The Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch

Hieronymus Bosch is often regarded as one of the forerunners of Surrealism, and it is not difficult to see why. His highly detailed paintings depict human beings and animals in fantastical and nightmarish situations that, because of his use of translucent oil glazes, produce a strange sense of reality. This is the key to Bosch’s work, because he used his art to offer a moral message.

Hieronymus (whose family name was van Aken) was born in about 1450 in the north Dutch town of ‘s-Hertogenbosch, which accounts for the name by which he is generally known. He spent virtually the whole of his life (he died in 1516) in ‘s-Hertogenbosch. He was deeply religious, and much of his work is religious in nature and was commissioned either by wealthy noblemen who sought rich decoration coupled with moral instruction, or Church organizations such as the Brotherhood of Our Lady, of which Bosch was a member.

The Garden of Earthly Delights probably dates from around 1504. It is a triptych painted in oils on hinged wood panels. There are actually four paintings, because the two wing panels, when folded inwards across the central panel, reveal a fourth scene split between the two panel backs.

The left panel depicts the Garden of Eden and the right panel is a scene of Hell. The large central scene (which measures 87 by 38 inches) is of mankind between the two extremes. Eden has been abandoned and everyone is on their way to Hell. One possible scenario is that the central panel depicts the world before God sent the Genesis Flood to destroy it, which would fit with interpretations of the “fourth scene” as representing the Flood itself.

One could spend hours examining everything that is going on in this painting, and even more time trying to work out what it all means. Some sort of sexual orgy is in progress, with naked human figures engaged in an extraordinary range of weird activities. The strangeness is accented by the huge birds, fish and fruits that dwarf the humans and are sometimes seen consuming them or engaging in sexual activity. A man carries a huge mussel shell on his back, in which another man is trapped. A man and a woman are seen inside a bubble on the back of an imaginary sea creature. In the middle distance there is a parade of people riding on the backs of a huge range of creatures including pigs, goats, unicorns, and others that are part-animal and part-bird. Some of the people are holding huge fish as they ride. In all, there are about a thousand human figures in the whole work, plus all the animals, birds and other life forms, some of which would not be out of place in a work by Salvador Dali.

It should be noted that the left and central panels have a similar basic structure of a scene with land in the foreground and background and a lake in the middle distance, although the parallels are not exact in terms of the relative positioning of the lakes. A central globular object from which a slender tower emerges is a feature of both lakes. However, everything in the Garden of Eden is in proportion, which is certainly not so in the “earthly delights” scene. The darkly painted right panel depicting the horrors of Hell is another matter, with little resemblance to the structure of the other two, although the fantasy buildings in the distance of the central panel have been replaced by a burning city that looks remarkably like depictions of blitzed cities from World War Two.

It is impossible to make sense of everything in this work, although it is clearly intended as a powerful allegory of the sins and ravings of degenerate humankind. The modern viewer must bear in mind that The Garden of Earthly Delights was painted more than 500 years ago in an age when much of the world was still unknown by Europeans and people believed in the reality of unicorns, witches and demons. What may look unreal and fantastical to someone in the 21st century was very much part of the worldview of most people in the early 16th century. However, whatever century the viewer belongs to, the central message that mankind is corrupt and deserves its inevitable damnation is clear enough.

This extraordinary work, which is probably the best known painting by Hieronymus Bosch, may be seen at the Prado, Madrid.