An Introduction to The Garden of Earthly Delights & Hieronymus Bosch’s Wildly Creative Vision

Hierony­mus Bosch’s mas­ter­piece of grotes­querie, The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights, con­tains a young God, Adam and Eve, over­sized fruits and musi­cal instru­ments, owls, tor­tured sin­ners, some­thing called a “tree man” whose body con­tains an entire tav­ern, a defe­cat­ing avian dev­il eat­ing a human being, and “frol­ick­ing, obliv­i­ous fig­ures engaged in all sorts of car­nal plea­sures,” as art his­to­ri­an Beth Har­ris puts it in the new Smarthis­to­ry video above. Through­out its fif­teen min­utes, she and her col­league Steven Zuck­er explain as much as pos­si­ble of this jam-packed trip­tych — not that even a life­time would be long enough to under­stand it ful­ly.

“Bosch con­founds our abil­i­ty to even talk about what we see,” says Har­ris. “His imag­i­na­tion has run wild. He’s just invent­ed so many things here that we could nev­er even have thought about in our wildest imag­i­na­tions.” Zuck­er cites one art-his­to­ry the­o­ry that this trip­tych rep­re­sents Bosch’s attempt to “ele­vate the visu­al arts to the lev­el of cre­ativ­i­ty that was per­mit­ted in lit­er­a­ture.”

Even in Bosch’s late fif­teenth and ear­ly six­teenth cen­turies, writ­ers had an envi­ably free hand in choos­ing and pre­sent­ing their sub­ject mat­ter; because the direct­ly rep­re­sen­ta­tive form of paint­ing, by con­trast, “had always been at the ser­vice of reli­gion, it was inher­ent­ly more con­ser­v­a­tive.”

It’s entire­ly pos­si­ble — and oth­er analy­ses pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here at Open Cul­ture have argued it – that Bosch, too, was work­ing at the ser­vice of reli­gion. But it could also be that The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights, in its vast mid­dle pan­el, tells “an alter­nate sto­ry,” as Zuck­er puts it. “What if the temp­ta­tion had not tak­en place? What if Adam and Eve had remained inno­cent, and had pop­u­lat­ed the world? And so, is it pos­si­ble that what we’re see­ing is that real­i­ty, played out in Bosch’s imag­i­na­tion?” Not that such a vision would have read­i­ly been accept­ed in the artist’s own time and place — nor that his inten­tions alone could lead us to a com­plete inter­pre­ta­tion of his work. As any nov­el­ist knows, some­times your char­ac­ters sim­ply take over, and it could hard­ly have been with­in even Bosch’s pow­ers to deny the desires of a cast so teem­ing and bizarre.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Mean­ing of Hierony­mus Bosch’s The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights Explained

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Hierony­mus Bosch’s Bewil­der­ing Mas­ter­piece The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights

Hierony­mus Bosch’s Medieval Paint­ing, “The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights,” Comes to Life in a Gigan­tic, Mod­ern Ani­ma­tion

The Mean­ing of Hierony­mus Bosch’s Spell­bind­ing Trip­tych The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights

The Musi­cal Instru­ments in Hierony­mus Bosch’s The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights Get Brought to Life, and It Turns Out That They Sound “Painful” and “Hor­ri­ble”

A Dig­i­tal Archive of Hierony­mus Bosch’s Com­plete Works: Zoom In & Explore His Sur­re­al Art

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.