The
Garden of Earthly Delights is the title of a surrealistic
painting (or more accurately, four paintings) by Hieronymus
Bosch dating from c.1504. The image shown above is the
central panel of a triptych that depicts the third day of
creation on the exterior shutters; on the interior the
left-hand wing shows The Earthly Paradise of Eden (or Creation
of Eve), with the Garden of Earthly Delights in
the centre and Hell on the right-hand wing.
While this is Bosch's most
famous painting, it is also his most puzzling, and no
interpretation of it is universally accepted. ...
The central panel, The Garden of Earthly Delights,
swarms with the frail nude figures of men and women sporting
licentiously in a panoramic landscape that is studded with
fantastic growths of a quasisexual form. Bosch seems to be
showing erotic temptation and sensual gratification as a
universal disaster and the human race, as a consequence of
original sin, succumbing to its naturally base disposition.
The themes are derived in part from three major sources:
Medieval bestiaries, Flemish proverbs, and the then very
popular dream books, all mixed in the melting pot of Bosch's
astoundingly inventive imagination. In addition, the artist
includes frequent alllusions to magic and alchemy and mingles
animal and vegetable forms in the most absurd combinations.
Symbols are scattered plentifully throughout the panel: fruit
for carnal pleasure, eggs for alchemy and sex, the rat for
falsehood and lies, dead fish for memories of past joys. A
couple in a glass globe may illustrate the proverb "Good
fortune, like glass, is easily broken." We have lost the
key to many of Bosch's symbols, but it may be assumed that
they were well known to his contemporaries. ...
The triptych as a whole may represent the false paradise of
this world between Eden and Hell, but this is only one
interpretation. Another explanation has it that Bosch
belonged to a secret, heretical sect, the Adamites, and that
the central panel was thought of as a kind of altarpiece
symbolically celebrating its rites and practices. A fairly
strong case has been made for an interpretation in terms of
contemporaneous alchemical knowledge and practice.
(source: Gardner's Art Through The Ages, 9th edition,
1991, pp.712-716.) Which leaves us no further ahead in
understanding the motivations behind the painting ... so is
it satire, irreligious mockery, pornography? The work of a
heretic or fanatic?
