The Devil in Bosch

Depicting a bird-demon in The Garden of Earthly Delights

When The Garden of Earthly Delights was purchased by Philip II of Spain at the end of the 16th century, the specter of heresy lurked everywhere. Hieronymus Bosch was suspected of heresy and had to be cleared of suspicion before his artwork could be discussed in this firmly Roman Catholic context.¹ Though The Garden is a visual narrative which reimagines traditional iconography, monk and Escorial librarian José de Siguenza attempted to subsume the painting into an emblematic and coded notion of art, claiming that the strawberry depicted in the central panel symbolized a moral message: “The ‘fleeting taste of the strawberry’ was indicative of the transience of sensual pleasures in the sexuality portrayed”.² This understanding of such an enigmatic artistic rendering does not do justice to the original intention of the painting; however, since little is known of Hieronymus Bosch, including the title of this painting, whether the eroticism and utopia of The Garden is meant as a meditation on sin or a satire of the Christian religion is difficult to conjecture. 

Hieronymus Bosch was born in 1450 at Hertogenbosch, Brabant, and was buried August 9, 1516, at Hertogenbosch.³ There is little information on the early life of the artist, though it is known that he came from a lineage of accomplished painters (Ibid). “His name does appear on the register of the Brotherhood of Our Lady, located in the city of his birth, and there is mention of him in official records from 1486 until the year of his death, when he was acclaimed an Insignis pictor (“distinguished painter”)”.⁴ This much is clearly true: Bosch’s artwork played a significant role in his life, and his depictions of folly and sin render religion as personal artistic practice. That he chose to create such a fantastical painting as The Garden in the form of an altarpiece was no accident; standing between generations that met at the threshold of the 16th century, Bosch “gained personal freedom in his stance which was both ‘no longer’ medieval and ‘not yet’ modern”.⁵ In The Garden, Bosch drags us through a labyrinth of imagery that undulates with various motifs, leading the viewer on a confusing journey that limits conventional descriptive approaches.  

An attempt at addressing each distinctive feature of The Garden is doomed to failure.

Though a moral generalization could be made about how the painting depicts mortal souls rising from an earthly paradise and then descending to Hell, such interpretations of the work do little justice to Bosch’s creative vision and fail to address the heterogenous and ambiguous order of the three triptychs. One could read it from right to left and glean an entirely different story from the painting, and the free associations of images causes the painting to “fold in and out of itself, monstrous in its violent transformations of scale, as tiny people gorge on giant strawberries and are crushed by severed ears... The painter interleaves different realities and unrealities, painting things perfectly natural in themselves, but hilarious and terrifying in their wildly inappropriate conjunction”.⁶ The delirious and pulsing image of Bosch’s infernal paradises creates an eroticism which is not dwelling in sinfulness but daring to be deemed heretical. The painting could be seen as an imaginary world in which there is no earthly sin nor Christian heaven but is instead placed under biblical terms. 

One image of interest pertaining to the historical iconography of Satan is the depiction of a large figure with a beaked face. The figure is seated on a golden throne and is swallowing a human with noxious gas and crows flying out of its ass. The humans seem to be excreted from the figure, out of an egg-shaped orb and into a pit where anguished human faces can be seen at the surface. One human figure is excreting gold coins into the pit, while another is vomiting. This depiction of a demon or Devil-like figure swallowing human beings in Hell as the sinners suffer is precedent in the works of Giotto, an Italian painter of the Late Middle Ages. In his famous illustration of The Last Judgement, Giotto depicts a grotesque Satan in his insulated hell, consuming the souls of the damned and defecating them. The defecation of sinners in religious iconography emerged in the late 12th century, and greatly appealed to Bosch’s satirical breaches of taboo.⁷ Bosch’s precision and anthropomorphizing of the Devil was also heavily influenced by Rafael Destorrents’ Last Judgement, an illumination which includes devils with “talons, batwings, and horns... grotesque lizards, fantastically beaked birds...”.⁸

Whether this figure is meant to be the Satan is difficult, nigh impossible to judge, given the lack of historical commentary on the painting before Siguenza in the last decade of the 16th century. Siguenza’s understanding of the “Hell” panel reveals the religious disputes of the late Renaissance and Reformation. Proof of profound faith was needed to defend Bosch against charges of heresy by iconoclasts of the day, and Siguenza’s description of this panel is deeply rooted in the concept of original sin and the punishments of hell: “The hellish domain, he writes, brutally reveals ‘the miserable goal of our labors. Anyone relying on music, obscene song, gambling, and dancing for his entire happiness’ had foolishly relied upon ‘a brief moment of pleasure’ that would be followed in the afterworld by ‘eternal wrath with neither mercy nor succor’”.⁹ The proliferation of images in the Renaissance depicting the suffering of sinners in hell with Satan as the harbinger of that suffering is indicative of this religious ethos. While Siguenza’s writings seek to defend the religious integrity of Bosch’s work, there is little indication that he would have wanted to be affiliated with the Church of the Spanish Inquisition.  

Bosch was focused on themes of sin, earthly living, punishment, reward, and temptation, seeking to represent abstract concepts in his work. The psychological and sociological surrealism of Bosch’s paintings has led many to seek “a hidden but unequivocal meaning that could be deciphered in such a way as to describe a content independent of Bosch’s art”.¹⁰ This is a grave mistake on the part of theological interpreters such as Siguenza, who sought to make the content of The Garden of Earthly Delights the end rather than the means of the work. It is understandable why modern viewers would find it difficult that Bosch wanted to “create an art that would emancipate him from subjugation to the clergy and their sermons”¹¹, given the heavy artistic license he drew from Genesis and other biblical tales. Ironically, Bosch found religious freedom in the act of creation; painting provided the vindication and imaginative space to establish a form of art that was both rooted in Christian iconography of the Late Middle Ages and profoundly unique in its depiction of abstract concepts. While monks like Siguenza could choose to believe in a straightforward imagistic code that followed from religious doctrine, Bosch could not subscribe to such tenets while creating a visual narrative of imaginative discovery. 

1. Belting, Hans, and Hieronymus Bosch. Hieronymus Bosch, Garden of Earthly Delights. Prestel, 2002, p. 8.

2. Belting, Hans, and Hieronymus Bosch. Hieronymus Bosch, Garden of Earthly Delights. Prestel, 2002, p. 14.

3. “Hiëronymus Bosch.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hieronymus-Bosch.

4. “Hiëronymus Bosch.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hieronymus-Bosch.

5. Belting, Hans, and Hieronymus Bosch. Hieronymus Bosch, Garden of Earthly Delights. Prestel, 2002, p. 8.

6. “Visions of Paradise and Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 26 Aug. 2003, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2003/aug/26/1. 

7. Link, Luther. The Devil: The Archfiend in Art from the Sixth to the Sixteenth Century. Harry N. Abrams, 1996, p. 135.

8. Link, Luther. The Devil: The Archfiend in Art from the Sixth to the Sixteenth Century. Harry N. Abrams, 1996, p.147.

9. Belting, Hans, and Hieronymus Bosch. Hieronymus Bosch, Garden of Earthly Delights. Prestel, 2002, p. 14.

10. Belting, Hans, and Hieronymus Bosch. Hieronymus Bosch, Garden of Earthly Delights. Prestel, 2002, p. 17.

11. Belting, Hans, and Hieronymus Bosch. Hieronymus Bosch, Garden of Earthly Delights. Prestel, 2002, p. 14.