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Bosch owl sketch8/19/2023 ![]() ![]() In naming this site 'Some Landscapes' initially I just saw it as a few modest notes and didn't know if I'd keep it up. For the first year I did several short entries each week since then I have reduced the frequency and some posts are a bit longer. I've also on occasion covered the creation or alteration of landscapes by architects, artists and garden designers. This blog explores landscape through the arts: painting, installation, photography, literature, music, film. The slope of the field reminds Koerner of the 'subtle curvature of the surface of the earth, ensuring that whatever the work's statement is, it will be global.' And what does it mean? 'Historians have managed to reattach these stray sensoria to a proverb current in Bosch's day and published and illustrated in a woodcut dated 1546, "The field has eyes and the wood has ears I will look, stay silent, and listen."' In other words, in hostile times, it is wise to keep one's counsel. But this is a Bosch drawing and so there are also two large ears standing in the thicket and eyes scattered over the ground. Above the owl there are shrieking birds and below, at the base of the tree, a rooster pushing its way towards a fox, apparently resting. In Dutch they were sometimes called boschvoghele. Here (and note the characteristically witty turn of phrase which makes Koerner's books such a pleasure), the 'dead tree serves as a shadowy refuge for an owl, which eyes us with dubious intent.' Owls appear at least twenty-five times in Bosch's art and can almost be There the Tree-Man idly floats like some outlandish carrack adridt in an inland canal.'īefore leaving Bosch it is worth mentioning another remarkable sketch, which at first sight simply depicts a tree in a landscape. Beyond the marshes, as Koerner observes, there are 'harbor towns on a maze of waterways, like the huge delta where the Rhine, Meuse, and Scheldt rivers meet and beyond the visible horizon, at a distance plotted by church spires and vast like the sky, the sea. But he is also the subject of Bosch's largest surviving drawing (above), transplanted to a scene of marshes like those that surrounded his native town, 's-Hertogenbosch. The Tree-Man features in the right hand panel of his great triptych The Garden of Delights (c. I will do a post on Bruegel, but here I thought I would focus on Hieronymus Bosch. Of the two artists, it was of course Breugel who was most influential on landscape painting. ![]() Joseph Leo Koerner's magisterial Bosch & Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life (2016) is so rich in interest it could furnish material for many blog posts. ![]()
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