Latest Blog Articles

Painting of the Week

  Hieronymus Bosch

The Garden of Earthly Delights, 1480 – 90, triptych, oil on panel

Painted by the Netherlands painter Hieronymus Bosch, around 1505. is currently displayed in the Prado Museum, Madrid.

Triptychs were common at the time, such as these three side-by-side panels or canvases, which usually has three hinged sections; the two outer parts can be folded inward covering the entire work.

The work of Bosch was very unusual for the time, and there are few pieces like this one in style. Bosh faced controversy because of his work; after his death he was known as ’The inventor of monsters and chimeras’.The painting contains a lot of symbolism, and many scenes which relate to religious belief and medieval fears regarding sin and the afterlife.  The left panel depicts paradise with Adam and Eve and a variety of animals. The middle panel depicts the earthly delights with nude figures, fruit and birds proliferating the scene. The right panel shows hell with all its horror and punishments inflicted on the sinners who end up there.

Compared to the warmth of the centre panel, the right wing possesses a chilling quality – rendered through cold colourisation and frozen waterways, and presents a tableau that has shifted from the paradise of the centre image to a spectacle of cruel torture and retribution. The painting was perhaps intended to illustrate the history of mankind according to medieval Christian doctrine. The Image of hell on the right-hand panel is violent. It suggests the penalty of the fleshly lusts played out in the previous panel. There are extremes here; icy lakes to fiery landscape. The depiction of musical instruments suggests human organs, different instruments symbolising states of being and parts of the human anatomy, usually sexual - here in the final panel the instruments are objects inflicting torture, suggesting that the victims here are paying for their fleshly lusts in their previous life. However, it seems other sins are also being addressed such as gluttony: the man being forced to vomit his food.

Hieronymus Bosch: 1450 - 1516