Since its creation in the early 1500s, Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” triptych has remained one of the most provocative works of art. Through his bold reinvention of biblical scenes, Bosch offers an eccentric portrayal of madness. Through Bosch’s eyes, madness flows through each stage of the human experience. Madness does not commit to a single phase – rather, it prevails as a timeless and uncanny force, equally present across his chronological depictions of creation, sin, and damnation. But how does his supposition of madness inform the modern world? In this article, I aim to identify the evolving interpretations of his madness and to prove its perennial status. Through its modern and historical manifestations, madness is shown to be integral to the human condition, prevailing as a ruinous force that contradicts salvation.
For the purpose of this article, madness shall be defined as the misalignment of our human senses. By embellishing humanity with an inherent disorder, Bosch’s work rejected the traditional moral order and courtesy posited by Christian scripture. However, despite his brusque deviation from traditional biblical art, Bosch’s artwork was lauded by Christian nobility. Accordingly, his madness may have awakened the innate primitive disorder of all humanity, with patrons and peasants alike, recognizing their rampant internal tendencies for pleasure and moral creed.
In Art-445: Histories of Art, Instructor David Fox drew our attention to the comedic aspects of Bosch’s masterpiece, which convey the essence of the madness he depicts. Frequently, Bosch includes arbitrary objects and colors to convey double meaning within his scenes, ranging from inverted fruits to obscure fountains decked in coral shades of pink. For instance, he symbolizes lust through the strawberry, a fruit that was largely uncommon and even absent in religious art until then. According to the Spanish writer Carlos de Sigüenza, the strawberry possesses a “pleasant odor that is hardly remembered once it has passed,” reinforcing the fleeting nature of its sinful pleasure. Almost scandalously, Bosch includes the strawberry in large proportions, centrally-located, as a harbinger of disarray. In the case of nobility, the lavish hues of the lustful strawberry may have fostered awareness of their decadent engagements, eager to be replicated by the lower classes. Interestingly, the strawberry, as well as the blueberry and the cherry, is used by the painting’s subjects as a stage for eroticism, exposing the natural garden as a playground for human sin. Likely, the third panel’s depiction of human damnation occurs due to the anthropocentric creed of the subjects, as well as the abuse of colonial power over the darker figures acting as slaves amid the action. Here, Bosch exposes the madness of such injustice and creates a tumultuous intersection of humanity and the natural world.
Yet, many consider the ambiguous intentionality of his work, which serves either to reject or to embrace the question of human pleasure. Does excess pleasure, originating from madness, play a role in the damnation he depicts?
Ultimately, Bosch’s artwork portrays humanity as a vicious cycle, in which our morals and pleasures may enter into a cryptic exchange that leads to our eventual, more tragic end. Indeed, the inevitability of his vision may have been a relief to the powerful patrons he attracted, as its artistic chaos fueled their selfish desires for excess pleasure and decadence, which may be attributed to some degree to all humans. In juxtaposition, Rosenthal’s exhibit at the Gropius Bau interrogates the possibility of a future ungoverned by such sin and demonstrates that our pleasures can be dampened to achieve a balanced society free of tragedy. Using the framework of Bosch’s moral exposé, Rosenthal humanizes our viewpoint by cleverly recognizing the inevitability of our pleasures, yet draws the line on the action necessary and possible to avoid our own self-destruction.
