Free Thinking – Hieronymus Bosch anniversary
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 16 February 2016
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Tom Shakespeare, film director Peter Greenaway and art historian Matthijs Ilsink join Matthew Sweet in Holland for an exhibition marking the 500th anniversary of the death of artist Hieronymus Bosch. Matthew also talks to Plebaan Geertjan van Rossem, priest at St John's Cathedral in 's-Hertogenbosch, to get a religious perspective on Bosch's work.
Het Noordbrabants Museum in 's-Hertogenbosch, Holland, presents the Jheronimus Bosch – Visions of a Genius exhibition from February 13 to May 8, 2016. 20 paintings (panels and triptychs) and 19 drawings are on display.
You might also be interested listening to Saturday 13 February, 1302-1500: Saturday Classics: Ahead of his BBC4 series Renaissance Unchained, art critic Waldemar Januszczak conjures up the sound world of this epoch of huge passions and powerful religious emotions across all of Europe. The term 'Renaissance', or 'rinascita', was coined by Giorgio Vasari in 16th-century Florence, and his assertion that it had fixed origins in Italy has since influenced all of art history. But what of Flanders, Germany and the rest of Northern Europe? Waldemar presents music from the time of the Renaissance greats: Jan Van Eyck, Hans Memling, Albrecht Dürer, Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Leonardo and El Greco.
Producer: Laura Thomas
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.1 | This is Schertergenbos. |
| 0:34.5 | The word is alien to English eyes. |
| 0:37.0 | What kind of a place name begins with an inverted comma, followed by a lowercase S, then a dash, than an uppercase H? Well, Scher degenbosch. Standing here, it all looks fairly normal. Pavement cafes, cobbles, boutiques, the rows of reassuringly bourgeois Dutch townhouses |
| 0:55.9 | of the kind that you see in Vermeer. |
| 0:58.5 | But over there, a pair of giant disembodied ears |
| 1:03.3 | pierced by an enormous knife. |
| 1:06.1 | And above my head here, a banner with a weird bird-like animal on it. |
| 1:10.7 | The monsters are gathering in Schetigan Bosch. |
| 1:15.7 | Here in this town is a gateway to hell, a portal to the world of a man who took his name |
| 1:22.0 | from this town, lived here and died here 500 years ago, Hieronymus Bosch. |
| 1:28.3 | So I'm now going to practice saying your name, |
| 1:32.3 | which is Gietian von Rossum. |
| 1:35.3 | Yes. |
| 1:36.3 | Hirth. |
| 1:37.3 | Hirth Jan von Roesam. |
| 1:39.3 | Yes, that's it. |
| 1:41.3 | Who is the dean, in effect, of the cathedral here. Yes, yes. |
| 1:45.1 | Only four or five hundred meters from here is his house where he lived, |
| 1:50.5 | and only ten or twenty meters from here is his tomb, |
... |
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