Following on from yesterday’s blog about artists’ gardens, Rose Downer drew my attention to one of the most famous gardens in art – ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ by the early Netherlandish painter Hieronymous Bosch. This triptych, painted between the years 1490 and 1500, is now in the collection of the Prado Museum in Madrid. It is one of the most unusual artworks ever created and a fitting painting to think about in our current confusing world.
Hieronymous Bosch (1450-1516) can rightly be considered one of the most idiosyncratic artists of all time. Born into a family of artists in the Netherlandish town of Hertogenbosch his real name was Jheronimus van Aken but the city where he was born and lived provided the name he became known by. Bosch almost certainly learned his artistic skills from his grandfather, father and uncles and, like other professional artists of the time, was not confined to a single artistic medium. Apart from painting, Bosch was known to have designed stained glass windows, brass objects, and even to embroider. However, painting is where he excelled. While his contemporaries focused on historical tableaux, depictions of everyday life and illustrative religious episodes, Bosch explored similar themes which he filtered through his extraordinary imagination. This resulted in visual cautionary tales dense with symbolism and the absurdity borne of his unconscious. His art is replete with fantastical creatures and hybrid beings in ‘surreal’ landscapes who portray the bizarre and comical conflicts of humans as they wrestle with good and evil. ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’, regarded as his masterpiece, was painted when Bosch was already a favoured artist of the European nobility. It is believed the painting was commissioned by Engelbert II of Nassau and was later owned by the deeply religious Spanish king, Philip II. It is hard to imagine a painting that provides a more exuberant and enigmatic depiction of earthly pleasures.
The painting is a triptych which, when closed, shows a monochromatic (grisaille) painting of the world depicting the third day of Creation – the day when earthly paradise was forged by God. When the triptych is folded open we are confronted with three worlds – on the left there is the Garden of Eden with God introducing Eve to Adam with allusions to love and lust; and on the right Bosch imagines all the sufferings and monstrosities of Hell. Between the left and right panels is the large central panel which depicts a dreamlike surreal landscape of carnal bliss.
The complex nature of the painting has made it a favourite of critics and commentators who have enjoyed deconstructing and exploring potential meanings from it. One of the earliest surviving written descriptions of the work, penned by historian and theologian Fray José Sigüenza in 1605, sees the painting as conveying the idea of the ephemeral nature of earthly pleasures. Sigüenza dubbed the painting the “Strawberry Plant,” whose subject was “the vanity and glory and transient state of strawberries”—in other words, the fleeting nature of pleasure. There are many essays that can be found online including an analysis on the Prado Museum’s website: https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/the-garden-of-earthly-delights-triptych/02388242-6d6a-4e9e-a992-e1311eab3609
Rose Downer discovered a couple of interesting and alternative ways that the painting can be explored in our homes. The first is a youtube conversation in English about the painting between Alejandro Vergara, Senior Curator of Flemish and Northern European Paintings at the Prado, and Reindert Falkenburg, Director of the Chair of the Prado Museum, 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3O4XYxD2yDo&utm_campaign=Subscriber+Email&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=85560080&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-81rRPxr82JlbTe9mk74kfVbClUBv32OBkU7NDoIfGA1vor5BiCzNAmXWqQ6lA0lds0T4Ya1XI_Dc4uIFX8A9Y4zCxytg&_hsmi=85560080
The second is an extraordinary interactive version of the painting created by NTR, the Dutch public broadcasting service. Here you can wander through the painting and discover the many stories hidden behind the images. There is also the option to take an audiovisual tour of the painting, narrated by Redmond O’Hanlon: https://archief.ntr.nl/tuinderlusten/en.html?utm_campaign=Subscriber%20Email&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=85560080&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-81rRPxr82JlbTe9mk74kfVbClUBv32OBkU7NDoIfGA1vor5BiCzNAmXWqQ6lA0lds0T4Ya1XI_Dc4uIFX8A9Y4zCxytg&_hsmi=85560080
The art historian Walter Gibson described Bosch’s artistic language as: “a world of dreams and nightmares in which forms seem to flicker and change before our eyes”. He could easily be describing the world in which we live today.