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The Sunday Telegraph {Discover}
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Bosch 500 Year
UK Sunday 21, February 2016 11 1025 sq. cm ABC 355044 Weekly page rate £34,000.00, scc rate £80.00 020 7538 5000
The weird and the wonderful Nick Trend steps into the strange world of Hieronymus Bosch as the artist’s home town celebrates his life and work
H
ad he lived another 500 years, Hieronymus Bosch would, I think, have been shocked by what had happened to his home town; disappointed, too, that the surreal, hellish punishment regime that he depicted in his extraordinary altarpieces had not acted as a sufficient deterrent against self-indulgence and sin. Gluttony and lechery were two of the deadly sins that – along with avarice – Bosch seems to have enjoyed depicting. Ironically, the town – ’s-Hertogenbosch, or Den Bosch – is best known in Holland today both for its ability to hold a good party and for its culinary excellence. Carnival, which finished with a noisy flourish this week, is here celebrated with gusto; and the favourite local indulgence is the Bosch bol. This is a sort of outsize profiterole – a spherical confection of sugar, chocolate and cream that is as deliciously self-indulgent as it sounds. But then, it’s a long time since a genuine Bosch painting has been seen in the town, so perhaps the impact of his dire warnings to sinners has faded over the centuries. All that is about to change,
however. Den Bosch has pulled off an extraordinary coup: to mark the 500th anniversary of Bosch’s death in 1516, it has managed to gather together 17 of his 24 surviving works in a unique exhibition that opened in the city’s museum last weekend. Probably not even Bosch himself saw so many of his paintings together at one time. The only sadness is that his most famous triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights, is too fragile – or precious – to make the journey from its home in the Prado in Madrid. In fact, the whole exhibition will move to the Prado in May, so you could travel to see it in Spain, but it seems perverse, if you are interested in Bosch’s work, not to make the pilgrimage to his home town and see the show there. It’s certainly a pleasant place to enjoy a night or two to frame a visit to what is certain to be one of the outstanding art exhibitions of 2016. Den Bosch is one of those neat little Dutch towns, like Haarlem or Delft, in which you feel instantly relaxed. There are not quite so many stepped gables – they like them levelled off in Den Bosch – and
many of the canals are covered, running under the houses rather than between them, but the pedestrianised cobbled streets have that same sense of history on a human scale. The old town is formed of an axis between the great market square – where Bosch lived as a boy (the house is now a souvenir shop), and where he later kept a studio – and St John’s cathedral which overlooks a shady square, the Parade. At pace, you could walk across it in five or 10 minutes, but somehow you don’t want to. The streets are lined with restaurants and cafés, and a colleague who knows about these things told me that from a shopping point of view it plays a strong hand, too. And there are just enough cultural and architectural sights to spice up the mix. So what, apart from its descent into ribald gluttony, would Bosch make of his home town were he to come back today? He would certainly recognise the market square, though most of the houses and shops have been rebuilt over the intervening f
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