“The Garden of Earthly Delights,” by Hieronymus Bosch
What you’re seeing above is a detail from the right panel of the triptych “Garden of Earthly Delights,” by Hieronymus Bosch. In a list where only 10 paintings make the team, this Netherlandish painter contributed two, the other being the Adoration of the Magi. The Magi, being number 10 in the list, is mysterious and confusing, while number 3, the Hell Panel, is just pure mayhem. The man’s paintings are so frightening in fact, that the name “Hieronymus Bosch” itself has become synonymous with the word “scary”:
I don’t know what it was about this painter’s life that drove him to create such fantastic diabolical worlds on canvas. Perhaps he was concerned with the degrading moral and Christian values of the 15th and 16th centuries Europe. Perhaps he was angered when people made fun of his funny looking hat. Whatever it was, no one will truly understand what really went on this genius’ disturbed mind.
Let’s take a look at the Hell painting and attempt to explain some of its many curiosities. Click on the panel here and go back and forth; see if you can spot some of the following points of interest:
- Bosch painted the Hell panel as part of a triptych- when closed you see the outside as God creating the Earth, when opened on the left is Adam and Eve. Going to the center panel is the “Earthly Delights,” and then finally on the right humanity has descended into Hell.
- You’ll see many demons torturing humans in never before heard of methods with strange devices, some of which are human symbols of sin. The horrors seen in this setting would later inspire Pieter Bruegel to paint his “Triumph of Death.”
- You’ll find Satan (see detail above) as a giant bird with a cooking pot as a hat, symbolizing his unsatisfiable hunger, who eats the damned and excretes them out into a pit. In this scene we see several of the “deadly sins”: a demon forces a gluttonous sinner to continuously vomit, while into the same pit a greedy sinner excretes gold coins as punishment. Nearby we see a motionless woman condemned to stair at her reflection into the rear end of a demon- she had the sin of vanity.
- Interestingly, Bosch painted a frozen pond in the center of the painting with people skating on it, and one unlucky soul has broken through and drowns. In the center of the painting you’ll find a grotesque portrait of Bosch with trees for legs coming out of boats, and demons in the mid-section taking a break in a gory tavern. A rotating platform serves as a hat, with a bagpipe symbolizing evil and lust.
- Several large knives appear slicing and dicing, one of which cuts through ears showing that man is deaf to the warnings of the New Testament.
- Musical instruments abound in this eternity of torment, as reminders of the Earthly delights that have doomed mankind.
Many scholarly interpretations have been made on these symbols and over the meanings of the themes Bosch used in his paintings. Interpret them as you will, but no one can deny that the Garden of Earthly Delights is one of the scariest and most interesting paintings in all of art history.
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