The Painting That Looks Like the Internet

Before the garden and the fire and the famous swarm of figures the whole world half remembers, there was this. A grey world, sealed shut. No sky, no sun, no people. Only a flat disc of new-made land, floating in the dark inside a sphere of glass. What you are looking at is the back of the painting, the side that shows when its two wings are folded closed, the part most people walk straight past on their way to the colour within. Along the top, in a thin pale band, runs a single line of text. For he spoke, and it came to be. He commanded, and it stood firm. It is the third day of creation, the world as it stood before the sun, before the animals, before us. And then it opens, 500 years on, and we still cannot agree on what is inside. Step back, and meet it whole. The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymus Bosch, painted around the year 1500. It is a triptych, three painted panels, hinged like a book, so that the two outer wings fold shut over the middle one. Painted in oil on oak, it stands seven feet tall, and runs 12 feet wide when it is open, and for centuries, it has been hung in Spain, in the Prado, in Madrid. The story runs left to right, across three worlds. On the left, lies a paradise, a green and gentle garden where God brings the first man and the first woman together. On the right, its opposite, a dark burning country where the dead are put to torment, and between them, as wide as both wings put together, sits the panel the painting is named for. A field swarming with naked bodies, and giant fruit, and birds the size of horses, all given over to nothing but pleasure. Paradise, pleasure, punishment. It looks, at first glance, like the simplest kind of sermon, with sin laid out on one side, and the wages of it on the other. But it is not simple, and for 500 years, it has refused to hold still. So who painted it? His name was Geron van Acken, though we know him by the name he signed his pictures with. Bosch, after his home town, Schertogenbosch, a busy cloth town in the low countries. The only likenesses we have of him were drawn long after he was dead, so this, the closest we come to his face, is already half a guess. And yet every record we do have, points the same way. He came from a long line of painters, he married into money, and he was a devout and practicing Catholic. He was, in fact, a sworn member of the Brotherhood of Our Lady, a religious order so exclusive that, of its thousands of members, only some 60 took the oath he took. It sat him at table with the priests, the scholars, and the noblemen of his city. Hold that man in your mind, respectable, pious, well-connected, and then look at what his neighbours were painting. Because the art of his time and place was calm, and orderly, and devout. A gentle Madonna, a quiet saint, a still gold light falling across a tidy world. And this is what Bosch made instead. Nothing in the tradition he came from leads to it. His creatures have no models in nature, he invented them whole, out of his own head. And he did it in an age that did not prize invention at all. An age that held creation to be God's business alone, and the man who dreamed up his own to be already halfway to a sin. The most conventional of men painted the one picture no one could place. That is the puzzle. Hold on to it. Go back to the grey world a moment, the lid. Now that you know what bursts out of it, look at how carefully the thing was made. The earth is a flat disc, half in shadow sealed inside its sphere of glass, with the first grey plants only beginning to rise, and no sun yet, no moon, nothing alive to see them. And up in the corner, very small, so small it is easy to miss, a figure. God watching, tiny, at the very top, outside the glass, with the whole new world cupped in front of him. The line of text runs above his head, for he spoke, and it came to be. But read on a little in the psalm those words are taken from, and you find the rest of the thought waiting there. From heaven the Lord looks down, and sees all mankind. That is the place Bosch has quietly arranged for you to stand. Not in front of this painting, but above it, looking down, the way its maker looks down. You lift the lid on the world, and something is already watching to see what you will do with it. Open the lid then, and begin where the story begins, on the left, in Eden. It is a green and gentle world, where God stands between the first man and the first woman, and joins their hands. A calm pool behind them, soft hills, a few quiet animals come down to the water. It should be perfect. But look at the edges. A black unicorn, dipping its head to drink. A fish with wings, swimming through the open air. A duck-like creature, perched on the bank, reading a book. Bosch did not pull these out of nowhere. Little monsters exactly like them crawl through the margins of medieval prayer books, doodled into the borders by bored scribes, half a joke and half a nightmare. But Bosch has lifted them up out of the margin, and set them down in the middle of paradise. And there, in the centre of the pool, stands a thing no one has ever been able to name. A tall pink fountain, part flower, part fountain, part machine. This is the first sign that something here is wrong. The trouble in this painting does not begin in the middle, with pleasure, nor on the right, with punishment. It begins here, in Eden, painted in from the very first day. And now the centre, the garden the whole painting takes its name from. Take it in whole, all at once, because no single detail can hold it. Hundreds of small pale figures are scattered across the green, doing nothing in the world but enjoying themselves, eating, bathing, riding, climbing in and out of the fruit. There are strawberries and cherries grown bigger than the people carrying them, birds the size of horses feeding them berries by hand, and a great slow ring of riders wheeling round a pool on every kind of beast. There is no violence anywhere in it. No one suffers, no one is punished, and on its bright surface it looks like nothing so much as a picture of perfect happiness. And that is exactly what makes it so hard to read. Is it the sin itself, mankind drowning in its own pleasure, swelling like the fruit, a single step from the hell that waits on the right? Or is it something far stranger, a daydream of a world that never came to pass, paradise as it might have been, had no one ever fallen at all? The painting will not tell you. It simply hands you the garden, beautiful and troubling, in the very same breath, and leaves you to decide what you are looking at. Now cross all the way over, to the right, to hell. The green is gone. The world here is black and burning, and every pleasure from the middle panel has come back, turned now into a punishment. This whole corner is given over to music, but the instruments have become engines of torture. A man is bound across the strings of a great harp, as though crucified on it. Another is trapped inside the round body of a lute, while a drum, a horn, and a hurdy-gurdy are all turned against the people who once danced to them. To Bosch it seems even this could damn you, even a song, even play. Look around the rest of it. A gambler's table lies knocked over, the game lost for good. A miser is made to go on paying, somewhere off in the dark. And above it all, on a high seat, sits a creature with the head of a bird. He swallows the damned down whole, and passes them out beneath him into the pit. Whatever you loved in life, hell hands back to you, and makes it the very thing that destroys you. That is the warning, if it is a warning. And then, in the very middle of all that ruin, one figure stops you. They call him the Tree Man. His body is a broken white eggshell, cracked open and hollow, and his legs are two dead tree trunks that stand, impossibly, in two little boats. Balanced on his head is a wide flat disc, and around its rim tiny people troop in a slow circle, past an enormous set of bagpipes, as though the top of his skull were a dance floor. His ears are pinned through with an arrow, and split by a long blade. And then there is the face. It turns back, over the shoulder, out of the wreck of the body, and looks straight out at you, and it is calm, and almost sad, and it does not belong for one moment in a hell. Many of the people who have given their lives to this painting believe that face is Bosch's own. We cannot prove it, he left no certain portrait of himself anywhere. But if they are right, then somewhere in the worst place he was ever able to imagine, the painter turned, and gave the wreckage his own quiet face, and watched. Watching. Like the small god on the lid. Like you. So which is it, in the end? A warning, or a dream? Here is the honest answer. Nobody knows. And it is not for want of trying. For five centuries the cleverest people ever to stand in front of this thing have each walked away certain, and each one certain of something different. Some say it is exactly what it appears to be. A sermon against lust, in which the garden is the sin, the hell on the right is the bill, and the whole vast machine was built to put the fear of God in you. Others say very nearly the opposite, that Bosch belonged to a quiet heresy that held the pleasures of the body to be holy, and that the middle panel is no warning at all, but a hymn, a paradise handed back. Others still read the whole triptych as alchemy, the old dream of turning base matter into gold and spirit, encoded in the glass, and the egg, and the flower. And it is worth saying plainly that Bosch could be perfectly clear when he wanted to be. His other great pictures wear their morals on the surface, a cart of hay that the whole greedy world claws after, a ship of fools drifting nowhere in particular. This one will not do that. When the king of Spain's men crated it up in 1593, even the clerk who entered it in the inventory could not settle on what it was. He set it down in the end as a painting of the variety of the world. Though the same faded scrawl, some have always said, reads not variety, but vanity. So look at the whole of it one last time. Paradise, garden, hell, the grey lid that watches over them, the painter's own face set down quietly in the fire. And the thing that has kept this picture alive for 500 years is the very thing we have been circling from the start. It will not resolve. Every age has come to it certain it held the key, and every age has been sure of something different. The pious saw a sermon, a later century saw a heresy, and we come to it now and reach for the only words we have. Because there is something in this picture we recognize, even when we cannot quite say what it is. It is not one image, but a thousand, a field of the strange and the lovely and the alarming, far more than any single eye can hold, scrolling past faster than you can take it in. We have, lately, learned to live inside something a little like it. The surrealists, the painters of dreams, looked back across 400 years and claimed him as one of their own. But you do not need them to feel it. You have felt it this whole time, the pull to lean in closer, and the quiet certainty that you are still missing most of it. And then the wings fold shut, the colour folds away, the grey world returns, and the small god is still watching from his corner. A picture of the whole of life that no one has ever finished reading. In a world this full, do you know what you are looking at?