If you hope to inspire an appreciation of Renaissance art in your children, look to Hieronymus Bosch. Ideally, your children will not be sensitive types, nor prone to nightmares, but if they can handle a little, or indeed quite a lot, of fantasy, Bosch will blow their tiny minds.
My four-year-old lad, Luca, definitely not a delicate chap, was deeply impressed by ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ when I showed him reproductions. He remains unmoved by Leonardo and bored rigid by Giotto, but Bosch snared him. I should hunt down a full-size poster and hang it in his room. I read somewhere that Leonardo DiCaprio snoozed beneath one as a boy, and look where it got him.
Bosch fascinates everyone though, not just impressionable infants. This year is the 500th anniversary of his death and he is being celebrated both in his home town of ‘s-Hertogenbosch and in Madrid, where much of his output resides.
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