Luc van den Heuvel’s Reviews > Bosch > Status Update

As the Netherlandish and Belgian scholars Dirk Bax and Roger H. Marijnissen, in particular, have shown, Bosch's paintings often house visual translations of verbal puns and metaphors.

The older masters anchored their subjects in the realm of empirical visual experience, even when treating supernatural themes. Bosch, on the other hand, seems to confront us with a world of dreams, and more specifically a world of nightmares, full of ghosts rising like insistent hallucinations.