The Painting That Hid a Secret for 500 Years

There is a painting hanging in Madrid right now that no one fully understands. Not art historians and not the curators at the museum where it lives. It is almost 13 feet wide. It took years to paint and it contains hundreds of figures like naked humans. Impossible creatures with musical instruments used as torture devices. A man with a fish for a head and demons eating people and expelling them into darkness and hidden inside the chaos of hell. Actual music written on a human body that nobody noticed for 500 years until a college student found it on Tumblr in 2014. This is the Garden of Earthly Delights painted by Hieronymus Bosch somewhere between 1490 and 1510 and it is not just one of the strangest paintings ever created, it is one of the most debated, most analyzed and most obsessed overworks in the entire history of art. Because nobody, not one person in 500 years, has been able to say with complete certainty what it means. Before we look at the painting, you need to understand the man who made it. Hieronymus Bosch was born as Jeroen van Eycken around 1450 to a family of artists rooted in the once bustling city of Hertogenbosch in what is now the Netherlands. His grandfather, father, uncle and brothers were all painters. He almost certainly trained in the family workshop as a child. But what came out of that workshop was unlike anything any of them could have imagined. Bosch painted at least 16 triptychs throughout his life, depicting scenes from the Bible. What sets his work apart from his contemporaries is his interpretation of these scenes. Instead of painting a straightforward depiction, he drew heavily on his imagination to create surreal, incredibly detailed artworks. His works served as cautionary tales, showing the consequences of man's immorality. He earned a nickname that followed him for centuries, the creator of devils. But here is what makes Bosch truly strange. We know almost nothing about him personally. Bosch did not record much of his life, and he left no letters, no diaries, no written explanations of his work. Every interpretation of his paintings, including this one, comes from looking at the images themselves and trying to understand what a deeply religious medieval mind was trying to say. And with the Garden of Earthly Delights, what he was trying to say has been argued over ever since. The painting is a triptych, three panels that fold together like a book. When closed, the outer panels show a muted monochromatic world, the earth on the third day of creation, before God placed life upon it. Gray and empty, a world not yet corrupted, and then you open it, and everything changes. The left panel shows the Garden of Eden. God stands between Adam and Eve. The panel is divided into three sections, the top representing heaven, the middle representing the descent of the divine, and the bottom portraying earth. The Garden of Eden is portrayed as a lush, idyllic environment complete with animals and mythical creatures. But look carefully at this panel, because Bosch has already hidden something. A pink fountain sits in the center of the panel, symbolizing the flow of divine energy from heaven to earth. Throughout the triptych, Bosch uses pink to represent divine influence. And in the bottom corner, easy to miss, a duck-billed creature with human hands, Bosch was believed to be highly intellectual, and this image could represent the corruption of man through education. Even in paradise, in the very first moment of creation, Bosch is warning you something is already wrong. Now the center panel, the one that has driven scholars mad for five centuries. The central panel is the painting's largest. It shows a pleasure garden bursting with mostly nude, beautiful young figures engaging in all manner of amorous activity. The colors are high-key and joyous. They feast from the mouths of giant birds, huddle inside flower petals, and swim in pools together. At first glance, it looks like paradise, like celebration, like joy, but Bosch is not celebrating. He is warning. As scholars like Dirk Bax and Walter S. Gibson have suggested, medieval symbolism pointing to sin is everywhere in this panel. The setting itself, a lush garden, would have connoted lust to Bosch's contemporaries. Every giant fruit is a symbol of temptation, and every naked figure indulging in pleasure is a soul moving toward damnation. The strawberries, enormous, ripe, being devoured with abandon, were a medieval symbol of fleeting pleasure. Beautiful for a moment. Gone the next. The intricacy of its symbolism, particularly in the central panel, has led to a wide range of scholarly interpretations over the centuries. 20th century art historians are divided as to whether the triptych's central panel is a moral warning or a panorama of paradise lost. One scholar put it plainly, I cannot help feeling that the real secret of his magnificent nightmares and daydreams has still to be disclosed.