Hear the Song Written on a Sinner’s Buttock in Hieronymus Bosch’s Painting The Garden of Earthly Delights

There’s some­thing unusu­al­ly excit­ing about find­ing a hid­den or dis­creet­ly placed ele­ment in a well-known paint­ing. I can only imag­ine the thrill of the physi­cian who first noticed the curi­ous pres­ence of a human brain in Michelangelo’s The Cre­ation of Adam: God, his ret­inue of angels, and their cloak map neat­ly onto some of the main neur­al struc­tures, includ­ing the major sul­ci in the cere­bel­lum, the pitu­itary gland, the frontal lobe, and the optic chi­asm. It’s hard to gauge Michelangelo’s moti­va­tion for doing so, but con­sid­er­ing his doc­u­ment­ed inter­est in dis­sec­tion and phys­i­ol­o­gy, the find is not par­tic­u­lar­ly sur­pris­ing.

And then there’s anoth­er find. Sev­er­al years ago, the Inter­net became excit­ed when an enter­pris­ing blog­ger named Amelia tran­scribed, record­ed, and uploaded a musi­cal score straight out of Hierony­mus Bosch’s The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights, paint­ed between 1490 and 1510. The kick­er? Amelia found the score writ­ten on a suf­fer­ing sinner’s butt.

The poor, musi­cal­ly-brand­ed soul can be seen in the bot­tom left-hand cor­ner of the painting’s third and final pan­el (below), where­in Bosch depicts the var­i­ous tor­ture meth­ods of hell. The unfor­tu­nate hell-dweller lies pros­trate atop an open music book, crushed by a gigan­tic lute, while a toad-like demon stretch­es his tongue towards his tune­ful but­tocks. Anoth­er inhab­i­tant is strung up on a harp above the scene.

The piece, which Amelia tran­scribed and record­ed, can be heard in the video above. It is… unusu­al. Although we can’t ascer­tain why Bosch decid­ed to write out this par­tic­u­lar melody, since scant bio­graph­i­cal infor­ma­tion about the painter sur­vives, it’s pos­si­ble that he decid­ed to include music in his depic­tion of the infer­no because it was viewed as a sign of sin­ful plea­sure. For those who haven’t yet had a chance to hear it, lis­ten to Medieval-era butt music here.

Ilia Blin­d­er­man is a Mon­tre­al-based cul­ture and sci­ence writer. Fol­low him at @iliablinderman or at Google, or read more of his writ­ing at the Huff­in­g­ton Post.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Hierony­mus Bosch’s Bewil­der­ing Mas­ter­piece The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights

The Mean­ing of Hierony­mus Bosch’s The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights Explained

Watch the Spec­tac­u­lar Hierony­mus Bosch Parade, Which Floats Through The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights Painter’s Home­town Every Year

Hierony­mus Bosch’s Medieval Paint­ing, “The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights,” Comes to Life in a Gigan­tic, Mod­ern Ani­ma­tion