The Garden of Earthly Delights

The story of The Garden of Earthly Delights

On the left, God introduces Adam to Eve in a green Eden with a pink fountain. In the middle, hundreds of naked people ride birds, climb into giant strawberries, and crowd around a pool under blue and pink towers that look like nothing on earth. On the right, in the dark, a bird-headed creature eats the damned, a man is crucified on a harp, and a pale figure with a tree for a body looks out at you from under a hat. Bosch painted the triptych sometime between 1490 and 1510, and it has hung in the Prado in Madrid since the sixteenth century. Nobody has explained it and nobody has stopped trying.

On a wall, the full triptych is very wide and very busy. From a distance it reads as three bands of color: soft green, warm pink and pale blue, and near-black with fire in it. It suits a study, a living room, a den, a home office, or a hallway that gets walked slowly, and it fits eclectic, maximalist, dark-academia, and surrealist-leaning interiors. This is a painting to go big on, because the detail is the whole experience. The Extra Large at 63.2 × 36 in is the size that lets you find the strawberry riders and the harp; the Large at 42.1 × 24 in is right above a sofa, and the Medium at 28.1 × 16 in works above a desk.

Bruegel's Netherlandish Proverbs is the other crowded panel where every inch tells a story, The Tower of Babel is the same Flemish imagination on a single building, and Memling's Last Judgment is the sober version of the right-hand panel. More from Hieronymus Bosch.

Printed in our studio from the Prado's public-domain photograph of the open triptych, with all three panels at the same scale.