Have you ever wondered why two large owls sit on either side of the central panel in “The Garden of Earthly Delights” by Hieronymus Bosch? Or perhaps you’ve noticed the strangely fleshy, sculptural fountains rising from the bodies of water—or are they stone? Why is the right side so dark, and who are all these people anyway?
Narrated by Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker, Smarthistory’s latest video tours the uncanny landscapes of Bosch’s famous triptych, which continues to “confound our expectations of Christian art of the Renaissance.”
Smarthistory is a small nonprofit that collaborates with hundreds of art historians, curators, archaeologists, and more, who are committed to making art history as accessible as possible. Through essays, conversations, and videos, the organization presents scholarly information in engaging, digestible, yet analytically rigorous lessons.
For Smarthistory’s video examining some of the motifs in “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” Harris and Zucker dive into some of the most alluring details of Bosch’s historic painting, parsing mysteries that have persisted since its creation at the turn of the 16th century.
The overarching narrative of Bosch’s masterpiece remains largely an enigma. “Although it is wonderfully playful and wonderfully inventive and just an incredible thing to look at, it would have been deeply troubling to Bosch’s generation,” Zucker says. “His society would have looked at this as sinful, even though the people that are being represented here didn’t understand sin.” (More on that in a minute.)
An anomaly of its genre, the painting was commissioned by Engelbert II, a wealthy member of the court of the Duke of Burgundy, probably intending it for his palace. The work consists of three panels in the style of an altarpiece, with two half-size panels on either side of a central composition, which fold inward like two doors to reveal another painting on the exterior.
In Bosch’s case, he depicted a crystalline sphere in grisaille, or all-gray, which portrays an overview of the earth with God perched in the upper left-hand corner, readying to make something of the lackluster orb. Two biblical phrases, “for he spake and it was done,” from Psalm 33, and “for he commanded and they were created,” from Psalm 148, reference Creation.
Turning over the panels, as if opening the cover of a book, we enter an otherworldly realm where humans and beasts mingle with oversized animals, fruit, and surreal structures. On the left, Adam and Eve are introduced by a young God, before Eve was tempted to eat the forbidden fruit hanging in the Garden of Eden. In the center, dozens of nude figures frolic, eat, engage in sexual activities, forage, swim, and fly. On the right is hell.
“One of the most compelling theories is that the central panel is an alternate story,” Zucker says. “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 Bosch’s imagination?”
Two oversized owls, symbolic of the presence of evil, flank the central panel. While people appear unashamed of their selves or actions, a sense of uneasiness pervades the scene, balancing the dichotomies of paradise and hell; holiness and sin.
“The largest figure is a figure which art historians call the ‘tree man,’” Dr. Harris says. “His legs look like the branches of trees with more branches growing from them. But where we might see his feet, we see two unsteady boats in the water with figures in them, suggesting that there’s an inherent instability to this figure who can barely balance in this way.”
Smarthistory’s video illustrates compositional tools that provide clues to underlying narrative and metaphor, like the way the “tree man” appears to look back across space at Adam and Eve—specifically Adam’s lustful gaze as the representation of humankind’s origin. “In this representation, we don’t need the apple. We don’t need the serpent. All we need is Adam’s lustful gaze as he is introduced to Eve,” Dr. Zucker says. And the rest, so to speak, is history.
Explore more from the world of art on Smarthistory’s website. You might also enjoy this fantastical parade in The Netherlands devoted entirely to Bosch and Roberto Benavidez’s Bosch-inspired piñatas.
