There are paintings you glance at, and then there are paintings that rearrange your brain. The Garden of Earthly Delights belongs to the latter (less an artwork, more a fever dream with impeccable detail).
Painted by Hieronymus Bosch, the iconoclastic Northern Renaissance mind who somehow made religion feel surreal before surrealism had a name, it unfolds like a world where the sacred and the absurd are in constant, slightly awkward conversation. Bosch had humor - actual humor - and he used it. Evil, in his universe, isn’t always terrifying; it’s often ridiculous. Think tiny demons shaped like funnels (yes, the one you use for olive oil), grotesque little creatures that feel more like satire than a threat.
His fantastical scenes blur everything we like to keep separate: beauty and grotesquery, the mundane and the divine, pleasure and punishment. No one can fully explain what any of it means. Not definitively. We’re looking at an almost 500-year-old visual language from a medieval mind we can’t fully access, so interpretation becomes a kind of projection.
Trying to decode Bosch can feel a bit like trying to explain David Lynch; you can get close, circle the ideas, but clarity is never the point.
Some have called him heretical to make sense of the chaos, but that misses it entirely. He basically treated religion as a living system for imagination, irony, and zero interest in being obvious.
One more detail. Close the triptych: when the wings shut, you’re confronted with the Third Day of Creation, painted in grisaille.
Grey tones only. Why no colour?
Because the sun and the moon haven’t been created yet.
Colour, theologically, isn’t possible yet. When you open the panels, the burst of colour hits like a shock.
The Garden of Earthly Delights is a triptych oil painting created between 1490 and 1510, currently in the Museo del Prado in Spain, where photography is apparently forbidden. Which feels a little over-the-top, until you remember there is literally no way to pick a single moment from something this overloaded without your brain short-circuiting.
It’s split into 3 panels, and it only keeps getting weirder the longer you look. On the left, there’s this oddly (seemingly) perfect “Garden of Eden” situation, showing God introducing Eve to Adam in a pristine, peaceful landscape that already feels a little suspicious.
In the middle, things go fully spiral in a sprawling, chaotic scene with naked figures everywhere, giant fruit, and this very “what is happening” wonder that feels like paradise but also definitely not.
And then on the right, it fully drops into nightmare territory. A dark, chaotic landscape where punishment becomes almost theatrical, the “Tree-Man” stands out as the iconic figure (possibly Hieronymus Bosch’s self portrait), and musical instruments are transformed into torture devices.
The Garden of Eden (Paradise)
Left Panel
Bosch didn’t conceive paradise as a perfect starting point. He conceived it as a process already moving toward its end before it had even begun. Every creature, every hunting scene in the left panel is a deliberately placed record: the Fall isn’t an event. It’s a direction that was always already there.
A lion tears apart an antelope, a cat hunts a mouse, a monstrous bird swallows a frog. Death is already present in Paradise.
“If we look closely, the only thing that connects Paradise with Hell is sin.”
Sin doesn’t begin in the Hell of the right panel. It begins in the Paradise of the left. Bosch chose to tell the story of sin not from its consequences, but from its source. Larry Silver, Professor of Art History at the University of Pennsylvania, makes this concrete. A three-headed amphibian crawls out of the pool surrounding the Eden fountain. In the dark marshland of the foreground: a unicorn-seahorse composite, a winged fish, a three-headed bird. In Silver’s words: hybrid figures found in no bestiary. Right in front of Adam and Eve.
The Garden of Earthly Delights (False Paradise)
Central Panel
The setting itself—a lush garden—would have connoted lust to Bosch’s contemporaries. “For centuries, the garden had functioned as a setting for lovers and love-making”.
Fruit in 3 acts
In the first panel, a scene from the Garden of Eden, all of the fruits are safely on the trees. The middle panel shows creatures eating the fruits, and the last panel has no fruits because it depicts the consequences of eating them.
Early descriptions of the triptych refer to it as the ‘strawberry painting’, and the fruit appears several times in the central panel. It allows Bosch to reference other forms of imagery: in one section, people pick apples from trees while a man offers a strawberry to a woman with a leering expression, a twist on biblical depictions of Eden. In another, couples feed each other berries, a scene traditionally associated with courtly romance, yet here they are doing more than merely flirting. Bosch ‘subverts and perverts’ the theme of courtly love, with “‘love fruit’, a traditional metaphor for amorous union, both religious and worldly, now transformed into a hellish prison”.
Plucking fruit, which happens all over this panel, symbolized copulation; and Bosch’s swimming figures were likely nods to the 16th-century Dutch expression “swim in the bath of Venus,” which meant being in love.
The birds could also be taken as a double entendre.
As well as being an obsolete plural form, the Dutch word ‘vogelen’ (vogel = bird) could refer to having sexual intercourse.
In the middle of it all…
The fountain placed at the heart of the panel offers another sign that all is not well. In form, it mirrors the shimmering, crystalline wellspring seen to the left, in the Paradise panel. The surface of this one, however, is cracked, “thus conveying the idea of the ephemeral nature of earthly pleasures”.
Clothing feels like an optional idea that never really made it into the central panel.
Instead, you get hundreds of naked figures moving through this hyper-saturated world of excess, frolicking through lush green fields, gathering under strawberries the size of furniture, slipping into fountains, or emerging from giant eggs. It’s all very “anything goes,” but also slightly unhinged. The nudity reads more like exposure in every sense of the word. Everyone is fully in it, fully visible, fully giving in to impulse, which is probably why the whole scene feels like pleasure and confusion happening at the exact same time.
Gordon Williams suggests that shellfish have been ‘venereal symbols’ since ancient times, arguing that although Bosch’s shell is from a mussel rather than an oyster, “it has a scattering of semen pearls… Pliny mentions a species of mussel called Venereae, or Venus-Shell”.
The giant, bug-eyed owls placed on either side of the central panel hinted at evil in Bosch’s time, the hollow fruits dotting the landscape “signified something worthless, which was of course the way in which the medieval moralizers viewed the carnal act.”
The animals that cover the central panel also evoke carnal urges.
We know that fish, which crop up several times here, referenced the phallus in Old Netherlandish proverbs. The hordes of figures riding on the backs of bulls, horses, and fantastical creatures likewise allude to animal appetites and the act of sex itself. But while these figures are certainly enjoying themselves, Bosch also gestures to the ephemerality of fleshy pleasures—and to the fate that will follow.
Hell (Damnation)
Right Panel
Bosch’s hell panel is a far cry from other mediaeval depictions of inferno, where we often see people being boiled, burned or eaten alive. The suffering going on in this panel is not just on the physical level, it’s also psychological: the souls are being driven mad by fear, anxiety, chaos and distress.
The Tree Man
This odd creation has a human face and is crouching forward, it seems. The shoulders are propped up by legs resembling tree trunks, with branches sticking out. The Tree Man is balanced on two small boats, in which a group of people try to find shelter. In the tavern inside the Tree Man’s torso, a woman is pulling pints from a barrel, and we see a cross bow hanging from a tree. A man is sitting on a giant toad, a symbol of the devil.
The head of the Tree Man is surmounted by a large bagpipe, the instrument of sloth and idleness. The tiny flag on his eggshell back also shows a bagpipe. It may well have been sloth and alcohol abuse that caused the figures in the diabolical tavern to end up in hell.
When Music Turns Punitive
Those being punished for playing secular music are tortured with instruments; one man is splayed on a harp, another resigned to life with sheet music written on his ass.
What Flows Beneath Prosperity
In mediaeval days, the river running through the heart of ‘s-Hertogenbosch was an open sewer. Its stench pervaded the streets of the city. Only the very rich could afford a ‘closet’ perched above the river where they could relieve themselves in private. Ordinary people would defecate straight into the river. The elegant potty chair painted by Bosch would only be found in the homes of the city’s wealthiest. After his marriage with Aleid, he would become one of them. And most likely a similar chair took pride of place in his home.
On the edge of the sewer we see three figures. One rich ‘stinker’ is pooping coins. The figure right next to him is throwing up. Bosch had made an earlier painting themed on the seven sins.
Could it be he is depicting gluttony and greed here?
“I decided to transcribe it into modern notation, assuming the second line of the staff is C, as is common for chants of this era,” (in 2015, this score was transcribed and brought to life by university student Amelia Hamrick)
The 500-Year-Old Butt Song from Hell…
as it’s also known, is an entrancing piece: played on lute, harp and hurdy-gurdy or sung in a Gregorian choral arrangement, the music soars beyond a tiny patch of paint on the third panel of a triptych.
It might seem that the pig in a nun’s habit is the most significant element of this detail: but the amputated foot in fact offers the more surprising insight. Bosch paints the sawn-off appendage as a reminder of a condition known as St Anthony’s Fire – gangrene caused by eating bread infected with a black mould, or ergot fungus. In the 1950s, a component of the fungus was synthesised to create LSD.
“If you ate bread from the wrong baker… limbs would rot away while the mind would be addled by hallucinations, ultimately leading to insanity. Did Hieronymus Bosch paint his Garden of Earthly Delights while suffering from a bad trip?”
You could spend hours trying to make sense of every single element in The Garden of Earthly Delights and still feel like something slipped past you. It’s less a puzzle to solve than a field of possibilities you move through, where interpretation feels provisional at best.