better known, Professor Scallen leads an intensely visual exploration of the glorious art that resulted. She explains devotional paintings, brilliantly illuminated copies of the medieval prayer book known as the Book of Hours, and triptychs—massive three-panel works that often served as church altarpieces.
