The Garden of Earthly Delights

I'm not a reader of art criticism, but I love Mr. Beagle and Bosch has always been weirdly fascinating, so this was a really interesting, very well laid out book. from PB: "Everything was religious. So must dreams have been, of course, in a way that I will never be able to imagine. Far more than anything else that I want to know about Hieronymus Bosch, I wonder what the dreamed. I believe, finally, that he painted, not alchemical roadmaps or Kabbalistic minutes of the last meeting, but his own nightmares and daydreams, which were the deepest dreams of his civilization. There have probably been artists like that since the caves, one or two in each generation: somehow commanded to dream for a people in its time, to give a shape and a name to the monsters that exist in the particular darkness of that time. Hieronymus Bosch was such an artist." And a quote from a Dutch historian in the epilogue, which sums things up well: "So violent and noisy was life, that it bore the mixed smell of blood and roses. The men of that time always oscillate between the fear of hell and the most naive joy, between cruelty and tenderness, between harsh asceticism and insane attachment to the delights of this world, between hatred and goodness, always running to extremes." - Johan Huizinga