Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights: Heresy, Alchemy and Musical Hells
Hieronymus Bosch's triptych in the Prado: the three panels, the tree-man, Fraenger's theory and alchemical readings, from the Nassau court to El Escorial.
The Prado Museum in Madrid holds the triptych that, more than any other, has inspired talk of heresy, alchemy and secret languages: The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch. Painted in oil on panel, probably in the first decade of the sixteenth century, it measures about two metres high and almost four wide when open. The painter, born Jheronimus van Aken around 1450 in 's-Hertogenbosch, in Brabant, died there in 1516, leaving a work that still challenges interpreters today.
Three panels and a closed world
When the triptych is closed, the outer wings show, in shades of grey, the earth on the third day of creation, enclosed in a transparent sphere. At the top left a small God the Father watches the scene, accompanied by a verse from the Psalms in Latin: «He spoke and they were made, he commanded and they were created». Opening the wings, we pass from grey to an explosion of colour. On the left is the Earthly Paradise, where God presents Eve to Adam; in the centre a crowd of nudes plays among giant fruits, birds and fountains; on the right a nocturnal hell opens up.
Bosch's hell is surprisingly musical. A lute, a harp and a hurdy-gurdy become instruments of torture, and a stave of notes is even drawn on the body of one of the damned. At the centre stands the «tree-man», a hollow body resting on trunks like boats, turning towards the viewer a melancholy face in which some have wished to see a self-portrait. On the right a bird-headed monster, seated on a high chair, devours the damned and expels them.
The esoteric hypotheses
In 1947 the German scholar Wilhelm Fraenger proposed that the triptych had been commissioned by a heretical sect, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, also called Adamites, and that the central panel celebrated an innocent, paradisal love. The theory enjoyed great popular success but has been rejected by most historians: Bosch was a respected member of the Brotherhood of Our Lady in his town, an entirely orthodox religious association.
Other interpreters have read the triptych in alchemical terms. The glass spheres, flasks, transparent vessels and figures enclosed in shells recall the laboratory equipment of the time, and the sequence of the panels has been compared to the stages of transmutation. This reading also remains a hypothesis: alchemical symbols were widespread in the visual culture of the period and may have served Bosch as images of fragility and vanity rather than as coded messages.
From Brussels to El Escorial
The first reliable records place the work in the palace of the Counts of Nassau in Brussels, where in 1517 it was seen by Antonio de Beatis, secretary to Cardinal Luigi d'Aragona, who described with amazement men, women, birds and animals of every kind. Later the triptych passed to Philip II of Spain, a great collector of Bosch, who had it brought to El Escorial in 1593. The monk José de Sigüenza, in 1605, defended its moral value, seeing it as a satire on human sins and follies.
The title by which we know it today does not go back to Bosch but to later inventories. Its modern fame is partly due to the Surrealists, who recognised in it an ancestor of the painted dream. However it is interpreted, as a moral sermon, an encyclopaedia of symbols or an alchemical vision, the triptych remains one of the most powerful painted meditations on desire, on the transience of pleasure and on the destiny of the soul.