Details
ONLINE ART HISTORY COURSE
Hieronymus Bosch: Heretic, Lunatic, or Philosopher?
Course Description:
The Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch (ca. 1450-1516) had a bizarre and inexhaustible imagination. Known as the creator of disturbing demons and spectacular hellscapes, he also painted the Garden of Earthly Delights, where gleeful naked youths seduce one another with giant strawberries and place flowers in bodily orifices best left unexposed in polite society. Viewers from Bosch’s time to our own have struggled to find meaning in his startling paintings, citing dream imagery, lunatic fantasies, and even heresy in his works. Adding to the difficulty of interpretation is the fact that Bosch’s name appears on only seven of the thirty or so paintings accepted as his, and none of these shows a date. Furthermore, we know very little about the painter’s life – his education, friends, or patrons. Despite these problems, it is possible to understand Bosch as belonging to a world of mutable boundaries and multiple points of view. People lived always with an eye towards Christian salvation, and there were no distinct boundaries between secular and sacred. We need not accept Bosch as either ignorant or learned, bourgeois or aristocratic, devout of heretical, pragmatic or visionary. In the end, his fascinating paintings reveal a world that was different from, but no less complex than our own.
Virtual Classroom: Full access to an online educational platform with discussion forum, videos of recordings, syllabus, and reading list.
Location: LIVE INTERACTIVE ON-LINE ART HISTORY LECTURES
Optional Readings:
Readings to be provided to students in PDF format prior to the beginning of course.
Complete syllabus will be provided upon registration.
- ALL LECTURES WILL BE RECORDED AND AVAILABLE FOR VIEWING AT YOUR CONVENIENCE IN OUR VIDEO LIBRARY FOR THE DURATION OF THE COURSE
