Garden of Earthly Delights

Garden of Earthly Delights
Painting Artist: Hieronymus Bosch; Oil painting on panel; painting Size: 220x195 cm (central panel), 220x97 cm (wings); Prado, Madrid.

The Garden of Earthly Delights is a triptych painting by Hieronymus Bosch, perhaps it is Bosch's most famous painting, is regarded as a work of his late maturity, dating from between 1514 and 1516. When the wings open the painting shows the Garden of Earthly Delights in the middle panel with numerous nude figures and tremendous fruit and birds, the significance of the central panel is in which the painter seems to have given free rein to his own inexhaustible fantasy is much more controversial. Perhaps the most plausible explanation is that it is a moralizing satire. Paradise on the left depicts paradise with Adam and Eve and many wondrous animals; Hell on the right with depictions of fantastic punishments of the various types of sinners.
When closed it presents the Creation of the World on the outer faces of the two shutters, painted with the grisaille technique, offers a poetic vision of the Earth viewed through a crystal sphere.
The Creation of the World, for it Bosch draws on traditional iconography, although he curiously confines the figure of the creator to the top left-hand corner. The divine act is summed up by the words taken from the Psalms and reproduced on the two panels: Ipse dixit et facta sunt, Ipse mandavit et creata sunt. The moment represented corresponds to the third day of creation, when the light was separated from the darkness, the lands emerged from the waters and the trees appeared.