In the midst of the realist-leaning artistic climate of the Late Gothic & Early Renaissance Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch (c 1450-1516) was more than an anomaly Bosch&s paintings are populated with grotesque scenes of fantastical creatures succumbing to all manner of human desire fantasy & angst One of his greatest inventions was to take the figural & scenic representations known as drolleries which use the monstrous & the grotesque to illustrate sin & evil & to transfer them from the marginalia of illuminated manuscripts into large-format panel paintings Alongside traditional hybrids of man & beast such as centaurs & mythological creatures such as unicorns devils dragons & griffins we also encounter countless mixed creatures freely invented by the artist Many subsidiary scenes illustrate proverbs & figures of speech in common use in Bosch&s day In his Temptation of St Anthony triptych for example the artist shows a messenger devil wearing ice skates evoking the popular expression that the world was "skating on ice"-meaning it had gone astray In his pictorial translation of proverbs in particular Bosch was very much an innovator Bosch-whose real name was Jheronimus van Aken-was widely copied & imitated the number of surviving works by Bosch&s followers exceeds the master&s own production by more than tenfold Today only 20 paintings & eight drawings are confidently assigned to Bosch&s oeuvre He continues to be seen as a visionary a portrayer of dreams & nightmares & the painter par excellence of hell & its demons Featuring brand new photography of recently restored paintings this book covers the artist&s complete works Discover Bosch&s pictorial inventions in splendid reproductions with copious details Art historian & acknowledged Bosch expert Stefan Fischer examines just what it was about Bosch & his painting that proved so immensely influential