Bosch owl sketch7/9/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() 1480-90), many of his dates will be considered too late, e.g. While he makes a strong case for an early date of the first drawing, the Rotterdam Old Women (c. The state of our knowledge is now so very much in flux concerning both of those critical components that even Koreny’s up-to-date publication of a lifetime of research on Bosch has to be regarded as provisional. Clearly this catalogue raisonné will form, henceforth, the basis of any and all considerations of individual Bosch drawings and of their place in the artist’s overall oeuvre, including the wider range of his workshop production and his extended influence, even after his death in 1516.Īs someone who has written a Bosch monograph (2006), I fully appreciate the difficulties of discerning workshop attributions (something I gave too little attention) and still more, the folly of advancing any chronology of Bosch’s oeuvre in both paintings and drawings (something I regret even attempting). Half the book presents an analytical overview the other half closely inspects individual drawings in catalogue form. Only a short segment, by contrast, considers the signature Boschian iconography: monsters, witches, beggars, owls, proverbs, and genre subjects. ![]() For his assessments he uses all available evidence, included here: signatures (often false) comparisons to accepted paintings considerations of left-handedness and watermarks plus all technologies of examination, including inspection of paintings ranging from infrared reflectography to dendrochronology. Koreny, for three decades the curator of German drawings at the Albertina and professor in Vienna, has held a long fascination with Bosch, highlighted by his extensive 2003 Vienna Jahrbuch essay. Of course, as the corollary of that new first premise, it follows that we must also now rethink formerly secure Bosch attributions, paintings as well as drawings, as in Ron Spronk’s 2010 Nijmegen Inauguralrede, “Eigenhändig?” This new, dazzlingly produced new tome by Fritz Koreny applies that same process as fully to Bosch drawings as to his paintings. Evidence for this is ready to hand in the two versions of the Haywain Triptych (Escorial Prado), neither of which is even assuredly by Bosch himself. First the 2001 Rotterdam exhibition and its associated publications posited what scholars now acknowledge, namely that Bosch – son of a painter and a member of the Van Aken painter family – led an active workshop. Over the last decade a new consensus has been emerging about Hieronymus Bosch, usually regarded as an eccentric and a unique, if influential genius. ![]()
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