Hieronymous Bosch Action Figures!
Cough. Right. Apologies. I didn’t mean to leave that ‘weasel in a farty prock’ thing hanging at the top of the page all day, sucking up attention. First thing this morning, I’m staring blearily at the Drudge Report and it suddenly comes back to me: I was handed a rush job last Friday that absolutely had to be done by Monday afternoon. So I’ve been doing that.
It involved faking up stupid marketing slogans on billboards, so my first stop was a Google images search for highway photos. Don’t ask me what the connection is, but these neato action figures turned up on some French site a few pages in. These things are almost as creepy as Pokémon. I find some of the strangest things through image searches.
When I tried to right click and save the images right off the browser, a dialogue box popped up that said “ATTENTION ! Tout contenu de ce site est soumis aux directives concernant let droits d’auteurs. Reproduction interdite.” This is français for “I’m a socialist Eurotard who doesn’t understand the first thing about marketing or I would realize spreading pictures
of my crap would probably help me sell it.”
So I did a screen capture.
I love Bosch. Ship of Fools and Death of a Miser are in the National Gallery in Washington and they were part of my regular tour, back when I hit the Smithsonian once a year. There really is something deeply spooky about his stuff.
A friend of mine tried to ruin Bosch for me by pointing out that these weren’t just fever dreams; all of these objects were specific religious symbols. Maybe. But, outside Breughel the Elder (who was a conscious imitator), nobody has ever painted anything REMOTELY like this stuff. So how universal could these symbols have been?
September 17, 2007 — 2:06 pm
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