The Garden of Earthly Delights, c.1490/00 Hieronymus Bosch (c.1450-1516)

Hieronymus Bosch - Triptych of the Garden of Delights

This exceptional triptych is of crucial importance in correcting the usual picture of Bosch as a participant in the supernatural and the apocalyptic, in magic, alchemy and witches, in a time of bloody persecutions and trials. According to the out-moded view, in depicting enigmas and hieroglyphs, monsters and hybrids, dreamlike juxtapositions and symbols of sin and folly, Bosch is the painter of the demoniac, of obsession with sexuality and all that perturbs the religious spirit. A great mass of literary interpretations has diverted attention from Bosch's style and prevented an authentic understanding of his work. If he sometimes intentionally loaded his art with representational functions (Christ Carrying the Cross in Ghent, where he rivals Metsys in the adoption of Leonardo's grotesques), he based them on a rigorous and 'rational' tendency to be found in Holland (Geertgen and followers, Master of the Virgo inter Virgines, etc.), and which is also connected with such French painters as Fouquet, the Master of Moulins, the Master of St. Sebastian. Furthermore, in working from the earliest Flemish masters, Bosch does not hesitate to learn from Jan van Eyck, the founding father of the tradition. There is no doubt that a fanciful intellectual climate, rich in myth and passions carried to the point of nightmare visions, gave Bosch the opportunity to insert a marvellously free kind of painting into an established idea of subject matter. The persistence of the Temptation of St. Anthony theme is better explained by the wealth of fabulous detail permitted by the legend, than by any veneration of the saint in the master's native town of's Hertogenbosch. And his inventive faculty was undoubtedly immense, inexhaustible, to such an extent that it has favoured an almost exclusive attention to his ever-surprising subject matter and reduced his work to a matter of anecdotes.

The forms of his paintings, however, are not all obscure or sunk in details; their clarity is carried to a point of transparent lucidity: the 'demoniac' is manifest in every supposedly tortured image. The transformation of the real into an autonomous vision is not accomplished through an iconography of the impossible, but first of all in terms of pictorial expression. The three parts of this triptych are unified by three large concentric perspective rings (to which the terrestrial globe on the outside of the wings corresponds), while below, the rigorous distribution of details along diagonals (and the corresponding perspective levels) makes possible an extremely dense elaboration of subordinate motifs, without dispersion or lapses in the narrative or illustration. All the individual forms are marked by a geometric purity which, in close correspondence with the rhythm, unifies each part; the part in turn is spontaneously linked with and flows into the next, with a continual transformation that is also an internal form of the highest coherency. A close rein is kept on the imaginative representation, and its reduction to basic, controlled modules. Accordingly, it is hard to know how to speak of the anxious, the troubled and the diabolic before these joyous sequences, in places somewhat ironical or frivolous, where life is seen in its infinite guises, in its hidden connections, in its possible transformations and passages, in all its impetus that pervades every object, animate or not. Here the nature of man is exalted; it is not an orgiastic vision, but lyrically contained by a style that personalizes and harmonizes every part of the work, which is meant to be read attentively throughout its clearly marked courses, where movement and rest alternate, and everything is of equal intensity, from the choral ensemble to the most secret detail. Bosch himself may be present in the vision, in a presumed self-portrait.