A triptych is a work of art made of three panels set side by side: a wide central panel and, on each side, a narrower panel called a wing. The best known is The Garden of Earthly Delights, painted between 1490 and 1500 by Hieronymus Bosch, a painter from the Low Countries, and kept today in the Prado museum in Madrid.
On many altarpieces, the paintings that stand above a church altar, the wings are hinged. Each is about half as wide as the center, so the two fold over it like a pair of shutters and meet in the middle.
The folding object is older than painting. In Greek, triptychos means "having three folds," and in ancient Rome the word named a writing tablet of three wooden leaves, hinged together, each one filled with wax to write on. The painted triptych kept that build: three parts on hinges that open and close.
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Bosch's Garden shows what those hinges change. Books and posters nearly always reproduce the painting open: the Garden of Eden on the left, a crowd of naked figures in the middle, hell on the right. Folded shut, the wings show a second picture instead, and in it the colors vanish.
On a church altar, such wings normally stayed closed. They were opened only on major feast days such as Christmas and Easter, and the rest of the time the faithful saw the outside. A hinged triptych therefore carries two pictures, a sober one for every day and a richer one for feasts, and the artist had to plan both.
A picture that travels
Not every triptych stood in a church, though. Many early ones were small enough to hold in two hands, made for a single owner who prayed alone. On those little altars, the hinges did another job, one that had nothing to do with feast days.
What You'll Discover
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.