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Imagine it’s 1517 and you are the secretary to an Italian cardinal traveling across Europe. In a palace in Brussels you come across an unusual painting. Later, in your travel diary, you try to describe what you saw:
“There are some panels on which bizarre things have been painted. They represent seas, skies, woods, meadows, and many other things, such as people crawling out of a shell, others that bring forth birds, men and women, whites and blacks doing all sorts of different activities and poses. Birds, animals of all kinds, executed very naturally, things that are so delightful and fantastic, that it is impossible to describe them properly to those who have not seen them.”
This is the first description we have of someone encountering the painting known as “The Garden of Earthly Delights.”
For more than five centuries, it has been a fascination. Scholars have tried to puzzle out the meaning of every square inch, and at over 12 feet wide across the three panels, there is plenty to look at. It’s so enigmatic partly because there is so much in it and so little truly known about it.
First, a touch of context on the art and the artist, because a touch is all we have. Hieronymus Bosch came from a family of painters in the Netherlands. He lived roughly from 1450 to 1516. A Catholic, he belonged to an elite conservative brotherhood within the church. He probably painted this triptych between 1490 and 1500. (The Mona Lisa was painted around the same time, in the early 1500s.) No one is sure who commissioned the piece or what, exactly, it was intended for — though it probably was never displayed in a church.
It’s now at the Prado Museum in Madrid:
Rather than try to decode the meaning of every body, bird and berry — there are so many! — it might be more helpful to think about a way of looking at art that is chock-full of detail. Breaking down the painting into sections and major symbols, then watching how those symbols transform across the piece, can then help us start to understand it better.
We’ll start with something we didn’t show you — the exterior of the panels when the triptych is folded up. Our story (quite literally, in the Christian tradition) begins here:
This is Day 3 of the creation of the world. The water and land have just been separated.
That’s God up in the top left:
The Latin inscription along the top reads: For he spake, and it was done; and For he commanded, and they were created (Psalms 33:9 and 148:5).
Pull open those monochrome panels (the art term for monochrome is grisaille) and bam! Like Dorothy landing in Oz, you are greeted with this scene in glorious color:
Before we zoom in, squint your eyes and take it all in at once. (Squinting helps eliminate detail, leaving you with a blurry kind of overall impression.)
Things you can tell in this blurry state: In contrast with many modern pictures, there isn’t one central focal point or figure that the picture hangs on. The middle panel is much more packed than the first. The right-hand panel is much darker than the others. Triptychs like this were often meant to be read from left to right, so something has happened to cause this dramatic shift.
Also at this scale, notice how the background, middle ground and foreground are mostly consistent across the three panels, loosely connecting them:
The horizon is high in the frame, almost at the top, leaving plenty of room for the scenes below to unfold toward us.
Let’s start in the bottom on the far left. We are in the Garden of Eden, and God has just created Adam and Eve.
Eve is looking down.
Adam is looking at Eve (that small pink brushstroke on his cheek suggests maybe he’s blushing).
God (younger and more Jesus-like than on the exterior panel) is looking right back at us:
They are in a lush landscape surrounded by beasts you might recognize:
And some you might not:
(Not everyone had seen a giraffe in 1500 — and it’s doubtful anyone had actually seen the little hooded reader above in real life. Some of these were probably copied from other sources: woodcuts; manuscripts decorated with drawings in the margins; carvings in churches and bestiaries — basically medieval books of beasts.)
Smack in the middle of the central pink tower is an owl:
In Bosch’s time, the owl wasn’t known as the wise creature it is today. It was considered a symbol of evil and sin, a creature of the night, with an eerie call, said Robert G. Erdmann, a professor at the University of Amsterdam who has worked to preserve Bosch’s paintings in extremely high resolution through the Bosch Research and Conservation Project.
Elsewhere in this first panel, darkness is also creeping in.
(There’s so much more — look for the apples! the snake! another owl! — but we have to keep moving.)
Follow the horizon line right into the center panel, down past the phallic, fantastical towers, past the four rivers (thought to represent the four rivers that flowed out of the Garden of Eden). And what has happened to the birds and bodies established in the first panel?
No longer do we have just Adam and Eve. The people and animals have taken over entirely (maybe following God’s command in Genesis to “be fruitful and multiply”). An orgy of carnal bliss, of just sheer wildness, fills almost all the space.
Look at these scenes!
How do you even describe them?
Even at the deepest of zoom levels, off in the distance, the action continues.
“This is a painting that everywhere rewards looking carefully,” Mr. Erdmann said.
The once normal-size fruits are now massive:
The animals are also huge, no longer separate from the human figures, but communing with them:
This is not our world; it is a different world, of giant strawberries and oversize birds and humans (Black and white), indulging, luxuriating, living without a care.
One interpretation of this middle panel is that it represents humanity overcome with lust and sin just before the great flood that God used to cleanse the earth of its wickedness, Mr. Erdmann said. (Noah, his family and his ark of animals would be the only ones left.)
This is not a real paradise, in other words, but a false one.
As in the first panel, darkness lurks. The owls are back. Two jumbo owls flank either edge of the center panel, staring back at us:
They prepare us for the final panel on the right.
As your eyes shift over, it’s clear we’re now in hell. And the birds are running the joint:
Fires rage in the background.
The fruit is gone.
The naked bodies are being tortured by clothed, often unidentifiable beasts:
Musical instruments have become instruments of torture:
In the center of it all is a figure that scholars refer to as the “tree man”:
He’s peeking back at us around the hollow shell of his body, sometimes interpreted as the spiritual emptiness of those now in hell, Mr. Erdmann said.
Those engaging in sins like gambling,
vanity,
and gossip
are brutally punished.
Sin has consequences.
And this is it.
“Consistent with much of the rest of Bosch’s oeuvre, this is a kind of morality tale,” Mr. Erdmann said. “This is like, ‘OK, this is why we can’t have nice things.’ This is the world run amok. This is giving into the ‘earthly delights.’ All of the temptations.”
Many of these images, themes, icons and stories would have been familiar to people who encountered the triptych at the time, but no one put them together quite like Bosch, especially his scenes of hell.
“Bosch was indeed singular in the realm of painting, and such images of hell became his trademark,” said Larry Silver, a Bosch scholar. “He was widely imitated after the taste for his imagery began to appeal to a wider public through knockoffs in an emerging public art market.”
“The Garden of Earthly Delights” has been endlessly copied in the past five centuries, reproduced on tapestries and in engravings. It inspired artists like Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who came soon after Bosch, and modern artists like Salvador Dalí and Joan Miró.
Today, you can find it in emoji form and on shower curtains.
A contemporary artist, José Manuel Ballester, created a version with all the people, animals and beasts removed — making the setting the new star:
The party’s over, this rendition seems to say. Look what we left behind.
Whatever the remix or the interpretation, Bosch created something so imaginary, so outlandish, so wild, that you had to see it to believe it.
And once you saw it, Bosch made certain you were never going to forget it.
This is an installment in our series of experiments on art and attention. Sign up to be notified when new installments are published here. And let us know how this exercise made you feel in the comments.