Bosch, a little less bizarre

It is difficult to look through, or even look past, the peculiar images in Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings like The Garden of Earthly Delights and The Hay Wain. Figures like a knight with a tail, a nude man carrying a giant fish, a blue fairy with a trumpet for a nose and a peacock’s tail, and a stag with scaly, green legs are commonplace in Bosch’s macabre oeuvre. Anyone who has seen Bosch’s panoplies of the bizarre knows that Bosch is not a typical sixteenth-century painter. Perhaps this is why we cannot help but modernize him as much as possible, because he does not fit neatly into a prepackaged art-historical narrative about the Renaissance.

Since his death in 1516, descriptions of Bosch’s art have run the gamut from the psychedelic and the nonsensical to the proto-surrealist...