The Garden of Earthly Delights
Hieronymus Bosch (about 1450 to 1516) · 1490 to 1500
Three panels, nearly four metres wide when open, show the story of humanity from Creation to damnation as no one else has ever imagined it. On the left God presents Eve to Adam in a paradise of strange animals and a pink fountain. In the centre, hundreds of naked men and women feast on giant strawberries, ride on birds and pigs, climb inside shells and bubbles and pair off in every combination, in a landscape of blue and pink towers. On the right is Hell at night, where a bird-headed monster eats the damned, a man is crucified on a harp, and a hollow tree-man with a face that may be Bosch's own looks out over the wreckage.
Nobody knows exactly what Bosch meant, and that is part of the pull. The central panel has been read as a warning against lust, as a picture of a false paradise before the Flood, and as a dream of innocence. Look closely and the detail becomes endless: a couple inside a mussel shell, a man carrying a giant fish, an owl watching from a hole, ears with a knife between them marching like a war machine. Bosch paints with a fine brush on a light ground so that every colour glows, and his monsters are assembled from real animals, plants and household objects in a spirit of grim play.
The triptych was probably made for a nobleman of Brussels and was seen in his palace in 1517. Philip the Second of Spain, who collected Bosch obsessively, acquired it in 1591 and sent it to the Escorial, and it came to the Prado in 1939. When the wings are closed the outside shows the world on the third day of Creation, painted in grey inside a glass globe. Do not miss the tiny figure with a musical score written across his backside in the hell panel; it has been transcribed and performed.
Did You Know? The music written across the buttocks of a sinner in the Hell panel has been transcribed by modern musicians and can be listened to online.
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