Elden Ring puts a golden tree over everything. FromSoftware’s 2022 game was directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki, with George R. R. Martin writing the myth underneath it, and across most of the Lands Between the Erdtree glows gold over the ruins. The picture above you is a lot older. It’s Gustave Doré’s engraving for the thirty-first canto of Dante’s Paradiso, published in 1868, the saints of heaven arranged in rings like a white rose around one point of light, and two small figures at the bottom looking up into it. Side by side they are two lights a century and a half apart, and both make you want to walk toward them.
If you’ve looked up the art that inspired Elden Ring, you’ve seen the same names: Bosch, Doré, Friedrich, Bruegel. FromSoftware never named them; critics did. The matches hold up best when each painting is set next to something you actually meet in the game: the Fire Giant, the Erdtree Avatars, the skeletons that won’t stay dead.
What art inspired Elden Ring?
Start with what the people who made it said. In June 2019, when the game was announced, Miyazaki told Microsoft’s interviewer that he’d explained his overall vision to George R. R. Martin, “what sorts of themes, ideas, as well as many game-related aspects” he had in mind, and that their conversations were what Martin “later used as a base to write the overarching mythos for the game world itself.” The world, he said, “was constructed using this mythos and stimulus as a base.”
None of that names a painter. The paintings come from critics, and the best piece on them is Gareth Damian Martin’s for ArtReview, “The Boschian Horror of Elden Ring,” from March 2022. His chain starts with Kentaro Miura’s dark fantasy manga Berserk, which shows in FromSoftware’s “weighty armour, massive swords, and horrifying beasts,” and Berserk itself, he writes, is “a melting pot of pulp and classical imagery, welding Gustave Doré’s inferno or Caspar David Friedrich’s trees” to horror films, with Miura drawing demons straight out of Bosch.
Hieronymus Bosch and Elden Ring: the hell panel
The critic made the link through Boschbot, an account that posts close-ups of Bosch’s paintings. He found Elden Ring “filled with Boschian strangeness,” in its misshapen monsters, its rituals nobody explains and its “oscillation between the horrifying and the ridiculous,” and the game, he writes, “rewards wanderings, just as Bosch’s paintings reward a curious eye.”
Bosch painted the Garden around 1490 to 1500, a triptych whose two wings close over the centre like doors, and it hangs in the Prado in Madrid. The right wing is hell, a tall panel more than twice as high as it is wide, set at night in cold colours over frozen water, and it’s the panel that reads most like the Lands Between.
-
The hell panel
The right wing of the Garden. Every inch of it is busy, and nothing tells you where to look first.
-
A city on fire
Explosions behind the city gates throw light into the water, and a road fills with people running from it. The Lands Between have their fire too: late in the story, the great tree itself is set alight.
-
A blade between two ears
A giant pair of ears drives a knife through the crowd like a war machine. In the game the weapons run that big too, the massive swords that go back to Berserk.
-
The Tree-Man
A body made of a broken eggshell on rotting trunks, a tavern inside it, and a face turned sideways to look out at you. The art historian Hans Belting thought the face might be Bosch’s own. The game has its own: the Erdtree Avatars, huge headless tree stumps with staffs who guard the Minor Erdtrees, and the Ulcerated Tree Spirits, snake-bodied and swollen with red ulcers.
-
The musicians’ hell
People crucified on a harp and a lute, and a choir singing from music written on a pair of buttocks. The game’s version is what the critic called “rituals of obscure provenance,” things you walk in on halfway and never quite understand.
-
The Prince of Hell
A bird-headed monster on a high chair with a cauldron for a crown, eating people and passing them out below. A line written about the game fits him: “any institution of power is twisted beyond humanity towards something perverse and rotting.”
The thing Bosch does that the game does is refuse to rank anything. A burning city and a man crucified on a harp get the same care, the grotesque sits next to the almost funny, and you build the story yourself out of fragments. ArtReview’s line on the game: “to play Elden Ring is to make a whole from fragments.”
Gustave Doré’s Inferno giants and the Fire Giant
Doré is the first painter in that Berserk sentence. He paid to publish his illustrated Inferno himself, and when it came out in Paris in 1861 it sold out so fast that the publisher Louis Hachette sent him a telegram, “Success! Come quickly! I am an ass!” Hachette brought out the Purgatorio and Paradiso together in 1868, which is where the rose above this essay comes from.
Canto XXXI is near the bottom of hell, at the rim of the well above the frozen lake. It’s so dark Dante can barely see, and he makes out tall towers ahead and asks Virgil what town it is. Virgil takes his hand before he answers.
“That the reality may seem to thee / Less strange, know that these are not towers, but giants, / And they are in the well, around the bank, / From navel downward, one and all of them.”
Dante, Inferno, Canto XXXI, translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Doré draws them chained at the rim, packed shoulder to shoulder into one frame, one with his head thrown back against his own arm, the others bent over the stone looking down, and the two poets tiny on the rock below them. Find the giants’ faces with the light, then find the people.
Dante gets something exactly right there. From far away a giant is architecture, and you only find out it’s a body when you’re close enough to be in danger. His giants are chained because they made war on heaven; of Ephialtes, Virgil says, “This proud one wished to make experiment / Of his own power against the Supreme Jove.”
Elden Ring has the same war and the same sentence. Godfrey, the first Elden Lord, “led the War against the Giants,” and their bodies lie frozen in the far north of the map, the Mountaintops of the Giants. Not every giant died. The Fire Giant is “a survivor of the War against the Giants,” and the remembrance he drops says what was done to him: “Upon realizing the flames of their forge would never die, Queen Marika marked him with a curse. ‘O trifling giant, mayest thou tend thy flame for eternity.’” That is Doré’s plate made into a boss, a giant kept at his post forever for losing to the gods, a hillside until you are standing at his feet. You kill him for his forge, because its flame is the one that can burn the Erdtree.
Caspar David Friedrich’s Lonely Tree
The other half of the Berserk sentence is Friedrich’s trees, and the painting ArtReview ran beside the essay is The Lonely Tree, from 1822. An old oak stands in the middle of a wide plain under a low grey morning sky, with mountains behind it. Its crown is dead, the top of the trunk and two broken branches making the shape of a cross, but the lower branches are still in leaf, and a shepherd is sheltering under them while his sheep graze by a pond.
Friedrich’s Gothic ruins, like the roofless church in The Abbey in the Oakwood, sit better beside Bloodborne’s Victorian Gothic. What The Lonely Tree adds is the thing at the centre. Put it next to Doré’s rose and the game’s golden tree and you can see them doing the same job, one shape standing in an enormous space, the place your eye keeps going back to.
Doré’s light is the end of the road, the thing you’ve walked the whole poem to see. Friedrich’s oak is half dead and still giving shade. The tree in the game sits between them, a light you walk toward that has already started to fail, and the game says so in its own small print. The Blessed Dew Talisman reads “it was once thought that the blessed sap of the Erdtree would drip from its boughs forever,” and then, “that age of plenty swiftly came to a close, and with time, the Erdtree became more an object of faith.”
Bruegel’s Triumph of Death and the armies of the dead
The dead in Elden Ring don’t stay down. Its skeletons, Those Who Live in Death, get back up after you kill them unless something holy finishes them, and the game gives them a history. The Deathroot item reads: “On the night of the dire plot the stolen Rune of Death enabled the first Death of a demigod. Later, the Rune of Death spread across the Lands Between through the underground roots of the Greattree, sprouting in the form of Deathroot.” The demigod was Godwyn the Golden, murdered on the Night of the Black Knives, and death has been growing back up through the roots ever since.
The painting for an army of the dead is Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Triumph of Death, painted around 1562 and in the Prado since 1827. An army of skeletons crosses a burned land, fires on the horizon and ships wrecked in the sea behind them, ringing a bell, hauling a cart of skulls, driving people into a long box painted with crosses. The art historian James Snyder called the ground “scorched, barren earth, devoid of any life as far as the eye can see.” Then look at the colour.
Six colours by area and every one of them is earth, soot and rust and ochre and sand, with the palest, the colour of bone, the smallest of them all, and no green or blue anywhere on the bar.
Ruin, the beauty of what was
Every painting here is about what’s left: a hell where the fall has already happened, giants chained in a well, an oak with a dead crown, an army that has already won. Ruin is calmer than sadness, because the catastrophe is over and nobody can stop it anymore, and Georg Simmel, in his essay on ruins, wrote that a ruin gives a past life its present form. That is the voice FromSoftware writes in: nearly everything you learn about the Lands Between is item text about something already over.
In The Culmination a figure made of fire stands with a sword before a great green tree under a sky of planets, the burning and the tree in one frame, the way the Erdtree burns at the end of the Fire Giant’s road. Its words begin “This is no ending, but a fracture,” which is as close as a sentence gets to the Shattering.
Frequently asked questions
What art inspired Elden Ring?
On the record, FromSoftware talks about the myth: Miyazaki says George R. R. Martin wrote the mythos the world was built on. The paintings come from critics: Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, Doré’s Dante, Friedrich’s trees and Bruegel’s Triumph of Death, some of it by way of the manga Berserk.
Is Elden Ring inspired by Hieronymus Bosch?
Critics see Bosch in it, “Boschian strangeness” in its monsters and unexplained rituals. The closest single panel is the hell wing of The Garden of Earthly Delights in the Prado, a burning city at night above a crowd of monsters and the people they torment.
What is Elden Ring’s art style called?
Dark fantasy, the genre of Berserk. In painting terms the critics’ comparisons run from Bosch and Bruegel, around 1500 and the 1560s, to Doré and Friedrich in the nineteenth century: the sublime, beauty with fear in it.
Are there paintings in Elden Ring?
Yes, as puzzles. The base game has seven paintings and Shadow of the Erdtree adds three. Each shows a view somewhere in the Lands Between, and if you find the spot the painter stood on, the painter’s spirit appears with a reward. Homing Instinct, from the Artist’s Shack in Limgrave, gives the Incantation Scarab.
Read next
- The Garden of Earthly Delights, explained, the whole triptych around the hell panel: close the doors and find the world.
- What is a Doom painting? Medieval hell from the church wall to DOOM Eternal, with Bosch and Bruegel on the way.
- Bloodborne’s Victorian Gothic, FromSoftware’s other city, next to Doré’s London, Pugin’s Gothic town and Friedrich’s abbey.
- Fantastic Planet’s art style, Doré’s hatching cut out of paper and animated in Prague.
References
- Gareth Damian Martin, “The Boschian Horror of ‘Elden Ring’,” ArtReview, March 18, 2022: artreview.com
- Tyler Wilde, “George R.R. Martin wrote Elden Ring’s ‘overarching mythos’,” PC Gamer, June 11, 2019: pcgamer.com
- Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, about 1490 to 1500, Museo del Prado (P02823): commons.wikimedia.org
- Gustave Doré, illustrations to Dante’s Inferno (1861) and Purgatorio and Paradiso (Hachette, 1868), Canto XXXI plates: Inferno, Paradiso. Publication history: Open Culture, “Gustave Doré’s Haunting Illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy,” August 2025: openculture.com
- Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: gutenberg.org
- Caspar David Friedrich, The Lonely Tree, 1822, oil on canvas, Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin: commons.wikimedia.org
- Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Triumph of Death, about 1562, oil on panel, Museo del Prado (P01393): commons.wikimedia.org
- Georg Simmel, “The Ruin” (1911), in Kurt H. Wolff, ed., Essays on Sociology, Philosophy and Aesthetics, Harper & Row, 1965, pp. 259–66: archive.org
- In-game item text and locations, Elden Ring Wiki: Blessed Dew Talisman, Remembrance of the Fire Giant, Fire Giant, Mountaintops of the Giants, Elden Lord Crown, Erdtree Avatar, Ulcerated Tree Spirit, Deathroot, Those Who Live in Death, paintings, Homing Instinct
.jpg){kind=link}
.jpg){kind=link}
