Close the doors of Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych and the garden is gone: two grey panels, and across them a glass ball hanging in the dark, holding a flat disc of new land under heavy cloud. There are no animals and no people yet. Up in the top left corner, so small you could miss him, God sits with a book on his knees.
Open the doors and the colour comes all at once. On the left is paradise, with God bringing Eve to Adam. In the middle is a garden crowded with naked men and women, riding animals in a ring, climbing inside giant fruit and reaching for strawberries the size of their heads. On the right it’s night, and hell, where a bird-headed creature sits on a child’s toilet stool eating people. This is The Garden of Earthly Delights, and the order you see it in carries its meaning: a world made in grey, then desire running left to right, from Eden through the garden and into the dark.
What is The Garden of Earthly Delights?
The Garden of Earthly Delights is a triptych by the Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch, painted in oil on oak panels about 1490 to 1500, and it hangs in the Museo del Prado in Madrid. The title is a modern one. When it was handed over to El Escorial in 1593 it was listed as a painting “with two wings depicting the variety of the world”, known as “Del Madroño”, after the strawberry tree whose fruit turns up all through the middle panel, and early Spanish writers called it La Lujuria, Lust.
Read it left to right, the way the doors open. In the Prado’s catalogue the three inside panels share one subject, sin, which starts in Eden with Adam and Eve and is punished in hell, and the middle is “a Paradise that deceives the senses, a false Paradise given over to the sin of lust.” Bosch hides the trick in the landscape. Paradise and the garden share one horizon, high up near the top, so the garden reads like the same place, a little later.
The outside: the world in a glass ball
Closed, the triptych shows the beginning of the world: the third day of creation, when the waters were separated from the earth. It’s painted in grisaille, shades of grey, the way the outsides of Netherlandish altarpieces usually were, and the grey makes the colour inside land harder when the doors open.
The earth is a flat disc inside a clear sphere, with sea around its edge, and light comes down through the cloud onto the water. There are plants already, so grey and strange it’s hard to tell which are plants and which are rock. Along the top, one line of Latin on each door, from the Psalms: Ipse dixit, et facta sunt, “For he spake, and it was done”, and Ipse mandavit, et creata sunt, “For he commanded, and they were created.”
God is tiny next to what he’s making. Charles de Tolnay saw God’s hold on the new world already slipping by the time of the left panel inside, and the small Creator on the doors fits that reading.
The left panel: paradise, and God bringing Eve to Adam
Open the doors and the left wing is Eden. A technical study of the panel found that Bosch first painted the creation of Eve here, then replaced it with this, God presenting Eve to Adam, a rare subject tied to the institution of marriage.
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Eden
One landscape with a lake in the middle and blue rock at the top, under the same high horizon the garden picks up in the next panel.
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God, Eve and Adam
God is young here, golden-haired, much younger than the old Creator on the doors. He holds Eve by the wrist and raises his other hand in blessing. Adam sits up on the grass, just woken, looking at her, and she keeps her eyes down.
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The fountain
A tall pink fountain stands in the lake, the fountain of the four rivers of paradise. Bosch paints it again in the middle panel, and there it is broken.
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The owl
In the round hole at the fountain’s base an owl looks out. The Prado reads the owls in the next panel as evoking evil, and this one is already sitting in paradise.
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Animals from travel books
An elephant with a monkey on its back, a giraffe, strange beasts in the grass. Hans Belting points out that many of the animals here come from the travel books of the day, written for an educated, aristocratic reader.
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Out of the ground
At the front, birds and winged creatures, some real and some invented, crawl out of a dark hole in the ground, and a cat walks off with a small lizard in its jaws. Further back a lion is about to eat what it killed. It is paradise, and things are already eating each other.
The art historian Virginia Tuttle points out that the scene matches none of the moments from Genesis that painters usually showed. It looks like a happy beginning, and Bosch keeps tucking small signs of the ending into it.
The centre panel: the garden it’s named for
The middle panel is the garden the whole triptych is named for. It’s crowded with naked men and women, black and white, in pairs and in groups, making love, and the charge is meant: this is the sin of lust. The animals are far bigger than they should be, and so are the plants and the fruit. Red fruit is scattered over everything against blue, and those two colours run the whole panel.
In 1517 Antonio de Beatis, secretary to the Cardinal of Aragon, saw it in Brussels and wrote down what was on it: “seas, skies, woods, meadows, and many other things, such as people crawling out of a shell, others that bring forth birds, men and women, white and blacks doing all sorts of different activities and poses.”
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The garden
The crowd in front, a ring of riders in the middle, and at the back five strange towers standing in the water, pink and blue, half stone and half plant.
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The pool
In the middle, a round pool full of naked women, some with birds and fruit on their heads.
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The ride
Around the pool, men ride anticlockwise on horses, donkeys, camels, unicorns and animals that never existed. The Prado notes they have been linked to the deadly sins. The ring goes round and round, and nobody gets into the pool.
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Fruit
Strawberries, cherries and berries as big as the people eating them. People sit inside fruit, carry it on their backs and lie on top of it.
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The owl
At each edge of the panel an owl sits a little back from the front and stares straight out, at whoever is looking.
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The broken fountain
The fountain of paradise comes back in the middle of the lake, cracked this time. The Prado reads the crack as how short these pleasures are, and where the owl sat in the first fountain there are now lovers.
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Two in the corner
Half inside a cave, a pair usually read as Adam and Eve after they were sent out of paradise. The man is the only person in the whole garden wearing clothes.
There are no children in the garden and nobody old, which makes it a life without consequence. Hans Belting reads it as innocence, a world from before anyone knew good from evil. The Prado’s catalogue, after Paul Vandenbroeck, reads the same crowd the other way, as people who believe they’re living in a paradise for lovers when it’s false, and whose only fate is the panel on the right. Either way, time doesn’t move here. Everyone is reaching for something and nobody is done.
The right panel: hell, and the music written on a man’s backside
Then the lights go out. The right wing is night, with cities burning along the top, frozen water in the middle and a crowd of torments at the bottom. It is often called the musical hell, because so many of the punishments are done with instruments, to sinners who gave their time to worldly music. Where the garden was about one sin, here every one of the deadly sins gets its punishment. Unlike the Doom paintings on medieval church walls, it has no judge, no scales and no gate, only the damned.
The greedy are swallowed by a creature with a bird’s head, a kind of owl again, sitting on a child’s toilet stool, and they come straight out the other end. The gluttons sit at a table inside the Tree-man, waiting for devils to serve them toads. The envious are sunk in frozen water. People are punished for their board games, and in the bottom right corner a pig in a nun’s veil leans in to embrace a naked man, a dig at the clergy of the day.
At the bottom left, under the giant lute, a man lies face down with lines of music written across his backside, a choir behind him sings from it, and an open songbook lies beside him. Bosch painted no clef. In February 2014 Amelia Hamrick, a music student at Oklahoma Christian University, chose one, reading the second line of the staff as C, transcribed the tune into modern notation and posted it on her Tumblr as a “600-years-old butt song from Hell.” The Guardian picked it up on 13 February.
It belongs in this panel. In paintings of the time, musical instruments often carried an erotic meaning, and the moralising books of the day called lust the music of the flesh.
Who was The Garden of Earthly Delights painted for?
It was made for a palace. The Prado gives the commission to Engelbert II of Nassau, for his palace on the Coudenberg in Brussels, where Antonio de Beatis saw it on 30 July 1517. The patron was long taken to be his nephew and heir, Henry III of Nassau, until the painting’s date moved back into the 1490s, beside Bosch’s Adoration of the Magi of 1494.
A painting this big, full of naked lovers, with no religious image at its centre and no donor portraits, hanging in a house that heads of state and courtiers came through, has always raised the question of what it was for. Craig Harbison suggested a wedding, and that fits the rare scene on the left, God bringing Eve to Adam.
- 1490sBosch paints it for Engelbert II of Nassau, for the Nassau palace on the Coudenberg in Brussels.
- 1504Engelbert dies. It passes to his nephew and heir, Henry III of Nassau.
- 1517On 30 July Antonio de Beatis sees it in the Nassau palace and writes it down, a year after Bosch’s death.
- 1544It passes to William of Orange.
- 1568On 28 May the Duke of Alba seizes it in Brussels from William, the leader of the Dutch revolt against Spain.
- 1591Philip II of Spain buys it at the sale after the death of Alba’s son, Fernando de Toledo.
- 1593On 8 July Philip sends it to his monastery of El Escorial.
- 1933It moves from El Escorial to the Museo del Prado.
- 1943A decree of 2 March puts it on permanent loan to the Prado, where it hangs today.
The Garden of Earthly Delights and craving
Put the three panels back together and the middle one is what the whole thing turns on: wanting with no object and no end, a ring of riders going round a pool they never get into, fruit everywhere and nobody full. The doors explain the order. The world starts in grey, the wanting runs left to right through Eden and the garden, and it arrives in a hell built from the same ordinary pleasures, the lute, the gaming table, the tavern, turned into instruments of punishment.
The Rage In My Resonance, an XPRMTS open edition, belongs with the right wing. It is a tangle of pale violet bodies in red and orange fire, mouths open, and its words are about a song that cannot be shut out: “I had never heard anything so beautiful. I hated them for it.” Bosch punishes his sinners with the music they loved, and those words come from someone already caught in it.
Frequently asked questions
What is the meaning of The Garden of Earthly Delights?
The Prado reads the three inside panels as one story about sin. It starts in Eden with Adam and Eve, the middle panel is a false paradise given over to lust, and the right panel is hell, where every sin is punished. Others have read the garden as innocent, a world before the Fall, and the argument has run for centuries.
Where is The Garden of Earthly Delights?
In the Museo del Prado in Madrid, in room 056A. It belongs to the monastery of El Escorial, part of Spain’s Patrimonio Nacional, and has been on permanent loan to the Prado since a decree of 1943.
What is the butt music in The Garden of Earthly Delights?
In the bottom left of the hell panel a man lies face down with a line of music painted across his backside. In February 2014 Amelia Hamrick, a music student at Oklahoma Christian University, transcribed it into modern notation and posted it as a “600-years-old butt song from Hell,” and the tune went viral.
Read next
- The paintings inside Elden Ring, where Bosch’s hell panel meets Doré and Friedrich.
- What is a Doom painting? Medieval hell on the church wall, the judge Bosch left out, and DOOM Eternal.
- The Shimmer, explained, refraction, rainbows and Redon’s hybrids in Annihilation.
- Fantastic Planet’s art style, Topor’s engraved alien world, where Bosch’s giants come back as Draags.
References
- Museo Nacional del Prado, The Garden of Earthly Delights Triptych, P002823: object data, provenance and catalogue text after Pilar Silva Maroto, in Bosch. The 5th Centenary Exhibition, Madrid, 2016, pp. 330–346: museodelprado.es
- Larry Silver, “Hieronymus Bosch, Tempter and Moralist,” Per Contra, Winter 2006–2007, with Antonio de Beatis’s 1517 description: percontra.net (archived)
- Antonio de Beatis, The Travel Journal of Antonio de Beatis, 1517–18, London, Hakluyt Society.
- Hans Belting, Hieronymus Bosch: Garden of Earthly Delights, Munich, Prestel, 2005.
- Virginia Tuttle, “Lilith in Bosch’s ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’,” Simiolus 15, no. 2, 1985.
- Craig Harbison, The Art of the Northern Renaissance, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995.
- Charles de Tolnay, Hieronymus Bosch, Basel, Holbein, 1937.
- Sean Michaels, “Hidden sheet music in Hieronymus Bosch triptych recorded by blogger,” The Guardian, 13 February 2014: theguardian.com
- Priscilla Frank, “Hidden Sheet Music Found In Famous Bosch Triptych,” HuffPost, 13 February 2014: huffpost.com
- “OKC student discovers butt music,” Oklahoma Gazette, 11 March 2014: okgazette.com
- Images: the closed doors, after the Prado’s photograph; the three open panels and the hell detail, after the Prado’s high-resolution photographs for Google Earth. All public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.