The Garden of Earthly Delights

Bosch painted this great triptych, this three-panelled altarpiece, in the Netherlands around the turn of the sixteenth century, and it reads left to right like a warning. On the left is Eden, where God presents Eve to Adam among calm animals. In the centre, the panel everyone remembers, hundreds of naked figures sport among giant strawberries and birds and impossible glass shapes, a whole world given over to pleasure. On the right is hell, colder and darker, where a knife is wedged between two huge ears and a bird-headed creature devours the damned. To a churchgoer of Bosch's time the message would have been plain enough, that indulgence in the middle leads straight to the punishment on the right. What no one has settled in five hundred years is Bosch's own feeling about that central garden, whether he painted it in horror or with some sly delight in its strangeness. Much later the picture entered the collection of Philip the Second of Spain, a famously severe and pious king, which is how a Dutch fantasy of sin ended up hanging in Madrid. Look closely and small figures reappear across all three panels, the same crowd carried from paradise to torment.