The Garden of Earthly Delights by Bosch: Paradise, Pleasure, and Hell (c. 1490)
On the left, God presents Eve to Adam in a calm, green paradise. In the centre, hundreds of naked men and women play, ride animals, feast on giant strawberries and cherries, swim in pools and climb into huge fruits and shells, all in a bright, fantastic landscape. On the right, the light goes out: a city burns, musical instruments become instruments of torture, and a bird-headed monster devours sinners on a throne. Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights, painted around 1490–1500 and now in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, is the most complex and mysterious picture of the late Middle Ages. The picture below is our vintage poster version of the painting; the original is shown further down.
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Artist: Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–1516)
Date: c. 1490–1500
Medium: Oil and grisaille on oak panel; height 185.8 cm, central panel 172.5 cm wide, wings 76.5 cm wide
Collection: Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, Room 056A (on permanent loan from Patrimonio Nacional)
Format: Triptych with folding wings
How do you read the triptych?
The work is a triptych, three panels hinged together, and it is meant to be read from left to right, from the creation of humanity to its fate. When the wings are closed, they show a grisaille image of the world on the third day of Creation: a transparent sphere containing the earth, with God small in the upper left corner. Opening the wings is like opening the world itself.
The left panel shows the Garden of Eden. God, with the features of Christ, takes Eve by the wrist and presents her to the newly awakened Adam. Around them are exotic animals, among them a giraffe and an elephant, and a strange pink fountain rises from a lake. But even here there are signs of trouble: a cat carries off a mouse, and animals prey on each other.
The central panel, which gives the work its name, is a vast garden filled with naked men and women enjoying themselves without shame. Men ride in a circle around a pool of women on horses, camels and other beasts; couples hide in bubbles and shells; giant birds and fruits are everywhere. The Prado notes that, for the scholar Reindert Falkenburg, the overall theme is the fate of humanity, as in Bosch's Haywain: the garden is not an innocent paradise but a world given over to the pleasures of the flesh, which the fruits, often symbols of lust, make clear.
The right panel is Hell, dark and crowded. In the centre stands the "tree man", a hollow figure whose body is an eggshell and whose legs are tree trunks, his pale face turned to look at us; some see it as a self-portrait. Giant ears pierced by an arrow, a knife between them, roll through the scene. Musicians are crucified on their own harps and lutes. At the lower right, a bird-headed creature on a chair swallows the damned and expels them into a pit.
Who was it for?
We know very little about Bosch, who worked all his life in the Dutch town of 's-Hertogenbosch and died there in 1516. The triptych was not made for a church but for a powerful private patron: according to the Prado's provenance record, it belonged to Engelbert II of Nassau or his nephew Henry III of Nassau and hung in their palace in Brussels, where visitors in the early sixteenth century admired it as a curiosity. In 1568 it was confiscated from William of Orange by the Duke of Alba. Philip II of Spain, a great admirer of Bosch, bought it in 1591 and sent it to his monastery of El Escorial in 1593. It came to the Prado in 1933.
The Prado holds the world's finest collection of Bosch, including The Haywain and The Table of the Seven Deadly Sins. For later Spanish visions of darkness in the same museum, see Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son and our guide to Goya's Black Paintings. For another descent into the inferno, see Bouguereau's Dante and Virgil.
Where can you see it?
The triptych hangs in Room 056A of the Museo del Prado in Madrid, usually surrounded by visitors studying its thousands of details. Arrive early, and give yourself time: it is a painting you could look at for hours and still find something new.
Looking for a gift for a Bosch lover? See all our Garden of Earthly Delights gifts: a yoga mat, a vintage poster, prints and more.
Hang Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights as a vintage art poster from the Sapiens Verbum print shop.
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See Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights framed on your wall: a museum-quality print, canvas or poster from the Sapiens Verbum print shop.
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The Garden of Earthly Delights is one of the thirty pictures in our book The 30 Most Famous Paintings in the History of Art: The Myths They Hide, the History They Reveal. Each chapter takes one painting, the myth around it and the history behind it. On Kindle, in paperback, in hardcover and as an audiobook.
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Watch the video essay on @SapiensVerbum on YouTube.
Sources
Museo Nacional del Prado, collection record and provenance, The Garden of Earthly Delights triptych; Wikipedia, “The Garden of Earthly Delights”.
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