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This is the middle panel in Hieronymus Bosch’s famous triptych “The Garden of Earthly Delights”. A triptych is a painting or carving that spans three separate panels, usually commissioned as an altarpiece or for other religious purposes.

The painting above depicts all manner of imaginative pleasures and ecstasies. Look closely and you’ll find someone nibbling a giant strawberry, someone else fondling an owl, and there’s a group putting flowers in each others butts. It’s a bizarre, surreal landscape in which beasts and humans mingle freely. It’s basically Disneyland on mushrooms.

The left hand panel (not included here) depicts Adam and Eve in Paradise, whereas the panel on the right showcases Hell. The middle panel is therefore one stuck between heaven and hell. It is a confusing place, in which nothing seems impossible or unlikely. It’s also a potentially heretical symbolist gesture: what if sin is required in order to be absolved? What if Adam and Eve had to fall from grace in order for humankind to live and be salvaged? It’s a wild painting, and like all art, it invites us to revel in contradiction and ponder various interpretations.

It also reminds me of a short story by the Japanese author Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. In his story “Hell Screen” he describes an artist who has been commissioned to paint a scene of hell. But he can only paint what he has seen in real life. So he inflicts all manner of inventive torture upon his apprentices, hoping that he can paint them instead.

The story concludes when the artist asks his patron, a wealthy lord, to sacrifice a young maiden for him to paint. The lord agrees, but tricks the artist, forcing him to paint his own daughter as she burns for his painting. The artist goes mad, both horrified and enraptured by the consequences of his art.

And whilst Hieronymus Bosch clearly painted his triptych from imagination, the sheer abundance of his vision has always had something similarly reckless about it. Instead of using symbolism in a merely allegorical way, he suggests that sin and salvation are more deeply intertwined in the human experience than the church might want us to think.

I’d also like to contrast “The Garden of Earthly Delights” with a contemporary painting, by Erik Thor Sandberg. Titled “House” (2004), it clearly shares an affinity with Bosch’s Garden. Instead of a triptych we get one sprawling edifice, from which all manner of different characters leap. Every window contains a little scene. The house contains the full spectrum of the human experience; violence, suffering, lust, pleasure, and the absurdity of it all happening at the same time.

House, by Erik Thor Sandberg (2004)

The German philosopher Heidegger once said that language is a house we must live in. To which Lacan responded that language is in fact a prison-house we cannot escape from. Likewise, Sandberg depicts the symbolism of a house from which the characters leap and fall.

I like to think that Bosch was making a similar argument with his “Garden of Earthly Delights”. The fall from heaven is mirrored in the garden of earthly delights. And yet to be alive is to revel in this fall, to enjoy it a rollercoaster. Bosch depicts the imaginative possibilities of redefining what life can be. And nothing is ever as simple as it seems. His symbolism defies simple allegory. Life isn’t about choosing between food and evil. To be alive, to be a subject, is to be caught in a constant interplay of contradictory desires and fears, pleasures, and pains. Life is never just one thing.

The fantasy of heaven and hell is therefore that we might be able to make some sense of it all. The philosopher Slavoj Žižek once characterized ideology as that which provides a system to govern the chaos of our desires. And isn’t this exactly what Bosch portrays? Heaven and hell are an ideology that impose order on the chaos of our desires. This means that there is something revolutionary about Bosch’s unbridled garden, which might as well be a depiction of u-topia, a non-place, neither here nor there. It is a mesmerizing depiction of this possibility that makes the Garden of Earthly Delights such a riveting example of the way in which Art can help us reshape the possibilities of human life and its depiction as we know it. Or perhaps precisely as we do not yet know it.

Julian

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