Hieronymous Bosch

The Garden of Earthly Delights Triptych, 1490–1500, Oil on oak panel, Height: 185.8 cm; Width of the central panel: 172.5 cm; Width of the wing: 76.5 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid; Album / Art Resource, NY; Photo: ©️ Museo Nacional del Prado / Art Resource, NY

Proliferating Pleasures

Commentary by Andrew Hui

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Is there any painter who delights in such mind-boggling and eye-popping details as Hieronymus Bosch?

The central panel in The Garden of Earthly Delights is an exercise in proliferating multiplicity: animal, vegetal, mineral. Reading the triptych from left to right, Bosch depicts the Garden of Eden, the Garden of Earthly Delights, and finally Hell. Thus he charts the creation of two humans by one God to the procreation of many humans, and the descent into a cacophonic ‘subhuman’ multitude. What happens when one becomes two and two becomes many, and many becomes a hot, hellish mess?

In the luxuriantly detailed tour-de-force that is the central panel, Bosch gives us an encyclopaedia of creaturely desire.

Here, we see an interpenetration of living things great and small: humans appear to be animals and animals appear to be human. All permutations of copulation seem possible. Bodies are torquing, grabbing, entangled; all of creation huddled together and hankering after each other.

Genesis 2:16–17 present the primordial prohibition for the human race: ‘You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die’. Very clearly, Bosch has gone far beyond the plain text of scripture. The humans in his garden are gluttonous, ingesting humongous strawberries, raspberries, and cherries, and even each other—wildly exceeding the simple biblical regulation.

Yet, perhaps this frenzy of consumption recognizes a deeper truth of the biblical story. The oldest surviving observation about the painting comes from Fray José Sigüenza, who called it the ‘Strawberry Plant’ in 1605 and said it was about ‘the vanity and glory and transient state of strawberries’. Bosch shows us it is just as much about the vanity, glory, and transience of sinful humans.

 

References

Belting, Hans. 2005. Garden of Earthly Delights  (Munich: Prestel)

Koerner, Joseph Leo. 2016. Bosch and Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press)

See full exhibition for Genesis 2:9–17

Genesis 2:9–17

Revised Standard Version

And out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

10 A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers. 11The name of the first is Pishon; it is the one which flows around the whole land of Havʹilah, where there is gold; 12and the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there. 13The name of the second river is Gihon; it is the one which flows around the whole land of Cush. 14And the name of the third river is Tigris, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphraʹtes.

15 The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. 16And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; 17but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”

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