A bird-monster devouring sinners, naked bodies in tantric contortions, a pair of ears brandishing a sharpened blade: with just 20 paintings and nine drawings to his name, Netherlandish visionary Hieronymus Bosch (c.1450-1516) secured his place as a pillar of art history. To this day, the painter par excellence of hell and its demons continues to puzzle and enthral scholars, artists, designers, and musicians alike. Based on the best-selling XXL edition, which saw Taschen commission new and exclusive photography of details and recently restored works, this large-scale monograph presents Bosch's complete oeuvre. Texts from art historian and Bosch expert Stefan Fischer dissect the many compelling elements that populate each scene, from hybrid creatures of man and beast to Bosch's pictorial use of proverbs and idioms. By tying together the elusive threads of his oeuvre into one exhaustive overview, this book reveals just what it was about Bosch and his painting that proved so immensely influential. Features impeccable full-page reproductions celebrating the artist's staggering compositional scope, enlarged details unveiling the most intricate and bizarre scenes as much as the unsuspected technical minutiae, from subtle brush-strokes to the grain of the canvas and a fold-out spread drawn from the legendary Last Judgement. A special chapter focusses on Bosch's most famous work, the mesmerizing and terrifying triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. Colour. Hardcover with fold-out, 25 x 34 cm, a weighty 3 kg, 300 pages.

Caravaggio, or more accurately Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610), was always a name to be reckoned with. Notorious bad boy of Italian painting, the artist was at once celebrated and controversial: violent in temper, precise in technique, a creative master, and a man on the run. Caravaggio employed close physical observation with a dramatic use of chiaroscuro that came to be known as tenebrism. He made the technique a dominant stylistic element, transfixing subjects in bright shafts of light and darkening shadows. Caravaggio vividly expressed crucial moments and scenes, often featuring violent struggles, torture, and death. He worked rapidly with live models, preferring to forgo drawings and work directly onto the canvas. His first version of Saint Matthew and the Angel, featuring the saint as a bald peasant with dirty legs attended by a lightly clad over-familiar boy-angel, was rejected and a second version had to be painted as The Inspiration of Saint Matthew. Similarly, The Conversion of Saint Paul was rejected, and while another version of the same subject, the Conversion on the Way to Damascus, was accepted, it featured the saint's horse's haunches far more prominently than the saint himself. This excellent new Taschen edition offers a neat and comprehensive Caravaggio catalogue raisonné. Each of his paintings is reproduced from recent top-quality photography, allowing for a vivid encounter with the artist's ingenious repertoire of looks and gestures, as well as numerous detail shots of his boundary-breaking naturalism. Five accompanying chapters trace the complete arc of Caravaggio's career from his first public commissions in Rome through to his growing celebrity status and trace his tempestuous personal life, in which drama loomed as prominently as in his canvases. Colour. 15.6 x 21.7cm, 512 pages.

Observer Best Art Book 2021, it is an illuminating exploration of the intersection between life, art and the sea from the award-winning author of Leviathan. Albrecht Dürer changed the way we saw nature through art. From his prints in 1498 of the plague-ridden Apocalypse, the first works mass produced by any artist, to his hyper-real images of animals and plants, Dürer's art was a revelation. It not only showed us who we are, but also foresaw our future, a vision that remains startingly powerful and seductive today. Philip Hoare encounters medieval alchemists and modernist poets, eccentric emperors and queer soul rebels, ambassadorial whales and enigmatic pop artists. He witnesses the miraculous birth of Dürer's fantastical rhinoceros and his hermaphroditic hare and traces the fate of the star-crossed leviathan and the artist pursued. 'In another scene, from Eden, other animals slipped out of the forest, the humans as naked and content as them, until then. The scene receded, three-dimensionally, in layers. In the distance, a goat teetered on a cliff. Maybe this is where the world began... Then in another picture I saw an angel... Another sleepy dog dozed at the hem of their robes, a comet burst over the distant sea.' We can appreciate the many famous artworks through the eyes of a dreamer and wonderfully descriptive writer. 'Dürer gave you more ink per square inch. Peter Ursem, a Dutch artist, tells me that woodcuts differed from wood engravings... They're fossils, or contour maps of the seabed. In their gullies and crevices, agony collects. Dürer turned these blocks in his inky fingers, before the next run. Adam and Eve are chased from Eden; an archangel wields a sword; Christ dies, over and over again.' In 1515 Dürer created his Man of Sorrows, the first metal etching known to western history. If his woodcuts are astounding, his engravings are almost uncanny. Very well illustrated and with a series of colour plates at the end of this fine 4th Estate publication with its witty accounts and delight in the fragile beauty of the natural world. 304pp.