Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights: meaning, details and secrets

The Garden of Earthly Delights (in Italian Il Giardino delle delizie) is a large oil-on-panel triptych by the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, painted between the late 15th and the early 16th century. Open, it shows three scenes: on the left the Earthly Paradise with Adam and Eve, in the centre a vast garden of pleasures peopled by hundreds of naked figures, on the right Hell. Closed, it shows the creation of the world. It hangs in Madrid, at the Prado Museum.

On this page you will find what the three panels and the closed wings depict, the meaning of the strangest details (the giant strawberries, the cavalcade, the Tree Man, the monster of Hell), the interpretations of scholars, the history of the painting and where to see it. At the centre is the heart of the garden, which we have printed on Amalfi paper.

Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights triptych, c. 1490-1505, oil on panel. Madrid, Prado Museum

The closed triptych: the creation of the world

The closed wings: the world at the time of the Creation

The journey begins with the triptych closed. On the two outer wings Bosch paints, almost without colour, in tones of grey and green, a great transparent sphere containing the newborn Earth: a flat disc with water, rocks and the first trees, wrapped in clouds. In the top left corner, very small, is God with an open book. Above runs a Latin phrase from Psalm 33: "Ipse dixit et facta sunt, ipse mandavit et creata sunt", that is "He spoke and it was done, he commanded and all was created". It is the third day of Genesis, before the animals and man. When the wings open, colour explodes.

The left panel: the Earthly Paradise

The left panel: God presents Eve to Adam

At the bottom, God, with the face of Christ, takes Eve by the hand and presents her to Adam, who has just woken up. It is the first marriage in history. All around is a landscape full of real and imaginary animals: a giraffe and an elephant (which Bosch had never seen and knew from travellers' drawings), a unicorn, exotic birds. In the middle rises the pink Fountain of Life.

But look closely, and evil has already entered Paradise. In the hole at the centre of the fountain sits an owl, for Bosch the bird of darkness; below, a cat carries off a mouse, and animals devour one another in the pond. Paradise is perfect, but fragile.

The central panel: the garden of earthly delights

The central panel, the largest, gives the work its name. It is an enormous green park where hundreds of naked men and women play, embrace, eat fruit, swim and ride. No one works, no one suffers, no one grows old. There are no children. The landscape continues that of Paradise, as if it were its sequel: it is the world of mankind after Adam and Eve.

The strawberries and the giant fruit

Giant fruit, shells and transparent bubbles

Everywhere there are enormous strawberries, cherries, blackberries and raspberries, bigger than the people, who bite into them and hug them. There are couples enclosed in glass bubbles, seashells, husks. In the Middle Ages the strawberry was the fruit of pleasure that lasts an instant: very sweet, but it rots at once. In Spain, in fact, the painting was called la pintura del madroño, the painting of the strawberry tree. And the glass of the bubbles recalls a Flemish proverb: "happiness is like glass, it soon breaks".

The cavalcade around the pond

The cavalcade around the pond

In the middle of the garden is a round pond where only women bathe, some with fruit or birds on their heads. Around it, in an endless ring, a troop of men rides horses, deer, camels, boars and griffins. It is desire going round in circles, never stopping. Higher up, four fantastic fountains of pink and blue stone rise from the lake: they are the four rivers of Paradise, turned into strange plant and mineral structures. This is the part of the garden we have printed.

The Garden of Earthly Delights on Amalfi paper, to hang at home

The Garden of Earthly Delights is a painting you never finish looking at: each time you discover a new figure, an animal, a fruit, a gesture. That is why it is perfect to have at home, where you can study it calmly, day after day, the way Bosch wanted it to be looked at: up close.

We chose the heart of the central panel: the four fountains of the rivers of Paradise, the great blue sphere, the cavalcade around the pond and the groups of figures in the garden. We printed it on a sheet of handmade Amalfi paper, the oldest paper in Italy: Bosch's greens, pinks and blues stay vivid, and around the image remains the margin with the deckled edges of the handmade process. The sheet measures 42 x 29 cm (16.5 x 11.4 in), in landscape format, and is mounted in a handmade beech frame: 44 x 31 cm (17.3 x 12.2 in) in all. Each print comes with a certificate of authenticity, also on Amalfi paper, signed by the craftsman who printed it.

Why it is not a poster

Bosch painted figures just a few centimetres tall, with tiny details: on a glossy poster they blur into a green smudge. We chose the oldest paper in Italy.

The right panel: the Musical Hell

The right panel: Hell

On the right the garden ends in night. At the top whole cities burn, below opens a world of torments in which every sin has its punishment. It is called the Musical Hell because the damned are tortured with giant musical instruments: one man is crucified on the strings of a harp, another is shut inside a drum, a lute crushes a body. Music, which in the garden accompanied pleasure, here becomes torment. There are also gamblers, with their dice and cards, and a pig dressed as a nun pestering a man.

The Tree Man

The Tree Man, with legs of tree trunks and a body like a broken eggshell

At the centre of Hell is Bosch's most famous figure: the Tree Man, with legs made of tree trunks resting on two boats, a body like a broken eggshell with a tavern inside, and on his head a disc with a bagpipe. His face turns towards us with a melancholy expression. Many scholars think it is a self-portrait of Bosch, but there is no proof.

The Prince of Hell

The Prince of Hell, with a bird's head and a cauldron for a crown

In the bottom right corner, seated on a kind of high chair, a bird-headed monster with a cauldron on its head devours the damned and expels them into a pit. It is Satan, or the Prince of Hell, and he punishes gluttons and misers in particular: beside him a miser excretes his coins into the pit.

And then there is the curiosity that went viral online: on the bottom of one of the damned, crushed under a lute, a musical score is painted. In 2014 an American student transcribed and played it: Bosch's 500-year-old "butt song", heard by millions of people.

The meaning of the Garden of Earthly Delights

A warning against pleasure. This is the most widespread reading. Read from left to right, the triptych tells the story of mankind: the creation, Paradise, sin spreading through the world, punishment. The central garden is not a happy place but a false paradise: pleasures as beautiful and as short-lived as strawberries, leading straight to Hell.

Mankind before the Flood. The art historian Ernst Gombrich suggested that the garden shows the world "in the days of Noah", when people, as the Gospel says, ate and drank and married without a thought, until the Flood. The closed wings, with the Earth wrapped in water, would then be the world after the Flood.

An innocent paradise? In 1947 the scholar Wilhelm Fraenger argued instead that the garden was a happy utopia, painted for a secret sect, the Adamites, who practised nudity as a return to innocence. This theory has now been almost entirely abandoned, but it shows how mysterious the painting remains.

Bosch, who left no writings, did not give us the key. Five hundred years later, the Surrealists, starting with Salvador Dalí, recognised him as their ancestor.

History of the painting and where it is

Portrait of Hieronymus Bosch, engraving of 1572

Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450-1516), whose real name was Jheronimus van Aken, spent almost all his life in his home town, 's-Hertogenbosch, in Brabant, from which he took his artist's name. The triptych is neither signed nor dated. Proposed dates range from around 1490 to 1505.

The first to describe it, in 1517, was an Italian traveller, Antonio de Beatis, who saw it in Brussels in the palace of the Counts of Nassau: that is why the patron is thought to have been Henry III of Nassau, a powerful nobleman at the Burgundian court. In 1568 the Duke of Alba confiscated it from his nephew, William of Orange, and took it to Spain. King Philip II, a great collector of Bosch, acquired it and in 1593 had it taken to the Escorial, his palace-monastery near Madrid. Since 1939 it has been at the Prado Museum.

Today you can see it in Madrid, at the Prado, in the room devoted to Bosch, alongside other masterpieces of his such as The Haywain and The Table of the Seven Deadly Sins. Open, it measures about two metres high by almost four wide (about 6 ft 7 in by 13 ft): it is as big as a wall, and always surrounded by a small crowd.

If you are fascinated by stories of the Creation, on our blog you will also find Michelangelo's Creation of Adam and Tintoretto's Creation of the Animals. And if you want Bosch's garden always before your eyes, there is our print of the Garden of Earthly Delights on Amalfi paper.

Where to hang it, and who to give it to

In the study or library, above a desk, where you have time to lose yourself in its details. In the living room, above a console, as a painting that gets everyone who walks in talking. In a hallway or corridor, where you pass often and notice a different figure each time. And as a gift for anyone who loves the mysteries of art, the Middle Ages, Surrealism, or for someone who is never satisfied with a "quiet" painting.

Frequently asked questions