The Curious World of Hieronymus Bosch

600 years ago, in 1516, in the Duchy of Burgundy, Hieronymus Bosch died - an artist who linked the Middle Ages and the New Age with his work and remained a mystery to art critics. In 2016, his works returned to the hometown of the painter Hertogenbosch in North Brabant for one of the main exhibitions of the year - "Hieronymus Bosch. The vision of a genius". In three months, the North Brabant Museum was visited by almost 500,000 people, and the curator of the exhibition, Charles de Mooy, rightly noted that it is unlikely that Bosch himself saw so many of his own masterpieces collected together: 17 of the 24 surviving paintings by Bosch were on display at the exhibition, 19 of the 20 drawings. 8 years - that's how long it took the curators of the exhibition "Hieronymus Bosch. The Vision of a Genius" to get most of Bosch's paintings for the exhibition. The heir of medieval symbolism and the forerunner of surrealism, an artist without whom there would be neither Goya nor Dali, Hieronymus Bosch continues to intrigue his viewers. The amazing "Garden of Earthly Delights" and the poignant "Behold a Man", the most unusual image of John the Baptist in history and the triptych "The Haystack" are still impressive because of how whimsically Bosch combines the incongruous and uses metaphor in painting. The film "The Wonderful World of Hieronymus Bosch" offers an afterword to the exhibitions held in the Dutch city of Hertogenbosch and at the Prado Museum in Madrid in 2016.