The Garden of Earthly Delights by Jheronimus Bosch

https://tuinderlusten-jheronimusbosch.ntr.nl/en

by ivank • 8 years ago

128 23 8 years ago

tuinderlusten-jheronimusbosch.ntr.nl

Hieronymus Bosch's work is remarkable and getting to see it in person was one of the most delightful experiences I've had. To convey beauty in the grotesque, the macabre and the unreal: what a genius he was!

(Also, visual art is not something that I used to enjoy for the majority of my life and I still know next to nothing of art but I just found his work spellbinding)

jxub• 8 years ago

I still find his work mindblowing. He's like a mix between Goya, Picasso and Dali but almost half a millenium ago!

theoh2• 8 years ago

Painting has deteriorated since the old masters, of whom Goya is sometimes considered the last. Why this happened is not something people have a good answer for, but the end of the 18th C brought increasing rationalisation, modernisation and division of labour which seems to have gradually killed the skills and ways of looking that produced previous masterpieces. It is sad.

Picasso is great, but in a very 20th C way, a lot of what carries his work is a feeling of his energy and charisma, rather than depth of technique of concept. In contrast someone like Bosch was creating these very intensely realised fantasy scenes. Picasso couldn't have done that if he tried, nor can any movie concept artist working today. The same goes for any of the old masters. It's gone, somehow...

TheSpiceIsLife• 8 years ago

Speak of grotesque, macabre, and unreal, HR Giger and Mark Ryden spring to mind.

B1FF_PSUVM• 8 years ago

Back in 2016, the Museo del Prado, in Madrid, staged a sort of class reunion for the 500th anniversary of Bosch's death, with paintings coming from all over the world.

Only snag is that you can easily spend half an hour going over the details of a single painting, and viewer lines have to keep moving. Probably the optimal number of Bosch paintings in a museum is 1 ;-)

The books (e.g. Hieronymus Bosch, The Complete Works by Stefan Fischer) have trouble showing both the whole picture (too small) and the details (too fragmentary).

dang• 8 years ago

Discussed in 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11067566

gjkood• 8 years ago

Being a total art ignoramous but clearly interested in the technical aspects behind the site, I quickly googled the painting and learned that it was a triptych (had to google that) whose dimensions were 87 in x 153 in.

A few questions to anyone who can shed more light:

1. What would be the likely dimensions of the source image in pixels to reach such a zoomed level of detail?

2. What kind of camera equipment would I need to photograph such an image of similar size? Can I get away with a run of the mill DSLR such as Nikon D3400/D7500 or Canon EOS 80D?

3. What kind of lens is suitable? Macro?

4. What would be the process of photographing such an image? Taking a single high-res image or taking a series of high-res macro images under suitable lighting and stitching them together?

5. What would be the tools to host the image that would allow this kind of interactivity?

I have a project in mind that could make use of the same technology.

Palomides• 8 years ago

it's probably a number of carefully lit shots with a phase one camera/back. if you are very careful with positioning you could stitch a bunch of shots with a cheaper camera. definitely read up on lighting art for photography, that's going to be critical. macro lens is probably not necessary. there are a variety of javascript-y things for dynamically viewing large images, shouldn't be /too/ hard to find or set up.

edit: in this video, at 0:25 you can see the setup presumably used. https://vimeo.com/ondemand/jheronimusbosch/146311294

tkp• 8 years ago

Had some success with this amateur setup to get a higher resolution image from multiple Nikon D90 photos :

- take multiple zoomed-in low DOF overlapping photos, with fixed settings, covering the artwork from a tripod, only rotating the camera

- stitch with Hugin[1] and export undistorted UHD photo

- split the it into tiles according to your viewer's format with ImageMagick

- view with a tile viewer. OpenSeaDragon[2] is smooth and well suited for UHD images, but any can be adapted/used, for example leaflet[3].

Would love to hear about other workflows !

The Bosch websites seems to use Micrio[4] for the UHD viewing and storytelling.

[1] http://hugin.sourceforge.net/

[2] https://openseadragon.github.io/

[3] https://leafletjs.com

[4] https://micr.io/

moron4hire• 8 years ago

You should prefer to translate the image rather than rotate the camera. Rotation creates images that need to be spherically reprojected to get the rectangular image back out again. You end up losing resolution at the edges of the image, because they are further away from the camera than the center.

elorant• 8 years ago

As to the fourth question, here's a video that shows how a painting is photographed in order to produce a Giclee (aka a high res copy).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3Do2MvtFAU

ttctciyf• 8 years ago

More on the mysterious Bosch and The Garden of Earthly Delights in particular (in the closing quarter of the article) can be found in [1].

See also [2] for an intriguing piece on possible gnostic symbolism in this painting.

1: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/08/18/mystery-of-hieron...

2: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/246864

Iwan-Zotow• 8 years ago

Getting sometimes NaNs when press on bookmark

eutelic• 8 years ago

Here's another treatment: http://s3.imagediver.org/topic/album/4294b0e/garden_of_earth...

MisterTea• 8 years ago

A fantastic work of art. It was also used in a Buckethead music video where it was animated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bSZslEDUl0

_Microft• 8 years ago

Beside the image itself being awesome, I like the presentation on this website a lot.

Did you notice that the background music changes depending on where you zoom in on the image?

jacquesm• 8 years ago

http://www.rocklandstrand.com/sites/default/files/heirony.jp...

amorphic• 8 years ago

Any fans of Bosch's work should also check out Dave Patchett (http://davepatchett.net/).

I'm not sure if Dave's been active recently but he's best known for the use of his paintings as album covers for seminal UK doom metal band Cathedral.

I was fortunate enough to meet Dave in 2005 and purchase one his paintings. Chatting with him he confirmed my suspicion that he was heavily influenced by Bosch.

beyondCritics• 8 years ago

I am somewhat shocked to realize, that this is a true altarpiece.

The Garden of Earthly Delights by Jheronimus Bosch

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