The Garden of Earthly Delights is a triptych painted between about 1490 and 1510 by Hieronymus Bosch, now in the Prado in Madrid. It reads from left to right: paradise, a vast garden of naked pleasure, and a nightmarish hell. The usual reading is a warning that unchecked desire ends in damnation.
Shut the wings and it is a gray, almost empty world on the third day of creation. Open them and the color arrives all at once.
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The warning-about-sin reading has a weak spot: it does not come from Bosch. He left no letters and no word about what the triptych meant.
The first visitor on record was Antonio de Beatis, a cardinal's secretary, who saw it in a Brussels palace on 30 July 1517, a year after the painter died. He wrote that there were “some panels on which bizarre things have been painted.” Bizarre, he wrote.
He did not call it a sermon, a warning or a lesson. He called it bizarre, and he moved on to the next sight. Nobody wrote down what it meant for almost a century.
Whom did he meet ten weeks later?
Leonardo da Vinci. On 10 October 1517 the same diary records a visit to Cloux, where the old painter received the party of Cardinal Luis of Aragon and his right hand was paralyzed. De Beatis, the cardinal's secretary, kept this diary of the journey, and the triptych in the Nassau palace of Coudenberg, seen on 30 July, is one more stop in it.
He was no art critic. He was a secretary who noted what the great houses of the journey contained, and the picture got a line like the other sights.
A man who walks past a picture and calls it bizarre has not been handed a sermon to repeat. Whatever Bosch intended, he did not leave a label, and for years scholars even named the wrong man as the one who paid for it.
What You'll Discover
Who really paid for it.
What a monk saw in the strawberries.
What one scholar saw in the center.
What is written on a sinner's body.