NEW ACQUISITION IN BOSTON

ALMOST nothing is known of Hieronymus Bosch beyond the facts that he lived in 15th-century Burgundy, belonged to the austere lay Brotherhood of Our Lady, and painted some of the world's greatest pictures. He was perhaps better understood in an earlier age than at present. In 1605 a Spanish monk wrote that "Bosch alone has the courage to depict the inner and the essential . . . His paintings are not farces but like books of great wisdom." Today Bosch is called the "father of surrealism" and admired chiefly as a convincing fantasist.

The Boston Museum of Fine Arts' recently acquired Ecce Homo (right) helps correct that impression. Unlike Bosch's better-known canvases of nightmare torture and lust, it presents the actual: a turning point in human history. Bosch packed the expressions of the foreground crowd with cruelty and pride and made Pilate a picture of complacency, but these purely human horrors convince the mind as well as the eye. Christ, bound and crowned with thorns, dominates the scene by His gentleness, and speaks through it to the heart.

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