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

Over the half-mil­len­ni­um since Hierony­mus Bosch paint­ed it, The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights has pro­duced an ever-widen­ing array of inter­pre­ta­tions. Is it “a paint­ing about sex­u­al free­dom”? A “medieval acid trip”? An “erot­ic fan­ta­sy”? A “hereti­cal attack on the church”? The work of “a mem­ber of an obscure free-love cult”? James Payne, the Lon­don cura­tor behind the Youtube chan­nel Great Art Explained, rejects all these views. In the open­ing of the in-depth video analy­sis above, he describes Bosch’s well-known and much-scru­ti­nized late-15th or ear­ly-16th cen­tu­ry trip­tych as, “pure and sim­ply, hard­core Chris­tian­i­ty.”

Dat­ing from “a time when Euro­pean artists, writ­ers, and the­olo­gians were shap­ing a new, ter­ri­fy­ing vision of Hell and the pun­ish­ment await­ing sin­ners,” Payne argues, The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights is “an intense­ly moral­is­tic work that should be approached as what it is: reli­gious pro­pa­gan­da.”

Depict­ing the Bib­li­cal cre­ation of the world on its out­er pan­els, the work opens up to reveal elab­o­rate­ly detailed visions of Adam and Eve in the Gar­den of Eden, then human­i­ty indulging in all known earth­ly delights, then the con­se­quent tor­ments of Hell. It is that last pan­el, with its abun­dance of per­verse activ­i­ties and grotesque human, ani­mal, and human-ani­mal fig­ures (recent­ly made into fig­urines and even piñatas) that keeps the strongest hold on our imag­i­na­tion today.

Payne’s expla­na­tion goes into detail on all aspects of the work, high­light­ing and con­tex­tu­al­iz­ing details that even avowed appre­ci­a­tors may not have con­sid­ered before. While iden­ti­fy­ing both the pos­si­ble inspi­ra­tions and the pos­si­ble sym­bol­ic inten­tions of the fig­ures and sym­bols with which Bosch filled the trip­tych, Payne empha­sizes that, as far as the artist was con­cerned, “his images were a real­is­tic por­tray­al of sin and its con­se­quences, so in that sense, it was­n’t sur­re­al­ism, it was real­ism.” This bears repeat­ing, giv­en how dif­fi­cult we mod­erns find it “to look at this paint­ing and not see it as sur­re­al­ism or a prod­uct of the sub­con­scious, not see it as a sex­u­al utopia, a cri­tique of reli­gion, or even a psy­che­del­ic romp.” Just as The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights tells us a great deal about the world Bosch lived in, so our views of it tell us a great deal about the world we live in.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

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

Take a Mul­ti­me­dia Tour of the But­tock Song in Hierony­mus Bosch’s Paint­ing The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights

The Musi­cal Instru­ments in Hierony­mus Bosch’s The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights Get Brought to Life, and It Turns Out That They Sound “Painful” and “Hor­ri­ble”

New App Lets You Explore Hierony­mus Bosch’s “The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights” in Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty

Fig­ures from Hierony­mus Bosch’s The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights Come to Life as Fine Art Piñatas

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.