pair with a lost Seven Sacraments, depicts the Sins in a cir-
cular narrative strip with a circular painting of the Man of
Sorrows in the center and four roundels of the Four Last
Things (Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell) around the
main composition. The meaning of the picture is eluci-
dated by a text scroll: “Beware, beware, God is watching.”
Other presumably early works include the Berlin St. John
on Patmos and the Washington Death of the Miser; both re-
veal a growing taste for the fantastic in the inclusion of
tiny demonic figures. Demons appear in force in Bosch’s
extraordinary triptych The Haywain (Madrid). The shut-
ters depict the fall of man, with the fall of Lucifer in the
background, and, while in the center panel men and
women of every estate crowd around a haywain, drawn by
devils towards hell, ignoring an apparition of Christ as the
Man of Sorrows. Bosch’s iconography probably relates to
Isaiah’s text, “All flesh is grass,” and is evidently a denun-
ciation of pride leading to materialism and sinfulness.
Temptation is the central theme of Bosch’s Temptation
of St. Anthony triptych (Lisbon). In this painting the
dilemma of the saint is almost lost in an extensive,
stricken landscape, peopled by all manner of demons,
some part animal or vegetable, of every conceivable shape
and size. In Bosch’s most famous work, The Garden of
Earthly Delights (Madrid), three fantastic landscapes are
presented. One shutter depicts the creation of man in a
beautiful Eden filled with wonderful animals and flowers,
and the other a black hell, lit by burning buildings, in
which sinners are tormented by swarming devils, utilizing
enormous musical instruments as instruments of torture.
The central panel portrays an alien landscape filled to ca-
pacity with nude men and women, animals, and colossal
fruits. While the subject matter is presumably a denunci-
ation of hedonism, the painting is primarily memorable
for its superb decorative patterns, glowing colors, and
boundless inventiveness.
Over the centuries innumerable theories, many of
them as fantastic as the painter’s imagery, have grown up
around Bosch’s work. His membership of a religious con-
fraternity and his aristocratic patrons and collectors indi-
cate that his own religious ideas and those embodied in
his work were considered entirely respectable. The roots
of his personal iconography lie so deep in popular belief
that it is unlikely ever to be entirely understood. In a
sense, his pictures are the ultimate exotic fruit of the taste
for concealed religious symbolism that so proccupied
15th-century Netherlands artists.
Further reading: Ludwig von Baldass, Hieronymus
Bosch (London: Thames & Hudson, 1960); Laurinda
Dixon, Bosch, Art and Ideas (London: Phaidon, 2003); Jos
Koldeweij et al, Hieronymus Bosch: The Complete Paintings
and Drawings (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001).
Bosio, Antonio (c. 1576–1629) Maltese-born Italian
archaeologist
The nephew of Giacomo Bosio, he succeeded his uncle as
agent for the Knights of Malta in Rome. From 1593 he
used his leisure time to explore the underground areas
of ancient Rome, particularly the catacombs. These re-
searches formed the basis for Roma sotteranea, which his
executor published in 1634. The volume, often reprinted,
was the first, and until the 19th century the fullest, work
on the subject.botanic gardens (physic gardens) Collections of grow-
ing plants designed originally to teach student physicians
to recognize the sources of most of the medicines they
used. The earliest were established in Italy in the 16th
century, first at Pisa (c. 1543) and Padua (1545) and soon
in many other university towns, including Leipzig (1579),
Leyden (1587), Montpellier (1592), Oxford (1621), and
Paris (as the Jardin du Roi; 1635). Under the direction of
Carolus CLUSIUSfrom 1594, the Leyden Hortus Academi-
cus became the center to which numerous plants new to
Europe were sent and from which they were disseminated
to other gardens. From plants with known benefits, the
scope of physic gardens thus grew to include plants newly
introduced to Europe from the Americas and elsewhere,
whose possible virtues had still to be discovered; this in-
novation soon made the gardens attractive to visitors
other than students. Herbaria (reference collections of
dried plants) were added to the living ones, and CABINETS
of natural history curiosities were often situated in botanic
gardens too, as in Bologna, where Ulisse ALDROVANDIwas
professor of natural history and first director of the gar-
den. A few private botanic gardens, like Cardinal Odoardo
Farnese’s in Rome and the short-lived one at Eichstätt,
near Nuremberg, belonging to the Prince Bishop Johann
Konrad von Gemmingen, had their contents described in
print, as did many of the academic gardens.
Further reading: John Prest, The Garden of Eden: The
Botanic Garden and the Re-creation of Paradise (New
Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1981).botany Perhaps the most obvious feature of botany dur-
ing the Renaissance is an increasing concern with the ac-
curate identification of plants, including new ones
brought to Europe by explorers of distant lands, and the
emergence of schemes of classification to reduce the plant
kingdom to an orderly pattern. Aristotelian botany, trans-
mitted through the work of his pupil Theophrastus (first
printed in 1483), divided plants into herbs, sub-shrubs,
shrubs, and trees and gave some account of plant structure
as well as descriptions of individual plants. HERBALS, prac-
tical handbooks of medical advice based on remedies from
plants and other sources, which had a much wider audi-
ence, mainly relied on the work of the first-century Greek
physician Dioscorides. The famous Byzantine illustrated6644 BBoossiioo,, AAnnttoonniioo