German and Netherlandish Drawings 1350-1500

The project aims to catalogue all German, Bohemian, Netherlandish and French late Gothic drawings worldwide, covering the period form 1350 up to 1500, to the beginnings of the Renaissance, the great majority of which is still untreated. The materials in question comprise more than 2.500 German, ca. 800 Netherlandish and about 350-400 French and Bohemian drawings. Such drawings are often misjudged both in collections as well as in the art market and literature, so that it seems necessary to treat them within one project. In this way, it will be possible to separate French and Bohemian materials from German and Dutch ones on more convincing grounds, and to distinguish more distinctly between Austria and other German regions of artistic production. It is planned to establish a worldwide record of these drawings within a multivolumed work, subdivided according to regions (similar to the Corpus of Italian drawings 1300-1450 by B. Degenhart and A. Schmitt, Berlin 1968, 14 vls. until 2004). The corpus envisaged is supposed to contain illustrations of the entire number of works plus a catalogue of the drawings with scientific investigations considering artistic individuality. Chapters serving as introductions into the various sections should outline regional artistic peculiarities, developments, influences, etc. as concisely and at the same time as clearly as possible. For the sake of comprehensibility, explanatory chapters are supposed to be included for marginal fields of drawing, such as preparatory drawings for book illustration, architectural drawings in connection with sculpture or wall-painting, sinopias or infrared reflectography, as far as required.

The catalogue raisonné deals with the autograph drawings by Hieronymus Bosch, with the drawings of his workshop and followers up to 1600 as well as with the drawings erroneously attributed to Bosch in the art historical literature. This includes 61 sheets at all and results to 84 entries with the drawings on their backsides.This material encircles works from 1400 up to 1600. It turns out that only 11 of the drawings can be considered to be by Bosch`s own hand. The critical catalogue of the drawings is preceeded by an extensive introduction. This outlines not only the stylistic development of Early Netherlandish drawing, discusses Bosch`s drawings as described in arthistorical literature and deals in detail with Bosch as a painter. Here a controversial theory, concerning the workshop organization of Bosch, debated since 2002, will be deepened. The drawings compared with the paintings allow to distinguish four collaborators of his workshop. Among these employees it become possible to separate a lefthanded draftsman to whom some of the best known sofar supposed as works of Hieronymus Bosch e.g. the Haywain (Madrid), The Peddlar (Rotterdam) or the Ship of Fools (Paris) can be attributed. Stylistic matching the drawings with the paintings seems further to allow for the first time a rough chronology of Boschs`s graphic work. The publication aims to be a manual, addressed not only to arthistorians but also to interested laymen. This catalogue raisonné is the first comprehensive publication on Hieronymus Bosch as a draftsman.