Bosch and Breughel: From Enemy Painter to Everyday Life by Joseph Leo Koerner (review)

Bosch teems with the glory of the grotesque, with antic wit, rejoicing in the diablerie so much in fashion in his day. His art is one of puns, of erotic delight, of studied illiteracy and neoprimitivism, but not, I think, of enmity. Breughel is far more complex than the everyday that meets the eye, his an art for humanists and aristocrats. All that being said, the happiest aspects of Koerner’s book—studded with erudite aperçus, teeming with little-known and apropos information about the history and theology of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—are the surprises and delights he scatters with such prodigality along the way. His inspired tribute to the genius of Jim Carrey—Hollywood’s brightest star since Chaplin’s superior, Buster Keaton—should be required reading for anyone in film studies. Koerner should follow the virtuosic example of his Harvard colleague Tom Conley and write in that area himself.