Description from Wikipedia:
- The work depicts Jesus carrying the cross above a dark background, surrounded by numerous heads, most of which characterized with grotesque faces. There are a total of eighteen portraits, plus one on Veronica's veil. Jesus has a woeful expression, his closed eyes and the head reclinate.
In the bottom right corner is the impenitent thief, who sneers against three men who are mocking him. The penitent thief is at top right: he is portrayed with a very pale skin, while being confessed by a horribly ugly monk.
Detail. The bottom left corner houses Veronica with the holy shroud, her eyes half-open and the face looking back. Finally, at the top left is Simon of Cyrene, his face upside upturned.
Thanks for this! Great piece. It's not from the same era by any means, but this one's been haunting me since I saw it at the DIA (quite a while ago now): Not really surreal, at least not any more so than the Greek myth which inspired it, but certainly disturbing. Especially because there's some basis to it: horses do apparently sometimes throw down on some flesh. Horses of instruction, my arse! As far as the Renaissance painters go, especially Dutch, I've always really liked Brueghel's (the elder) stuff. Equally preoccupied with religious themes, comparably grotesque. In tracking down his paintings, I see one of them was used on a Black Sabbath album cover. 'Nuff said? His other stuff is broad in scope and often whimsical, which I like, such as this one:
I suppose you know this one too? It's Nederlandse Spreekwoorden, Dutch Proverbs, and also used as the cover of a Fleet Foxes album. I think it's an amazing picture, as most proverbs are still used in Dutch so for me it's a linguistic Where's Waldo. There are some really weird ones as well. For instance, in the middle you can see two people shitting out a window: an old proverb goes something like 'to shit through the same hole' and it's said of people who agree with each other or who are comrades.
Awesome. After reading the full wikipedia post, I have to assume that the dude chilling on the wall is Heracles.Heracles was not aware that the horses, called Podargos (the fast[citation needed][1]), Lampon (the shining), Xanthos (the yellow) and Deinos (the terrible),[2] were kept tethered to a bronze manger because they were wild; their madness being attributed to an unnatural diet of human flesh.
Well, da Vinci for one. Picasso for another. Probably Vermeer. As far as weird surreality that didn't exactly influence the rest of the world but appears anachronistically ahead of its time, he's up there with Richard Dadd: I dig Bosch in his own way but he's not that much weirder than a lot of his contemporaries.