A triptych is a work of art made of three panels set side by side, usually a wide central panel with a narrower wing on each side. On many triptychs, especially altarpieces, the wings are hinged, so they can fold over the center like a pair of shutters. The best known is Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights, painted between 1490 and 1500 and now in the Prado in Madrid.
The word comes from the Greek triptychos, "having three folds." It first named something far more ordinary than a painting. In ancient Rome, a triptych was a writing tablet made of three wooden leaves hinged together and coated with wax. The painted triptych kept the same principle: three parts joined by hinges, which can be opened or closed.
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The Garden of Earthly Delights is almost always reproduced open. Across its three panels, it runs from Eden on the left, through a crowd of naked figures in the middle, to hell on the right. That is only one of its two faces. When the wings are shut, the colors disappear, and the outer panels show another picture, painted entirely in shades of gray.
That closed face was not a back that nobody looked at. Many triptychs were altarpieces, and altarpieces with hinged wings were normally kept closed, then opened for the major feast days of the church year. The rest of the time, the outside was the picture the faithful saw.
A hinged triptych therefore holds two pictures, a sober one for ordinary days and a richer one for feast days, and the painter had to plan both.
What You'll Discover
The tiny triptych made for a traveling cardinal.
What Bosch painted on the closed wings.
How a donor slipped into the Annunciation.
The Flemish triptych that reached Florence in 1483.
Why some triptychs never close at all.
Why modern painters went back to three panels.