Hieronymus Bosch/Hieronimus Bosch

LAST year’s Kafka “revival” is paralleled on a lesser scale this season by an upsurge of interest in the fifteenthcentury Netherlands painter Bosch. Both were possessed of a preternatural awareness of the fear and guilt caverns of man’s inner life, the subject material of so much contemporary literature and art. “What they [the surrealists] have to say,” Mr. Daniel observes, in what is the first study of Bosch written in English, “is the pale echo of what was said by Hieronymus Bosch four hundred and fifty years earlier.” Mr. Combe’s (translated from the French) is the more substantial text, though both offer a lucid and penetrating analysis of Bosch’s nightmare universe. In Mr. Daniel’s volume the reproductions — twelve in full color, forty-eight in black and white are superior. Mr. Combe has the edge in quantity.