I spent a good portion of my most recent holiday break assembling a jigsaw puzzle of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. I cannot recommend this puzzle enough to all you art-lovers out there. Sure it’s somewhat obscene to reduce a masterpiece to a kitschy consumer toy, but come on: consumerism is the water we swim in nowadays.
And Bosch is a perfect artist to assemble from confusing fragments. Several times I had to ask my sister-in-law if she had over on her side of the table any bluish seashell earthworks, or anything from the pink scrotal edifice in the background with the bird on there, or hey is that my huge disembodied ear sitting next to your assembly of dark brown, lower-Hell pieces?
If you’re looking at the whole tableau at once then you quickly get the gist of Garden: paradise was stiff and stately, then people indulged quite a bit, and then burned in hell for having done that. The greatness of the painting though is in the specific expressions of those broader movements. “Imagination” and “whimsy” are terms that don’t come anywhere near to capturing the haunting, repellent, engrossing and baffling imagery that Bosch sets down. And you get to really sink your teeth into these qualities, really get to inhabit Bosch-world fully, when you place all your focus on one or two puzzle pieces.
Everywhere you look there are dozens of…let’s call them fables, but good luck assembling narratives. You’ve got the persistent element of sexuality, depicted explicitly but also through metaphors: large juicy berries and bursting seedpods. There are familiar manifestations of sexuality, like butt-play, but you’ve also got people marching erotically into the crack of a huge egg, and bubble domes with freaky fishlike creatures within, and a guy in a floating pink thing peering down a clear tube at an approaching rat.
Certainly this painting has the heavy medieval moralism that comes with 17th century biblical interpretation. But there’s just too much wide, fulsome freedom for these decadent acts to be a sort of Reefer Madness for sodomy. These fables must have inspired more rebellion than they discouraged.
I get a particularly joyful vibe from the center of the middle panel, where groups of naked humans and their livestock march in a circle around swimmers in a pond. It looks like a pagan fertility rite, or a battle against no one in particular. Bosch is also dutiful in recording the variety of European trees and birds that appear on nearly every puzzle piece. The natural world is set down in scenic, almost scholastic accuracy, right next to gleaming nutsack temples and topless, partying mermaids.
I couldn’t believe it when I read in Stefan Fischer’s book that this canvas was a wedding present. Henry III of Nassau’s family asked Bosch to offer a guide for a good marriage. For all the lurid fantasy on offer, there is also a knowledge that the viewer will return to his comfortable mercantilist life. Bosch’s masterpiece urges a more imaginative marriage, a wilder more libidinous landscape design where people of all races (!) and even animals form a dangerous and extravagant community. Until they/we are all smote, of course.
Further Reading:
Stefan Fischer, Hieronymous Bosch, The Complete Works, Taschen, 2016.
Paul Vandenbroek, Utopia’s Doom, Leuven: Peeters, 2018.