On January the 10th 2018, I watched a documentary movie called “Bosch, the Garden of Dreams”. It is about the famous Dutch artist in 15-16c, Hieronymus Bosch. If you understand all the English, French, Dutch and Spanish, you may enjoy the movie to full extent (that I didn’t). The paintings by Bosch are full of imagination from gargoyles, illustrations of medieval manuscripts, sermons, and visual hallucinations. They brought revolution in artistic expressions of the age. Creatures in the garden of earthly delights are mysterious, and those in the hell are very cruel to the human beings, representing the attitudes of surrounding worlds to humans. However, by careful observation, they also maintain very conservative thoughts for Christianity. If one does not understand the paintings of Bosch are conservative in the sense of Christianity, it means one does not understand Christianity at all. Japanese people, who often stick to the controversy between Geocentrism and Heliocentrism, or creationism and evolution, have to be careful for this type of expressions of “conservative”. One may be lead to “weird dreams” with a sort of strange harmony existing inside the paintings.
