Bosch

An excellent intro for the newbie to Bosch as well as a nice pickup for the experienced Bosch connoisseur. This 143 page paperback with color plates has color-coded edges corresponding to three overarching sections in the painter's oeuvre: Background, Life and Works, and Masterpieces. The book's cover indicates a "life in paintings" yet the real biographical information is interspersed with the presentation of the pieces, and the details of Bosch's life are themselves sparse. However for a quick overview and summary of this amazing artist's career, the book is second to none. There are certainly other books which provide a larger quantity of information and interpretation about the paintings as well as enlarged details of the paintings themselves, but what is here is impressive. The book will whet the appetite of any starting Bosch student through the discussion of Bosch's motives and possible meanings in scenes from his work, with elucidative lines of text nearby the selected detail. Particularly useful are the paragraphs setting up the historical context for all of this mystifying imagery. Overall a solid book, the only possible drawback the brevity of the text itself. Contains an index of people and places.

We may never know much about him, as there are so few histories written about him. This is a great book for those who've never heard of him and for art enthusiasts wanting to expand their shelves on books about artists, but there's not much new and different biographical information about Bosch's like in it. The explanations of his works are phenomenal, however.