Reimagining Hieronymus Bosch: Receptions of a Pictorial Mode in the Habsburg World (1516-1675)

This dissertation offers a set of original case studies looking at the critical fortunes or "afterlives" of Hieronymus Bosch (ca. 1450-1516) in early modern Europe and the colonial Americas. It explores the various ways in which Bosch's work was imagined and mobilized by artists, collectors and critics through two centuries. The aim is less to advance the subject theoretically than to introduce some new perspectives on how the Boschian mode started to live a life of its own — a life increasingly estranged from its creator. As an essay in reception history, this investigation traces some of the ways in which later viewers reinterpreted Bosch to fit their own needs and circumstances. His world of images proved incredibly adaptable to whatever the interpreter wished to infuse into it; Bosch's legacy was continually reconfigured to others' ends and endowed with meanings far beyond the late-medieval painter's time and place.

Publication year:2019