Acknowledgments

Carroll, Margaret D.

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Acknowledgments

Margaret D. Carroll

Hieronymus Bosch: Time and Transformation in The Garden of Earthly Delights

Acknowledgments

Author

Margaret D. Carroll

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23176

Acknowledgments

It may be the case that in writing about a work of art, to a certain extent one is writing about oneself. It is certainly the case that in this study of The Garden of Earthly Delights I have focused on themes that resonate with me: themes having to do with worldly curiosity, discovery, conjecture, and invention; also questions of racial difference, sexual difference, and sexual inclination. I am grateful to Katharine Park, my former colleague at Wellesley, for introducing me to those aspects of the late medieval culture of curiosity that she set forth with her colleague Lorraine Daston in their pathbreaking book Wonders and the Order of Nature. I am indebted to the pioneering book by Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing, for steering art historians away from dwelling upon the admonitory and allegorical messages putatively embedded in northern European paintings to considering the ways in which those artists inventively confronted the visible world. I am grateful to Svetlana for hours of stimulating conversation, for reading early drafts of this book, and for generously offering critical suggestions. I am also grateful to Elizabeth A. Honig for her astute criticisms and encouragement.

It has been a delight to try out my ideas about Bosch’s triptych with generations of receptive students at Wellesley College. Likewise, my thinking has been enriched by stimulating conversations with my colleagues on the Art Department faculty. Jeanne Hablanian and Brooke Henderson, art librarians, have been marvels of graciousness and ingenuity in helping me obtain books and other research materials. I thank the college for financially supporting my research and travel. I thank Amy Canonico at Yale University Press for her gracious and creative criticism in reading and suggesting revisions for multiple iterations of these chapters. I am also indebted to designer Jeff Wincapaw, to copy editor Ann Twombly, and to Heidi Downey, Sarah Henry, and Raychel Rapazza for their skillful work in preparing the manuscript for publication.

It is also time for me to acknowledge a long-standing debt of gratitude to a circle of friends that formed when we were all fellows at the Bunting Institute (now the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study) in 1984–1985. Writers, artists, scholars, activists, we have met once or twice a year almost every year since then to talk about our lives, work, and shifting aspirations. In the Covid era, we now meet weekly via Zoom. Thanks to my remarkable friends: Gudrun Brattström, Kate Daniels, Jaimy Gordon, Marianne Hirsch, Renée Neblett, Gail Reimer, Jane Sharp, Val Smith, Susan Strasser, and Elaine Spatz-Rabinowitz. Elaine’s paintings—her exquisite craftsmanship and her own engagement with the themes of time and transformation—have awed me for years. Elaine’s work drives home the enduring timeliness of Bosch’s premonitions of ecological and political catastrophe.

I also want to acknowledge the importance of my friendship with the dearly missed Chantal Akerman. By watching her in action and by conversing with her about her work as a filmmaker, I became inclined to dwell less upon questions of audience response to The Garden of Earthly Delights and more upon the artist’s creative investment in painting and revising his work.

I am endlessly grateful to my family for their warmth, good cheer, and encouragement: my son, Samuel Carroll, and his wife, Sarah; my daughter, Sophia Carroll Garmey, and her husband, Edward, their children, Nathaniel and Eleanor, and the children’s grandparents, Hal Carroll, Amy Ryan, and Jane Garmey.

My sister, Mary, has been a cornerstone and beacon for me since my earliest years. My gratitude for her sisterly love and oversight is boundless. She has never refrained from advising me on how she thought I should proceed through life, and for the most part she has been right.

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