Spanish troops took it to Madrid in 1568. By 1593, it was in the Escorial,
the royal monastery and palace outside Madrid. Given that King Philip
II’s passion for Bosch’s paintings is well known, it was probably acquired
by him.
It is rare to see the exterior of the triptych reproduced. The closed view
shows Creation, with the Earth Uninhabited. This shows a panorama of the
Earth, sky, and water enclosed in a transparent globe. The Earth seems to be
surrounded by water. Nothing is living, but strange things are visible, such as
horn shapes projecting from rocks and other fantastic forms. This is the third
day of creation as described in Genesis: “Let the waters under the heaven
be gathered into one place, and let the dry land appear. And God called the
dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas.” The
Creator, holding a book, is seen in a break in the darkness of the upper left
corner, and across the top of the two panels is a Latin quotation from Psalm
33:9, “For He spake and it was done: He commanded and it stood fast.”
Our next image is an open view of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights
showing Eden, the Garden of Earthly Delights, and Hell. The panels are
vertical, and there are three tiers in each panel. There is no linear perspective,
but there is frequent use of circular compositional units.
On the left panel is Eden with the creation of man and the tree of knowledge
of good and evil. In the foreground, we see a cat carrying a mouse, a not-
fully-evolved creature crawling out of a pool, and a À ying ¿ sh. In the middle
ground, we see animals that could have been observed in a zoo, such as a
giraffe and elephant, and a unicorn that could not have. Eden was watered by
four rivers, perhaps suggested by the four streams of water from the central
fountain, but this could also be a reference to the Book of Revelation, in
which the Fountain of Life is the source of the Rivers of Paradise. If this is
the Fountain of Life, then the presence of an owl is strange, because the owl
is most often a symbol of night and death. Note the birds À ying out of the
conical rock in a spiral formation.
Bosch and his contemporaries lived with the presumption of damnation,
which must have been intense in s’-Hertogenbosch, where the number of
religious institutions was notable. By 1526, it is estimated that 1 of every 19