The Garden of Earthly Delights: Walk into Bosch's Painting

Hieronymus Bosch painted his triptych around 1500 for a palace in Brussels. Today it hangs in the Prado in Madrid, and this page holds the museum's own photograph of it: 30,000 pixels wide, sharp enough to see the cracks in the paint. Open the wings, zoom in, and tap any of the 90 scenes we have described: the owl in the fountain, the couple in the mussel, the Tree Man, the music written on a sinner's backside. Every explanation names the writer it comes from. Free, no account, and the photograph is in the public domain.

The wings are closed: the world on the third day of Creation. Press Open the wings.

How to look

The wings are closed when you arrive, the way the painting was kept in the sixteenth century. You can already zoom into the grey outside: God sits small in the top left corner. Press Open the wings and the two grey shutters swing aside. Then drag to move, scroll or pinch to zoom, and click on anything that catches your eye: a paper card tells you what you are looking at, what the art historians have made of it, and where you are. Nothing is marked on the painting itself, so you can simply look. The closer you zoom, the smaller the details you can click, down to things that few visitors to the Prado ever see. The map in the bottom corner keeps track of where you are.

If you would rather be led, press Take a tour: the camera flies from scene to scene in the order of the story, from the closed wings to the bottom of Hell, or along a theme such as the owls or the music. Surprise me jumps to a scene at random. Find the owls turns the painting into a game. Share this view copies a link that opens the painting at the exact spot you are looking at.

On a phone the triptych runs full screen; the card slides up from the bottom and can be dragged taller. The text of every scene is also printed below the viewer, for reading at leisure.

The painting in a few lines

The Garden of Earthly Delights is a triptych by Hieronymus Bosch: three oak panels painted in oil, hinged so that the two outer wings can close over the middle. Open, it shows Paradise on the left, a garden of naked people, giant fruit and strange buildings in the centre, and Hell on the right. Closed, it shows the world on the third day of Creation in grey. It was painted in 's-Hertogenbosch, probably in the 1490s, and hangs in the Museo del Prado in Madrid.

Painter	Jheronimus van Aken, called Hieronymus Bosch (about 1450 to 1516)
Date	1490 to 1500 according to the Prado; about 1495 to 1505 according to the Bosch Research and Conservation Project. The oak of the panels was ready for use from 1460 to 1466.
Size	Painted surface 185.8 cm high; the centre panel 172.5 cm wide, each wing 76.5 cm. With the frame about 2 by 4 metres.
Technique	Oil on oak panel; the outside of the wings in grisaille, grey on grey
Museum	Museo del Prado, Madrid, inventory P02823, on permanent loan from Patrimonio Nacional, the Spanish royal collections
First seen	30 July 1517, in the palace of the Nassau family in Brussels, by the Italian traveller Antonio de Beatis
Old names	"The variety of the world, called Del Madroño" (1593), the strawberry painting, La Lujuria (Lust). The modern title is not Bosch's.
Signed	No. Bosch signed only seven of the paintings that survive and dated none.

The Prado writes that the painting has never been doubted as a Bosch. Nothing else about it is certain: not the date, not who paid for it, not what it means.

Sources: the Prado's collection entry (Pilar Silva Maroto, 2016); the Bosch Research and Conservation Project as cited by the Eclectic Light Company; Wikipedia, The Garden of Earthly Delights.

Who was Bosch

Jheronimus van Aken was born around 1450 in 's-Hertogenbosch, a prosperous town in Brabant, now in the south of the Netherlands. His grandfather Jan and his father Anthonius were painters; so were four of his uncles. Nothing by any of them survives. In 1462 his father bought a stone house on the Market square, and the next year a fire burned down thousands of houses in the town. Jheronimus was about thirteen. He later signed his paintings with the name of his town: Bosch.

Around 1481 he married Aleid van de Meervenne, who was a little older and a good deal richer. They lived in a house she had inherited on the same Market square, called In den Salvatoer. In 1486 or 1487 Bosch joined the Brotherhood of Our Lady, a religious society of about forty leading citizens with thousands of outer members across Europe; he became a sworn brother in 1488 and painted for its chapel in the church of Saint John. The brotherhood's accounts record his funeral mass on 9 August 1516.

That is almost all we know. Bosch left no letters and no diary. Only about 25 paintings and 8 drawings are accepted as his. Already in his lifetime his work was collected in the Netherlands, Austria and Spain, and copied everywhere, especially the hells. The Spanish writer Felipe de Guevara called him, around 1560, "the inventor of monsters and chimeras". The Dutch painter and biographer Karel van Mander wrote in 1604 of his "wondrous and strange fantasies", often "less pleasant than gruesome to look at", and admitted he could find out neither when Bosch was born nor when he died.

Sources: Wikipedia, Hieronymus Bosch; the Jheronimus Bosch Art Center ('s-Hertogenbosch), his life and the review of Loes Scholten (2014) on the family's workshop; Karel van Mander, Het Schilder-boeck (1604), on DBNL.

How to read a triptych

A triptych is three panels on hinges. In churches the wings stayed closed on ordinary days and were opened on feast days, so the inside was a surprise. Bosch used the same trick for a painting that almost certainly never stood in a church: the outside is grey and quiet, the inside is colour and crowds.

The three inner panels are one landscape. The horizon runs at the same height across all three, the lake of Paradise is echoed by the lake of the garden, and the same blue rocks stand in the distance. Each panel has water in its middle ground: a pond with a fountain, a pool full of women, a frozen lake. Each has buildings in the background: fountains that look like plants in the first two, a burning city in the third. The figure of Adam, stretched out on the grass, is repeated in the garden and mirrored in Hell. The painting looks chaotic and is anything but.

Infrared photographs, which show the drawing under the paint, tell us that Bosch changed his mind while he worked. On the left wing he first drew the Creation of Eve from Adam's rib, the usual scene, and then painted God presenting Eve to Adam instead, a scene connected with marriage. The Prado showed the infrared and X-ray images in 2016, with the triptych standing free in the room so that visitors could walk around it and see both sides.

Sources: the Prado's collection entry (2016); Wikipedia; Eric De Bruyn's review of Reindert Falkenburg (2013), on the egg at the centre; the Prado's exhibition page of 2016.

What it means: seven readings

Nobody knows what Bosch meant, and the painting has been read in opposite ways for four hundred years. These are the readings you will meet on the cards, with the people who proposed them.

A warning against sin (José de Sigüenza, 1605, and most writers since): Sigüenza, the librarian of the Escorial, saw the painting there and wrote that it is "a painted satire of the sins and follies of men", about "the vain glory and brief taste of the strawberry, and its faint scent, which is barely noticed before it is gone". He defended Bosch against the charge of heresy: the others paint men as they look from outside, he wrote, Bosch alone dared to paint them as they are inside. The reading has held: Paradise, then a world given over to lust, then its punishment. Ludwig von Baldass (1960), Charles de Tolnay ("the nightmare of humanity"), Dirk Bax, Walter Gibson (a "false paradise") and the Prado's own text follow it.
A paradise regained (Wilhelm Fraenger, 1947): Fraenger turned it upside down. For him the centre panel was a happy world of innocent love, painted for a secret sect, the Adamites or Brethren of the Free Spirit, whose Grand Master was the pointing man in the corner. It was a brilliant book and nearly everything in it was invented: the Grand Master's biography was fiction, and no art historian today takes the sect seriously. The Dutch scholar Dirk Bax called Fraenger a fantasist.
Proverbs and puns (Dirk Bax, 1956): Bax read the painting through the Dutch language of Bosch's time: to pluck fruit, to bird, to swim in the bath of Venus. Many of the jokes on the cards are his. He gave the triptych a blunt Dutch name: the triptych of unchastity.
The world before the Flood (Ernst Gombrich, 1969): Gombrich found old inventories that called a copy of the painting "as it was in the days of Noah". He suggested that the centre panel shows the carefree world before the Flood, with giant fruit because the soil was more fertile then, and the closed wings the world after the waters went down. The Flood reading of the wings has been rejected; the "days of Noah" idea is still discussed.
A utopia (Hans Belting, 2002): Belting saw a humanist picture for a learned court: the world as it would have been if the Fall had never happened, a place without children, old people, work or death. He also proposed that the Tree Man's face is Bosch's self-portrait.
A test for the viewer (Reindert Falkenburg, 2011): Falkenburg's book The Land of Unlikeness argues that the triptych was a conversation piece for young Burgundian nobles. The garden is a false dream sent to lead mankind away from God, Hell is the "land of unlikeness" where man has lost the likeness of his maker, and the painting tests whether you can see through it. The people in the picture point and whisper to each other, just as its viewers did.
Alchemy and the Grail (Laurinda Dixon, 1981; Paul Vandenbroeck, 1989): Dixon read the glass tubes and eggs as alchemical equipment and the four panels as the four stages of the Great Work; reviewers find the match thin. Vandenbroeck sees a false paradise of love, the "Grail" of medieval romances, painted the way preachers described it. The Prado's 2016 text sums up the museum's position: a paradise "that deceives the senses, a false Paradise given over to the sin of lust".

Sources: Gibson (1973) and Spanish Wikipedia for Sigüenza; Wikipedia and the Jheronimus Bosch Art Center for Fraenger, Bax, Gombrich, Belting, Dixon and Vandenbroeck; Gombrich's own article (1969); De Bruyn's and Jacobs's reviews of Falkenburg; the Prado's entry.

The painting's travels

The triptych was made for the Nassau family, the most powerful nobles of the Low Countries: for Engelbert II of Nassau, says the Prado, or for his nephew Henry III, say others. It hung in their palace on the Coudenberg hill in Brussels, where De Beatis saw it in 1517 and wrote of "bizarre things", "seas, skies, woods, meadows", "people crawling out of a shell". From Henry it passed to René de Chalon and then to William of Orange, the leader of the Dutch revolt against Spain.

In 1568 the Duke of Alba, sent by Philip II to crush the revolt, seized William's possessions, the painting among them. It went to Alba's son Fernando de Toledo, and after his death Philip II bought it at the sale of 1591. On 8 July 1593 it arrived at the monastery palace of the Escorial as "a painting in oils, with two wings, of the variety of the world, illustrated with grotesqueries by Hieronymus Bosch, known as Del Madroño", the strawberry tree. It stayed there for more than three hundred years.

In the 1930s it was taken to the Prado in Madrid; the museum's register says 1933, the Civil War deposit of 1936 and a decree of 1943 made the loan permanent, and in 2015 the royal collections and the museum agreed in writing that it stays. In 2016, five hundred years after Bosch's death, the Prado's Bosch exhibition drew about 590,000 visitors, the most in the museum's history, while the Noordbrabants Museum in 's-Hertogenbosch brought seventeen of his paintings home for a few months and counted 421,700.

The painting was famous from the start. A Brussels workshop wove it as a tapestry in gold, silver and silk around 1550 to 1560, now in the Spanish royal collection; painted copies of the wings and the centre exist in Madrid, London and Budapest; and Pieter Bruegel the Elder took the right wing into his Dulle Griet and his Triumph of Death.

Sources: the Prado's provenance line; Wikipedia; Gombrich (1967) on De Beatis; Patrimonio Nacional, the Escorial leaflet of 2016 and the joint statement of 16 December 2015; Fundación BBVA and NL Times on the visitor numbers of 2016.

The music of Hell

Bosch's Hell is the only one I know with an orchestra. A harp with a man strung on it, a lute the size of a shed, a hurdy-gurdy that will take a nun's head off at the next turn of the crank, a drum with a man inside, a recorder in the wrong place, a trumpet that hurts the ears of everyone near it, a pink bagpipe on the head of the Tree Man. Under the lute lies a man with notes painted on his buttocks, and a choir of the damned sings them.

In 2014 a student in Oklahoma, Amelia Hamrick, wrote the notes out and played them, "the 600-year-old butt song from hell", and the internet loved it. A Spanish early music group had recorded the same notes in 1978, on an LP called Codex Gluteo. The musician Ian Pittaway has since argued that the notes are only painted to look like notes: there is no clef, so no pitch, and Bosch never meant them to be sung. Which does not make the picture less funny.

I make electro: machine beats, vocoders, songs about people and machines. What I see in this panel is instruments that have turned on the people who played them, which is a story anyone who works with machines understands. If you want to hear what my own machines do, the About Me page has the records, and the Corporate Electro EP on Bandcamp is free. Bosch is on my list of inspirations there, with reason.

Sources: Ian Pittaway, Early Music Muse (2021), parts 1 and 2; Lapham's Quarterly on Amelia Hamrick; the NTR interactive documentary (2016); Wikipedia.

The catalogue of scenes

Everything the cards in the viewer say, printed here in order: the closed wings first, then Paradise, the Garden and Hell. Each entry opens the scene in the viewer.

The closed wings

The left wing: Paradise

The centre panel: the Garden

The right wing: Hell

Quaestiones

Is The Garden of Earthly Delights a warning or a celebration?

Most art historians since 1605 read it as a warning: Paradise, then a world given over to lust, then Hell. Wilhelm Fraenger (1947) and Hans Belting (2002) read the centre panel as a happy world without sin, and the painting looks happy enough to make that tempting. The Prado's own text calls it a false paradise that deceives the senses. The painting does not settle the question, which is probably why it was made.

Why is everyone naked?

Because the centre panel shows people living the way Adam and Eve lived before the Fall, without shame. There are no children and no old people in the garden, no work and no illness. In Hell the same people are still naked, but now they try to cover themselves.

What do the strawberries mean?

In 1605 José de Sigüenza wrote that the painting is about the "vain glory and brief taste of the strawberry", a pleasure gone almost before it is noticed. In Spain it was called the painting "del madroño", after the strawberry tree. Gibson adds that strawberries could also stand for hypocrisy and death hidden under a smiling face, and Gombrich that the fruit was giant because the earth was thought to be more fertile before the Flood.

Is the Tree Man a self-portrait of Bosch?

Hans Belting proposed it in 2002, and many people like the idea. Nobody can prove it: the portraits of Bosch that exist were all made after his death, so we do not know what he looked like. Belting's argument rests on the face itself: its ironic expression and its sideways glance out of the picture.

What is the letter on the knife?

It looks like an M on its side or a B, and it is a cutler's mark. In 1995 and 1996 archaeologists in 's-Hertogenbosch dug up a fifteenth-century table knife with the same M, and a deed of 1538 names the town cutler who used it: Anthonius Jonckers, also known as Van den Grave. Bosch's town was famous for its knives, so he most likely painted one from home. Older readings saw "Mundus" (the world), the Antichrist or "B for Bosch" in it.

What is the "butt music"?

A line of musical notes painted on the buttocks of a man who lies under the giant lute in Hell. Amelia Hamrick transcribed and recorded it in 2014; a Spanish ensemble had done so in 1978. The music historian Ian Pittaway argues that the notes are fake notation without a clef and were never meant to be played.

Who paid for the painting?

A member of the Nassau family in Brussels: Engelbert II, who died in 1504, according to the Prado, or his nephew Henry III according to the Bosch Research and Conservation Project. It was first described in their palace in 1517. It was almost certainly not made for a church.

Was Bosch on drugs when he painted it?

No. Bosch was a respected citizen and a sworn brother of a religious confraternity, and his monsters come from manuscripts, prints, bestiaries and the gargoyles of his own town's church. The idea comes from ergot, a fungus in bread that caused hallucinations and the loss of limbs; the sawn-off foot in Hell recalls that disease, but nothing connects it to the painter.

Where can I see the real painting?

In the Museo del Prado in Madrid, room 056A, where it has hung since the 1930s. It belongs to Patrimonio Nacional, the Spanish royal collections, and is on permanent loan to the museum.

May I use the photograph on this page?

Yes. The photograph was made by the Prado with Google in 2009 and the stitched 30,000-pixel version is on Wikimedia Commons in the public domain, because Bosch died in 1516. The texts on this page are ours; the scholars' words are quoted with their names.

How many owls are there?

We can point at four that the books also mention: in the Fountain of Life, at the left and right edges of the garden, and the owl-faced Prince of Hell. Writers count differently; the NTR documentary says people once called the owl "the Bosch bird". The owl hunt on this page uses the four.

What is a triptych?

A picture in three parts on hinges, so that the two outer wings can fold over the middle. Churches kept the wings closed on ordinary days. Bosch painted the outside of this one in grey, the world on the third day of Creation, and saved the colour for the inside.

Sources and credits

The photograph is The Garden of Earthly Delights by Bosch High Resolution.jpg on Wikimedia Commons, 30,000 by 17,078 pixels, stitched from the gigapixel photographs that the Museo del Prado made with Google Earth in January 2009, in the public domain. The closed wings are the Museo Nacional del Prado's own photograph of the exterior, 2,362 by 2,511 pixels, as served by the Prado's online viewer (photograph © Museo Nacional del Prado). We cut the photograph into 2,107 tiles; your browser loads only the part you look at.

Every scene card lists the pages it was written from. The main ones: the Prado's collection entry for P02823 by Pilar Silva Maroto (2016); the English, Dutch and Spanish Wikipedia articles; the NTR interactive documentary Jheronimus Bosch, the Garden of Earthly Delights (2016, Pieter van Huystee and Q42); E. H. Gombrich, "Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights: a progress report" (1969); Walter S. Gibson, "The iconography of the central panel" (1973); the reviews of Belting, Bax, Dixon, Gombrich, Gibson and Vandenbroeck on the site of the Jheronimus Bosch Art Center; Eric De Bruyn's and Lynn Jacobs's reviews of Reindert Falkenburg's The Land of Unlikeness (2011); Ian Pittaway's three articles on the music of the Garden at Early Music Muse (2021); Annemarieke Willemsen on the skates and the games (2001); Sally Hickson's essay for Smarthistory; Adam McLean on the knife and the portrait; and James Payne's video The Garden of Earthly Delights for Great Art Explained (2021), which gave this page its shape. Where a reading is Payne's own, the card says so.

The viewer and the texts are ours. The frame around the painting was modelled and rendered in Blender after the real frame of the triptych. Nothing on this page is affiliated with the Museo del Prado or Patrimonio Nacional. If you find a mistake, write to me.