Keisnijding or Cutting the Stone (1494) by Hieronymus Bosch
Hometown awash with Bosch
HertogenboschHieronymus Bosch and Leonardo da Vinci were artistic contemporaries, but not obvious ones. As the Italian Renaissance master busied himself fusing science with timeless beauty, a painter in the Netherlands was unleashing his imagination on canvases in a way that wouldn’t be seen again until the time of Salvador Dalí. Jheronimus (as he liked to spell it) took half his name from his hometown of ’s-Hertogenbosch – Den Bosch for short. To mark the 500th anniversary of his death this year, this canal-threaded southern Dutch town has brought back most of his surviving work for a unique exhibition. In his visions of heaven and hell, there’s the nagging sense he enjoyed painting the latter a bit too much, flling it with creepy details such as a fsh with backwards legs.