“And what is the potential man, after all? Is he not the sum of all that is human?”*…
Early Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch’s visionary triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights, has stoked discussion since it was completed (sometime between 1490 and 1510); critics and scholars have confidently proclaimed it everything from a “didactic warning on the perils of life’s temptations” to an “erotic derangement that turns us all into voyeurs, a place filled with the intoxicating air of perfect liberty”… occasionally both.
Photographer Lori Pond was moved to incorporate Bosch’s vision into her own photographic work after she visited the Prado in Madrid, where his masterpiece has been on display since 1939.
After an emotional reaction to the painting and its mythologized mysteriousness, Pond decided to create a series of photos based on Bosch’s work — isolating details from Earthly Delights, as well as The Temptation of St. Anthony, and The Last Judgment.
The photos themselves look like they could be more minimalistic paintings by Bosch, but the arrangements you see were mostly achieved in-camera. Pond used materials gathered from swap meets, and enlisted the help of a motley team made up of a taxidermist, a prosthetics designer, her friends, and their closets…
More examples from Pond’s portfolio at Bosch Redux on her site; more back ground at “Arresting Photographs Remake Images From Hieronymus Bosch’s Grotesque Biblical Fantasies” and “Recreating Hieronymus Bosch.”
Then wander over explore the wonderful interactive documentary “Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Delights” (part of the transmedia tryptich: this interactive documentary, the documentary film “Hieronymus Bosch, touched by the devil,” and the Virtual Reality documentary “Hieronymus Bosch, the Eyes of the Owl,” coming this April).
And finally, check out the “newest” Bosch painting, recently (re-)discovered.
* Hieronymus Bosch
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As we follow in St. Augustine in praying that God grant us “chastity and continence, but not yet,” we might send modern birthday greetings to Joseph Fernand Henri Léger; he was born on this date in 1881. Best known as member of the Cubist movement (in which he was unique for his use of cylindrical shapes, earning him the label “tubist”), Léger was also sculptor and filmmaker. Indeed, in his later life, he added book illustration, mural creation, stained-glass and mosaic work, and set and costume design to his repertoire. In those later years, his gravitated to modern subject matter, which he treated in simple, bold, and accessible ways– for which he’s now considered an important forerunner of Pop Art.
Léger’s Nudes in the Forest (Nus dans la forêt), 1910
