The garden of earthly delights: When bosch painted humanity’s dreams
Imagine a morning in the year 1505, in the study of a Flemish nobleman. The shutters open onto a triptych, closed, grey and austere as a tombstone. Then, with a slow gesture, the panels part. What appears is neither an Edenic paradise nor a conventional hell, but a world where giant strawberries sta
By Artedusa
••8 min read
The Garden of Earthly Delights: when Bosch painted humanity’s dreams
Imagine a morning in the year 1505, in the study of a Flemish nobleman. The shutters open onto a triptych, closed, grey and austere as a tombstone. Then, with a slow gesture, the panels part. What appears is neither an Edenic paradise nor a conventional hell, but a world where giant strawberries stand beside monstrous hybrids, where couples frolic in transparent shells, where music becomes an instrument of torture. Welcome to The Garden of Earthly Delights, a work that, five centuries later, continues to haunt our imaginations like a feverish dream from which we never wake.
This is not just a painting. It is a geographical map of the human soul, drawn by a man who seems to have contemplated our most secret desires and our deepest fears. Hieronymus Bosch did not paint a religious allegory—he captured the very essence of what makes us human: our capacity to lose ourselves in pleasure, to invent impossible worlds, and to tremble before the idea of our own end.
The man who saw the invisible
To understand Bosch, one must first forget the image of the pious, rigid medieval painter. Hieronymus van Aken—his real name—was a man of the North, born around 1450 in a town in the Netherlands now known as ’s-Hertogenbosch, a place where morning mists still shroud the canals like a winding sheet. His family was a dynasty of artists, but he would surpass them all, not through technique, but through vision.
Unlike the Italian masters of the Renaissance, obsessed with perspective and anatomy, Bosch was interested in what escapes the eye. He painted nightmares, fantasies, the impulses that the society of his time preferred to silence. In a Europe torn between the waning Middle Ages and the dawn of modernity, his art acted as a distorting mirror, revealing what other painters concealed beneath drapery or halos.
Little is known of his life. He belonged to the Brotherhood of Our Lady, a conservative religious society, yet his works teem with symbols that border on heresy. Some historians have detected traces of alchemical or astrological knowledge in his paintings, as if Bosch had access to forbidden knowledge. Others see simply the fruit of an overflowing imagination, nourished by folk tales and Flemish proverbs.
Whatever the case, one thing is certain: Bosch did not paint to please. He painted to reveal.
The triptych that defies time
When you stand before The Garden of Earthly Delights in the Prado, what strikes you first is the scale. Three panels nearly four metres wide, populated by hundreds of tiny figures, like a human anthill observed under a magnifying glass. Yet despite this profusion, every detail seems placed with surgical precision.
On the left, the Garden of Eden. God presents Eve to Adam, but something is already amiss. An owl—symbol of wisdom or madness?—hides in the fountain of life. Strange animals, half-real, half-fantastical, wander through a landscape too green, too lush to be innocent. Even the light seems suspect, as if paradise were merely a stage set.
In the centre, the panel that gives the work its name: The Garden of Earthly Delights. Here, the world tips into organised chaos. Hundreds of naked bodies engage in activities as enigmatic as they are suggestive. Some pluck giant strawberries, others ride hybrid beasts, still others enclose themselves in glass bubbles or transparent shells. Colour explodes—pale pinks, electric blues, acidic greens—as if Bosch had sought to capture the fleeting brilliance of a dream.
On the right, Hell. No more colour here, only bloody reds and deep blacks. Musical instruments become instruments of torture. A man is crucified on a harp, another impaled on the strings of a lute. At the centre, a creature half-tree, half-man, its hollow body housing a tavern where demons feast. This is the ultimate nightmare, a world where even music, symbol of harmony, turns to torment.
The strawberry and the owl: a secret language
Bosch did not paint at random. Every element of his triptych is laden with meaning, like the words of a poem whose key has been lost. Take the strawberry, for example. In the central panel, figures pluck them with avidity, as if they were the forbidden fruit. Yet the strawberry does not appear in the Bible. So why this choice?
For Bosch’s contemporaries, the strawberry was a symbol of fleeting temptation. Its sweet taste lasts only a moment, just like earthly pleasures. By placing it at the heart of his garden, Bosch reminds us that the happiness he depicts is but an illusion, as fragile as a fruit that rots in hours.
And what of the owl, that nocturnal bird that appears several times in the work? In medieval tradition, the owl was associated with wisdom, but also with heresy. Some see an allusion to the marginal religious currents that stirred Europe on the eve of the Reformation. Others believe that by placing an owl in the Garden of Eden, Bosch meant to suggest that evil was present from the world’s very beginning.
Even the musical instruments in Hell carry their own significance. In an era when music was considered a gift from God, to see it transformed into tools of torture is a cruel irony. Bosch seems to tell us that even humanity’s finest creations can turn against us.
The alchemy of a masterpiece
Bosch was a master of technique, but also an innovator. His use of oil paint, still relatively new at the time, allowed him to layer translucent glazes, creating unprecedented effects of light and depth. Look closely at the fruits in the central panel: their glow seems to come from within, as if illuminated by an invisible source.
Modern restorations have revealed fascinating details. Beneath the layers of paint, experts have discovered preparatory sketches, showing that Bosch often altered his compositions at the last moment. For instance, in the Hell panel, a giant sea creature was originally a boat—proof that the artist let his imagination guide him far beyond convention.
But what truly makes The Garden of Earthly Delights unique is its narrative structure. Unlike traditional religious triptychs, which follow a linear progression (sin, redemption, damnation), Bosch’s defies all logic. Some historians believe the work should be read from right to left, like a descent into hell. Others see an alchemical allegory, where each panel represents a stage of spiritual transformation.
Whatever the interpretation, one thing is certain: Bosch did not want his work to be immediately understood. He wanted it to intrigue, to disturb, to haunt.
The mirror of our fears
Why does The Garden of Earthly Delights continue to fascinate us five centuries after its creation? Perhaps because it speaks of us, of our unavowable desires and our deepest anxieties.
The central panel, with its entwined bodies and fleeting pleasures, evokes our obsession with instant gratification. The giant strawberries, the transparent shells, the glass bubbles—all this strangely resembles the illusions we create to escape reality. And Hell, with its instruments of torture and monstrous hybrids, is it not the reflection of our modern fears: technology that alienates us, music that becomes noise, the body that turns into a machine?
Bosch had understood one essential thing: art is not there to reassure us, but to confront us with what we prefer to ignore. His triptych is a mirror held up to humanity, and what we see in it is not always beautiful.
The legacy of a visionary
Bosch’s influence on modern art is immense. The Surrealists, from Dalí to Ernst, saw in him a precursor, a man who had captured the unconscious long before Freud. Dalí himself painted The Temptation of Saint Anthony directly inspired by Bosch’s universe, with its hybrid creatures and dreamlike landscapes.
But Bosch has also inspired far more unexpected artists. The designer H.R. Giger, creator of the creatures in Alien, acknowledged his debt to the Flemish master’s monstrous hybrids. And what of the Chapman brothers, who recreated Bosch’s Hell in three dimensions, with nightmarish figurines?
Even popular culture has seized upon his work. The Rolling Stones used a modified version of the triptych for the cover of Their Satanic Majesties Request. In The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco refers to Bosch as a painter who had seen the future. And in Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro recreated the oppressive atmosphere of Bosch’s Hell.
The mystery remains
Despite all the studies, all the analyses, The Garden of Earthly Delights retains part of its mystery. No one truly knows what Bosch meant to say. Was it a religious allegory? A social satire? An alchemical vision? Or simply the product of an unbridled imagination?
Perhaps there is no single answer. Perhaps Bosch’s work, like dreams, is not meant to be understood, but felt. When you stand before this triptych, it is not your intellect that reacts, but something deeper, more primitive. An ancient fear, an unacknowledged desire, a fascination with the strange.
And that, perhaps, is Bosch’s true genius: to have created a work that, five centuries later, continues to speak to us in a language we do not fully understand, but which we recognise instinctively. As if, in looking at The Garden of Earthly Delights, we were looking into ourselves.
The garden of earthly delights: When bosch painted humanity’s dreams | Art History
