Hieronymus Bosch “Garden of Earthly Delights”

by Lilly Flowers

Hieronymous Bosch was a Dutch painter whose work was extremely important to the Northern Renaissance. My first encounter with Bosch was through a youtube essay dissecting his work. The artwork that I have chosen to analyze as gothic is Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights which is a tryptic made of oil paints on oak wood, painted between 1490 and 1510. The most gothic thing about his painting is the overwhelming excess present in the artwork. More than anything else the painting has much to take in; from the multiple panels, many characters, and hidden symbolism the painting could be split into many different artworks and still be exciting to view. There is so much to look at and absorb that during the first viewing of the painting, it’s very confusing and claustrophobic, but by looking closer there is even less comfort. Within the painting, there are three panels all individually titled. The right panel, The Garden of Eden, depicts Bosch’s imagined Eden with God, Adam, and Eve, establishing biblical symbolism early on. Although God, Adam, and Eve are the main subjects of this painting, there is much more in the foreground and background of the artwork. In the front, we have a gaping black hole with strange creatures coming out of it–birds with multiple heads, swimming birds, and eerie land animals as well–all unfamiliar to the Earth and the viewer.

As we shift our viewing to the middle panel, the viewer is struck with the sudden images of odd sexual relations and a plethora of naked people. Many of the faces are very realistic, demonstrating the gothic movement towards naturalism. There are people with eggs and fruit on their heads, humans kissing beasts or riding his mythical creatures, large orgies in the lake in the middle ground of the painting, and many subjects eating fruit; a Christian allusion to the original sin. The main theme of sin is also a largely gothic trope and Bosch focuses specifically on the sin of sex. Culturally during the era of this painting, the 15th century, many northern Europeans were devoutly Christian and very afraid of the mystery of death and Hell. The fear of God was one that was present in the everyday lives of people yet even the church continued to inspire fear and confusion surrounding Hell and what happens once a person dies. People were not comfortable with sin in any way and this is Bosch’s representation of the sin we all crave and the sinister hell awaiting them. The religious subject matter and the desire to uncover an unknown truth all relate to the Gothic style. 

The final panel on the right aptly titled Hell is the most gothic of the three panels. This is Bosch’s depiction of Hell and what awaits the consequences of humans’ seven deadly sins. Contrasting the previous panels, Hell is painted with dark colors, mostly blacks, and reds to represent the underworld void of any life. There are people being crushed, stabbed, tortured, and eaten by more of his strange creatures. In the background, there are silhouettes of a city etched in fire, and looking closer, there’s an army led by a horned beast. Below them, a lake of naked people drowned adding to the surplus of violence. In addition to this, there are soldiers being eaten by even more strange and macabre creatures. This panel was made to scare the audience, acting as a threat to what is to come.

Stephen King’s novel “The Mist” also could be compared to Bosch’s painting because the main character David points out on page 147, “Her [Mrs. Carmody] sermon, a steady stream of horrors out of Doré, Bosch, and Johnathon Edwards, went on and on” directly connecting the type of creatures in the novel to Bosch’s work. Mrs. Carmody is preaching to the people locked in the grocery store about the monsters that have crawled out of the pits of Hell exactly like the monsters depicted in the third panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights. Even earlier David mentions Bosch, “It looked like one of the minor creatures in a Bosch painting–one of the hellacious murals”(103). The tentacled creatures of the mist, the four-foot flying slugs, giant spiders, and unimaginable beasts are littered throughout the Mist and from these quotes, it is clear that King has taken some inspiration from Bosch and his painting. Mrs. Carmody’s fire-and-brimstone sermon is extremely similar to the type of horrors depicted in The Garden of Earthly Delights as both of these people, Mrs. Carmody and Bosch, confess their fear of God’s wrath for the sins of the Earth.