Hell by Hieronymus Bosch

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Hieronymous Bosch's vision of Hell is found on the right hand panel from his immense triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights, painted between 1490 and 1510 (most likely 1495-1505).

Hieronymus Bosch made use of the emotive theme of Hell within several artworks. The iteration featured here was from the right hand panel of his epic, The Garden of Earthly Delights. Here we examine the many detailed features of this piece and place it within the overall series of four artworks which made up this multi-sides triptych. The very nature of Hell was ideally suited to the work of Hieronymus Bosch, an artist, after all, who revelled in the darkness of life and who also regularly used biblical content within his paintings. Bosch was an artist all about expression and imagination, and he would re-invent many topics from the Bible that had already been used on countless occasions by other artists. Whilst the likes of Van Eyck would focus on technical precision, Bosch took existing themes and appended his own extraordinary imagination on top. His panel titled, Hell, is a perfect example of this. For the benefit of those unable to see this majestic piece in person at the Prado Museum in Madrid, we have included some large images of various details in the composition below.

The Garden of Earthly Delights triptych as a whole shows a narrative sequence that starts on the left with Paradise and the Creation of Eve, continues in the centre with Mankind before the Flood, and ends up on the right in Hell. On the opposing, external shutters, the actual story begins with Creation of the World up to the Third Day. Man starts in Paradise, falls because of Eve's disobedience when she eats the apple, and ends up condemned to eternal damnation in retribution for his sins. Bosch's Hell is a more richly realised and individual Hell than the normal medieval underworld. It's a world of weirdness. In the background, cities burn; the scene is cold, with a blueish tinge to many of the colours, and it's full of intense detail, and very strange detail at that. Bosch's nightmare vision is like Breughel on steroids - the same feeling of a world full of people all busy pursuing their own activities, and full of precisely observed everyday objects, but in Bosch's world, everything has been strangely transformed into the stuff of nightmares.

All images are courtesy of Wikipedia.