Divine Judgment in Bosch'sGarden of Earthly Delights

Abstract

“We shall know them by their fruits” (Matthew 8:16)Despite many interpretations, the meaning of Hieronymus Bosch's so-called Garden of Earthly Delights (Fig. 1), especially that of its center panel, remains controversial and elusive.1 Like the Hay Wain, it is a secular triptych, an allegorical, moralizing picture for meditation. Writing of the Hay Wain, Tolnay speaks of Bosch's replacing the idea of transcendant divine judgment by the notion popular in the Middle Ages of an “immanent judgment as a consequence of man's sinfulness and foolishness.”2 He recognizes that the panels of the Garden of Earthly Delights are “differentiated according to the scheme of the Last Judgment,”3 but he does not pursue these concepts further. In the first edition of his book, he calls the Garden of Earthly Delights “the nightmare of humanity” or a “Divine Comedy” where “the artist's purpose is above all to show the evil consequences of sensual pleasure and to stress its ephemeral character.”4 In the catalogue raisonné, he moves away from these ideas and states: “In our opinion this is neither a simple didactic sermon [Siguença] nor a positive apotheosis of free love as Fraenger asserts; it is an encyclopedia of love and at the same time a representation of the sweetness and beauty of mankind's collective dream of an earthly paradise that would bring fulfillment of its deepest unconscious wishes, while at the same time it shows their vanity and fragility.”