1a. What did Bosch and others in Dutch society during the 1400s and 1500s believe about death?
2a. What does careful analysis tell the curator about the figure at the foot of the bed?
3a. How did Bosch originally draw the dying man?
1b. How are those beliefs depicted in the painting?
2b. How do you think the curator came to this conclusion?
3b. Why do you think he changed his mind in the final painting?
4a. What elements seem to be most important in this painting? Rank them in order of importance.
4b. What do the mix of good and evil elements in this painting suggest about the miser's fate? What do you believe the miser's fate was?
5a. How correct do you think this interpretation of Death and the Miser is? What, if any, elements might the curator and the authors have overlooked?
5b. If you could change something about the painting, what would you change?
Description and Analysis. How does this interpretation deal with the final synthesis of information?
1. Choose another painting reproduced in this book, and write a brief description of it.
2. Write a very short story about what happens to the old man in Death and the Miser.
3. Write song lyrics about the theme of good versus evil.
Synonyms and Antonyms. A synonym is a word that means the same or nearly the same as another word. An antonym is a word that means the opposite of another word. Fill in the following chart, writing down as many synonyms and antonyms for each word that you can think of. If you get stuck, use a dictionary or thesaurus to add to your lists.
Parts of the Sentence Review. The skills in this exercise combine all that you have learned about sentence structure this year. You may want to review the Language Arts Survey 3.14–3.20 to review the parts of a sentence. For each of the sentences below, indentify the simple subject(s), the verb(s), and the complement(s) (if any are present). Then indicate the kind of complement you have identified. Write down DO if the complement is a direct object, IO if it is an indirect object, PA if it is a predicate adjective, PN if it is a predicate noun, or PP if it is a predicate pronoun.
1. The curator investigates ideas about good and evil in Dutch society.
2. Students, careful analysis can give the curator further information within the painting.
3. Art, literature, and painting, only three of many art forms, use symbols.
4. Painting can be a history of an age; art reveals values and priorities.
5. Bosch's paintings have given values visual forms; skeletons are one of the forms.
6. Everyone understood the symbols; most came from religion.
7. Death and doom were both represented by skeletons.
8. Why might Bosch have chosen a miser and not a poor man?
9. Perhaps the money represents the world; a miser must leave it behind.
10. Other people may see the money as representing sin and evil pleasures.
Interpreting a Painting. Visit the National Gallery of Art Internet site at http://www.nga.gov/. Browse through the virtual exhibitions or other pages of the site, and locate a painting you particularly like. As you are viewing the painting and/or reading about it, try to answer the following questions:
What about the painting makes the biggest impact on you? Why does it?
What object, person, or element in the painting stands out the most?
What is happening in the less prominent parts of the painting?
What expressions appear on the faces of characters in the painting?
Which elements of the painting may be symbols representing other ideas? What other ideas might they represent?
