The 30 best art books of 2024 – Hyperallergic

By recontextualizing the Renaissance in downright gothic terms, Bosch becomes the primogeniture of an alternative school of the period that is marked by the monstrous as much as the humanistic. Aikema and Cremades’s argument isn’t a boring rehash of the Northern versus the Italian Renaissance debate. This alternative school isn’t marked by geography as much as it is by perspective, so that Giuseppe Arcimboldo joins Netherlandish counterparts like Pieter Brueghel in their turn towards the bizarre.