A stroll in The Garden. The Cosmic Cycle of Heironymus Bosch.
By Shankar Nair
A fleeting look—if that is at all possible—at Heironymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights is probably all it takes to dispel, quite instantaneously, the glamorous and righteous imagery we have of 15th century European Art and its artists. After having appeased our sensibilities with cherubic angels, motherly Madonnas and six-pack Davids, stumbling on The Garden of Earthly Delights is like discovering a chicken wing in a vegan meal. You will recoil, not as much from the wickedness of it, but from the sheer incongruence of it.
This was the glorious Renaissance for God's sake; the time when, drawing from the philosophy of Humanism, and inspired by the ideals of beauty as entrenched in the figures of Greek and Roman antiquity, Raphael painted St Catherine, Botticelli did Venus and Da Vinci, the enigmatic Mona Lisa.
But The Garden of Earthly Delights is nothing like them. In fact, it's just the opposite. Apocalyptic. Pessimistic. Outlandish and frightful. But of course, stunningly beautiful. It’s arguably the most distinctive, oracular and intellectually engaging work of art ever created by any artist of any age.
For centuries, scholars and laymen, kings and peasants, all have stood spellbound in its gaze, overwhelmed by the sheer ambition and audacity of the artist; puzzled by its creepy and irrational imagery; intimidated both by the complexity of its detail and the truthfulness of the message it sought to convey.
Heironymus Bosch, 'the master of the monstrous' as Carl Jung described him, gatecrashed the Renaissance party probably around 1500 with this monumental piece of art that would have certainly jiggled the sensibilities of the Florentine and Venetian elite. But this was the low countries, and the man from ’s-Hertogenbosch, in a predominantly Roman Catholic Brabant was hardly untouched by the reality and circumstance of the Burgundian Netherlands where, in his time, evil was always around the corner, hell beckoned, and most inhabitants inevitably were damned.
Europe was reeling in the aftermath of the Hundred Years War in which around 3 million people perished; the memories of the destruction and suffering still hung like an echo throughout the Burgundian State. Roman Catholicism was on the verge of an unprecedented assault that will shake its religious and political foundations, particularly the authority of the Pope, thanks to the composer cum Augustinian monk Martin Luther, who was waiting just around the corner.
Standing knee-deep in this fearful and accursed world, Bosch unleashed his prodigious imagination to daringly interpret common, but deeply moralistic biblical cliches with refreshing originality, often secularly, depicting them with exemplary draughtsmanship and conceptual courage, suffusing them with deep religious symbolism, complex allegorical and metaphorical imagery, weaving fantasy together with the real, creating such gems as the Haywain, The Last Judgment and The Temptation of Saint Anthony.
The Garden of Earthly Delights is his masterpiece.
Like many commissions of the time, The Garden of Earthly Delights is a triptych, a painting on three panels, a large centre-piece hinged on both sides by smaller side panels, that can be closed to reveal another painting on the outside. Triptychs were meant as altarpieces and they narrated stories with strong moral and ethical themes, and are usually intended to be read from left to right.
Painted in oil on oak wood, with the leaves open, it measures 7 ft 4 by 12 ft 9, and together, depicts loosely, sequentially from left to right, though one can never be really sure with Bosch, Paradise, Earthly Pleasure, and Eternal Damnation.
With the panels closed, The Garden of Earthly Delights forms a single Grisaille image of a glass globe, representing the earth, half filled with water, suggesting perhaps the sea, from which land with rudimentary vegetation and some curiously shaped structures emerge. Ominous shafts of light break through dark clouds overhead, lighting up the bleak and desolate landscape. A diminutive God sits on the top left corner with an open book; a line from the Book of Psalms runs on top—a quiet, unassuming, literal representation of what’s generally believed as the Third Day of Creation that serves as an introduction to the theme but more as a clever misdirection from what lies inside.
When the leaves are opened, the central panel, as if lying in wait for just that moment, leaps out; hordes of naked men, naked women, animals, birds, mutant creatures, oversized flowers and fruits, anomalous objects, inscrutable coral structures, all pounce, all at once, in an explosion of flamboyant colour and tortuous form. The eyes struggle to find a toehold, a central, predominant object to focus on to begin to make sense of the whole; but there’s no such thing; innumerable figures, densely packed, jostle, vying for attention and scrutiny against a maddeningly distracting landscape. Stupefaction, bewilderment and amazement follow in quick succession as the shock of the initial ambush gives way, and the visual complexity and technical sophistication of the work become apparent.
There’s an instinctive need to look away to clear the head, to gather one’s thoughts. And as one does, the eyes fall, fortuitously, on the right panel. It’s dark; something that looks like a cracked eggshell with a face impaled on a tree is the first to catch the eye; then a phallus that turns out to be a huge dagger between two large ears. Then the curious objects of the better-lit foreground come into view: oversized musical instruments, a rodent in a nun’s habit, a creature in wooden clogs impaling a man, a bird devouring a human, two cat-like creatures nibbling on someone, and of course, the most amusing, and talked about, but with musical notes. As the eyes get accustomed to the detail, numerous unearthly, diabolic figures and their human victims slowly emerge from the darkness, revealing a tableau of excruciating pain, unendurable agony and infernal torment set against burning buildings and ghostly ruins.
The right panel descends on you like a punishment for having even gazed at the untrammelled Dithyrambic romp in the central panel, and is clearly an inspired portrayal of blazing Hell. If you’ve heard the moaning in the central panel, you can hear the screams in the right one. These two paintings, together with the relatively stagnant left panel with God, Adam and Eve in Paradise—Bosch’s Paradise—form one additive image, one overwhelming phantasmagorical panorama of human innocence leading to human folly leading to divine retribution; or as José de Siguenza, one of the earliest commentators on the painting, described it in 1605 as “a satirical comment on the shame and sinfulness of mankind”.
Never before have a pair of eyes been asked to perceive something this visually demanding; never before has the intellect been called on to unravel and interpret something this fervently outlandish.
Bosch makes Surrealism look like a painting contest for preschool children, and Salvador Dali, like Sandro Botticelli.
If this is about Christianity—which it is—then it is a long way off from the summer blossoms, grazing sheep and chirping birds imagery one would normally associate with the faith; if it's to illustrate, as the art historian Ludwig von Baldass wrote "how sin came into the world through the Creation of Eve, how fleshly lusts spread over the entire earth, promoting all the Deadly Sins, and how this necessarily leads straight to Hell”, this could be the most compelling pamphlet on Roman Catholic doctrine the Church could have handed out in the Middle Ages.
Yet, despite its striking Christian theme—interestingly, there’s nothing Christian in the painting; no recognisable religious iconography or symbols or people or scenes unlike other religious works of the time—art critics and art historians, psychoanalysts and philosophers, semioticians and theorists, all have, over many decades agreed, disagreed, postulated, vehemently disputed and meekly compromised, when it came to the precise meaning embodied in The Garden of Earthly Delights—initially called the Strawberry Painting after the giant strawberries of the central panel—and in comprehending the inimitable and enigmatic genius of Heironymus Bosch.
Over the years, desperate but genuine attempts to decode the mystery of the man and his work have led to prompt but abortive applications of Freudian psychoanalysis, alchemy, cultism, sorcery, didacticism, diabolism and even tantrism, with some, like art historian and critic Robert Delevoy—who famously said of Bosch: “His is a world apart, self-sufficient, indivisible; analysis of his art, however close, leads nowhere”—throwing up his hands.
Bosch and his Garden remain as bewildering and inscrutable as ever. It seems the more you stare at this work, the more it stares back. Conveniently, commentators have branded him, among other things, a moralist, a heretic and a sexual pervert, and his work sententious, profane and commercialist. But all these critical pundits do concede, that for a painting that’s so staunchly orthodox, it’s far ahead of its time. A truth endorsed no less by the fact that I’m seeing something new in it almost five hundred and twenty years later, and writing about it.
Could there be a simple explanation for the Daedalian objects that copiously populate this work? Could it be that Hieronymus Bosch sculpted his fantasy from the tangible fear of biblical damnation that permeated his town and gripped his fellow citizens? Or are these just the unglamorous consequence of some drug induced hallucination? A weekend rave party perhaps, deep in Den Bosch?
Art historian Erwin Panofsky, writing about The Garden of Earthly Delights in 1953 stated, "In spite of all the ingenious, erudite and in part extremely useful research devoted to the task of decoding Jerome Bosch, I cannot help feeling that the real secret of his magnificent nightmares and daydreams has still to be disclosed. We have bored a few holes through the door of the locked room; but somehow we do not seem to have discovered the key”.
The key has proved to be the Holy Grail.
But many holes have been bored since Panofsky’s lament, and interpretations abound. Many of the intriguing detail of The Garden of Earthly Delights has been diligently deciphered; especially the multi-layered significances of the curious objects and the ritualistic activities taking place in the garden, but like at a highly potential archeological dig, the more one digs, the more one unearths. And not everything is familiar or explainable. But what is indisputable is that The Garden of Earthly Delights is the product of the times Bosch lived in; a mirror to the trials and trepidations of his simple fellow citizens of Den Bosch.
To the devout audience of the time, where symbols and beliefs were employed in everyday existence, necessitated by rampant illiteracy, The Garden of Earthly Delights contained identifiable iconography; and the intrinsic narrative of the triptych was easily comprehensible and relatable. Bosch believed that hell is the consequence of man’s ultimate sin: an attachment to the carnal pleasures on earth. By arranging these symbols, drawn from Dutch literature, Flemish proverbs and folklore, effectively and vividly, he made tangible and substantial the genuine fears that haunted them. He personified the Medieval Northern European imagination on canvas, or wood in this case, mirroring two fundamental and driving preoccupations of the time—religiosity and fear.
Religious paintings and altarpieces of those days pampered to the mindset of an agrarian laity whose starting point to comprehend the world and the phenomena around them was firmly rooted in sacredness and religiosity that manifested itself in holy wars, pilgrimages and cults. While this offered the much desired solace, it also inculcated fear—a constant companion in the Middle Ages. Fear about plagues, hunger and disease augmented the atmosphere of uncertainty and insecurity, engendered by incessant preaching on the Devil, God’s wrath and Hell from every street corner, injecting an unprecedented level of timidity and despondency in people’s minds.
This Medieval European psychology was what Dante, who expectedly attests to a similar world view as Bosch—that of searing damnation and punishment, so magnificently distilled and presented in Divina Commedia, with his cantos finding vivid visual expression in the Hell panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights. Works like Bosch’s became the psychological means by which the Roman Catholic Church displayed its power and control in the sixteenth century, daring the populace to veer away from its accredited canonical dogmas, and face the consequences.
I can imagine myself sitting in the dark and gloomy cavern of my parish church on a sleepy Sunday in Den Bosch, only to be brutally confronted by this altarpiece; ominously looking down at me, reminding every cell of my body of my iniquitous life and my eventual and inevitable end. It was the good fortune of the people of Brabant that The Garden of Earthly Delights neither adorned a church wall nor was employed as an instrument of sermon, and was probably a product of private commission, sparing the man on the street from many a sleepless night.
But beyond this obvious Christian interpretation, perhaps there’s a different, even more secular and metaphysical reading that Bosch offers through The Garden of Earthly Delights, either unconsciously or as a result of some uncanny cognisance. And that has to do with the unmistakable parallel its storyline draws with the profound and fundamental teachings of two other great religions in the world—Hinduism and Buddhism.
Sure, The Garden of Earthly Delights is essentially a Christian narrative. It’s about us; our individualistic, earthly story; born naive and innocent, we succumb to temptation and indulge in sin, and then eventually we pay the price for it—textbook Christianity. But the fact that this work does not contain any conspicuous Christian references sets us on a path less travelled; or not travelled at all.
But this path to a more philosophical and non-religious interpretation requires stripping our minds of all ‘Christianity’. We have to repudiate the implied message of the artwork; reject the circumstances of its creation, overlook its intricate and meticulous detail, and forget that Heironymus Bosch was a Roman Catholic or that he belonged to the elite cult of the Illustrious Brotherhood of Our Blessed Lady, or that he was an Adamite.
If that’s sorted, then how far is Herr Bosch’s basic birth-life-death idea from the Hindu and Buddhist concept of the cosmos? According to Hinduism, the universe—in contrast to other Creation Myths—is created, preserved for a definite amount of time (4.32 billion years), and is then destroyed, only to be created anew to live another 4.32 billion years, only to be destroyed again. This continues ad infinitum, orchestrated by the three principal Gods of the Hindu Trinity: Brahma, the creator, Vishnu, the preserver, and Shiva, the destroyer. This eternal cyclical existence is true for all life. Death is not the end but a beginning of a new life.
With the panels closed, the monochrome painting of the universe in the process of creation is seen first, and upon opening, sticking to the natural visual hierarchy of Triptychs, sequentially reading from left to right, there are three distinct separate compartmentalised spaces, within which are three distinct activities: creation on the left; preservation (or life with all its materialistic and hedonistic trappings) at the centre; destruction on the third. These are the cosmic functions; the lifecycle of all matter, living and nonliving.
But where is the cyclical aspect in this painting? Isn’t it amusing that the Triptych as a mechanical communication device lends itself to an unambiguous staging of the cyclical idea of Hindu Cosmology by first looking at the painting on the outer panel, then opening it and reading from left to right and then closing it again to catch the universe being born again, then repeating the activity?
And if one feels the need to be true and sincere to the Hindu views on cosmology, and to make an experience of it, one may have to repeat the activity for eternity, if the curators at the Museo Nacional del Prado are kind enough to allow.
Interestingly, many scholars view the painting on the outer panel not as the beginning of the narrative, but as its culmination, maintaining that the scene depicts the flood, sent by God to cleanse the earth of venality and vice, and not the creation of the universe. This possibility of the outer panel representing both the beginning and the end means that there’s an inherent cyclical nature to Bosch’s pictorial narrative which in itself is a strong argument for an implied reference to a cyclical universe.
Again, at a human level, it’s one of the fundamental affirmations of Hinduism that our insatiable desires, our pursuit of earthly pleasures and attachment to materialistic objects lead to our pitiable end, or death—the idea that Bosch conveys through the central and the right panels.
The idea of Original Sin, the pivot on which Bosch spins his elaborate and frightening narrative, is exclusively a Christian concept. Eternal Damnation is a consequence of this Sin. But the concept of Sin—as an infraction on Divine Law that invites Divine Retribution––is non-existent in Hinduism and Buddhism. So the central panel can be read only as a metaphor for regular life with its alluring but transient pleasures, and people in pursuit of them; and the right panel a consequence of that pursuit. Only, unlike the Christian narrative, the story doesn’t end there, but returns to the first panel and traverses to the right over and over again. Till eternity.
The mortifying consequence of a debauched and libertine life in Hinduism and Buddhism is not death but rebirth or Samsara—an inescapable cycle of birth, life and death perpetuated for eternity. And attaining salvation means not surrendering to death and allowing the moribund cycle of life to continue infinitely, but liberating oneself from this miserable loop, for which the requirement is absolute detachment from these gratifications.
More specifically, Hinduism describes six enemies of the mind that are detrimental to attaining salvation: lust, anger, greed, pride, attachment, and jealousy; there’s abundant lust in the central panel of the painting as a prelude to Hell, but who’s to say that tucked away in the bizarre and inexplicable objects, hidden in the furtive and playful interactions of the cavorting couples, concealed in the intricate layers of The Garden of Earthly Delights one wouldn’t find the rest?
And who's to say that Bosch’s whimsical paradise of overgrown flowers, refreshing ponds, delightful birds and animals, in which the naked men and women frolic, is exactly what he meant it to be: a fantasy, a chimera, suggesting that the world we covet, and actively pursue and lustfully engage in, does not exist, or more accurately, it exists but is not what it appears to be, that it’s all Maya—an illusion that creates an alluring but misleading experience of the world; a deception that hides the true nature of reality?
Who’s to say that the Buddhist idea of Tanha, loosely translated as craving or thirst, including craving for sensual pleasures, and Dukkha, or suffering, or misery, the consequence of Tanha, cannot be discerned in the central panel and in the Hell panel respectively of The Garden of Earthly Delights?
Like a canvas painted over and over again by perhaps a talented but impecunious artist, there’s no doubt that Heironymus Bosch, while reciting a predominantly Christian storyline to a predominantly Christian population in a domineeringly Christian environment, was clever and percipient enough to restrain himself from brushing in any form of conspicuous Christian iconography or imagery leaving enough room for a multitude of secular narrations, left to be discovered only when the outer layers are carefully peeled off and underlying sketches revealed.
Despite the mist of obscurity that still envelops the man and his work even after more than 500 years of diligent and passionate scrutiny, there’s absolutely no doubt that at the core of The Garden of Earthly Delights throbs a universal and profound truth, recognisable not only to devout Christians across the world but also to humankind in general: that decadence leads to ruin, excesses lead to ruin, self-indulgences lead to ruin.
And as an emphatic endorsement to the secular side of Heironymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights is bereft of any kind of moralistic instructions, preaching, evangelising or sermonising; and together with the conspicuous absence of Christian symbols and scenes, The Garden of Earthly Delights stands as a powerful piece of secular wisdom, or as a fascinating and colourful proverb, that makes as much sense today as it did in the 1500s.
One could even argue, and it is quite possible, that Heironymus Bosch’s exceptional genius had perceived this truth that’s not exclusive to any one religion or relevant to any one sect, and through The Garden of Earthly Delights wilfully articulated it with consummate passion and exceptional force: whatever religious path we choose to follow, whatever faith we choose to believe in, all will lead to the same truth.
Apart from being an "erotic derangement that turns us all into voyeurs, a place filled with the intoxicating air of perfect liberty” as American writer Peter S. Beagle describes it, The Garden of Earthly Delights continues to delight, and challenge, and provoke; reticent with its secrets but generous with its brilliance.
Heironymus Bosch’s distinctive, quirky and enigmatic genius, and particularly this work, was the inspiration for many later masters like Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Max Ernst and the intermittent communist and Surrealist painter Rene Magritte. A Medieval painter caught in the glamour of the renaissance, Bosch never attempted or aspired to educate, entertain or enjoin, but made an original and sincere effort to hold a mirror to the society he was a part of, reflecting the fears and tribulations over great distances into the future.
And in that process, exposed an all-embracing truth along with the gospel truth.
My stroll in The Garden of Earthly Delights has been, by no means, a walk in the park, and my enquiry into the extremely fascinating and mildly terrifying world of Heironymus Bosch and his works still continues. It has been a rocky but deeply satisfying journey that began when I first beheld the painting.
I still remember the first words that came to my lips: ”What the hell?”
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Shankar Nair is a writer, brand strategist and entrepreneur born in Kochi, India, and living in Mumbai for the last three decades. He holds a degree in Applied Arts and has worked in advertising for many years. He writes on art, philosophy and politics and was a columnist for The Goan, an English daily newspaper published from Goa, India. Currently, he’s involved in helping marginalised and underprivileged women in Goan villages find social and financial independence by better leveraging their traditional skills. On the writing front, he’s nearing the end of a three year-long research on the origins and evolution of Christianity in India which helps in nostalgic visits to his home state of Kerala.
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