Mysterious paintings by Hieronymus Bosch
Hieronymus Bosch was a Dutch artist. In his paintings he created a highly original world with a moral message. His works are often based on Christian writings. Bosch used his works to present his views on human sin and its consequences.
Hieronymus Bosch (his real name was Jeroen Anthoniszoon) was born in 1450 in Hertogenbosch, where he spent most of his life. Both his grandfather and father were painters.
Sometime before 1481 he married Aleyt Goyaerts van den Meervenne.
In 1504 Philip the Handsome, Archduke of Austria, commissioned him to paint a Last Judgment, which has not survived.
Scholars have estimated that Bosch produced 25 paintings and 14 drawings. They divide Bosch’s works into three main periods. From about 1470 to 1490, he began to focus on humanity’s weakness toward sin. In his middle period, from 1490 through 1500, Bosch began to paint triptychs. The most enigmatic of Bosch’s paintings is the triptych of the Garden of Earthly Delights. During the final period of his career, from 1500 to his death in 1516, Bosch painted on a smaller scale with close-up views of larger figures. One of Bosch’s last works is the highly compacted and emotive Christ Carrying the Cross.
Bosch often painted “classical” devils with horns or angels with wings. But everywhere there are terrible, absolutely unthinkable faces that can only be met in hell, as his contemporaries thought, or on other planets, as some experts of our time believe. American researcher of his creativity Linda Harris argues that many visions of the Last Judgment on his canvases accurately reflect episodes of modern wars and cataclysms.
Hieronymus Bosch died in his native Hertogenbosch at the age of 66 and was solemnly buried in the chapel of the church of St. John. But when in 1977 the grave was opened… it was empty! Historian Hans Haalfe, who led the excavations, said that there was a strange tombstone on Bosch’s tomb that was not like granite or marble. When a piece of stone was placed under a microscope, a particle of this mysterious material began to glow, and the temperature of its surface suddenly increased by 3 degrees. The Church immediately banned excavation, and the mystery of the death of the artist was unsolved.