Dissonance and Unification: Bosch on the Absurd Experience

March 19, 2021

Bosch, Hieronymus.“The Garden of Earthly Delights: Exterior.”

Bosch, Hieronymus. “The Garden of Earthly Delights: Interior.”

The Garden of Earthly Delights inhabits a particular realm just on the periphery of madness. A triptych oil painting in the traditional religious style, but supplanted with secular imagery, Hieronymus Bosch’s polemic of a painting promotes a kind of Voltairean irreverence that seems almost absurd for its time of creation between the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.[1] And yet, it successfully unifies an enormous variance of subject: the left panel showing a creation scene in Eden, the center and largest panel the most overtly sexualized of the three in its bizarre portrayals of earthly delights, and the right perhaps the sharpest contrast with a much darker rendition of hell. It is precisely the painting’s ability to unite the larger narrative and agglomeration of images that impresses the reader most. At once, the poem seems to exalt sexuality in its lavish images and condemn it in the religious scenes of the greater narrative. Eden is not devoid of pleasure, and neither is hell. Bosch demonstrates the deep absurdity of our search to create meaning (both spiritually and sexually) in a world that is ultimately chaotic; however, he finds hope in the story-like unity of our narrative wherein the tragedy of our absurd existence can at least be beautiful. 

Even in the traditionally serene Eden creation scene, Bosch chaoticizes the reader’s experience through the subtle physical and spiritual irregularities and contradictions that visually permeate the first panel. Larry Silver’s article, “God in the Details: Bosch and Judgements,” notes a few such details – “The attentive viewer will notice disturbing anomalies: animals attacking one another (a cat at lower left withdrawing with a mouse in its maws, a lion at the top right that has slain an antelope), misbegotten multi-headed creatures (a bird with three heads above the fetid pond, another three-headed amphibian crawling out of the central pond)…”[2] The images of conflict and violence in Eden complicate the usual simplicity of religious message – if Eden is not perfection and paradise, how are we to take the painting? A critique of hypocrisy? Further, the expression of grotesque and altered animals demonstrates a fantastical take on realism chaoticizing our experience of an otherwise realistic (in subject) scene. The result of this seeding of irregularities is that the longer one stares at the painting, the more tumultuous the viewing experience becomes.  Thus as Eden cedes to the earthly garden, and the garden to hell, it increasingly parallels the growing realization of the absurd nature of the world the longer one reflects upon it. However, moments of unity peak through the chaotic tones, hinting at some aspect of revolutionary meaning to be found within this painting pandemonium.

The Eden panel of Bosch’s painting juxtaposes the unity of creation with the discord of violence, impressing the absurdity of a contradictory world while maintaining religious admiration of the god-human dynamic. The focus of the scene at first seems completely unified; Adam gazes at god, Eve at Adam’s feet, and god almost directly at the viewer. The contemporary hierarchy of god, man, woman is abundantly clear, as is the connection points between them, with the hands of god and the woman touching and the feet of god and Adam. With the pinkness of his robes mingling blood (red) and purity (white), the hand and feet connections mirror the points pierced by nails on the cross. This evokes the unsettling image that Adam and Eve create a sort of human cross binding god, calling into question the initial impression of religious reverence. This burden of responsibility is passed directly from god’s eyes into the viewer through his line of sight. Further, as the eyes wander about the painting, the perfection of the scene is disturbed by instances of cruelty – one animal eating another, a phallic symbol of a snake, the tree of life’s branches painted in almost exactly the same way as bare legs in the next panel. The interconnection of innocence and violence, spiritual life and sexuality, at once passes the scene into something much darker and chaotic. This complication of religious and natural simplicity causes the viewer to reflect on the simplicity with which they regard the world around them and if, it too, is deeply complicated in a way that evades truth. The one element of security that remains is the religious narrative we associate with the creation story, and the smaller narratives we develop to describe the other aspects of the painting. 

Bosch’s center, earthly delights panel further blurs the lines between sexual and spiritual experience for the purpose of demonstrating the absurdity of a chaotic world unified only by narrative. Central to the scene, and appearing several times in the panel, is a large, round structure resembling a seedpod or egg. Within, the physical interaction is so ambiguously intimate that it could indicate a spiritually pure ascendence or an act of sexual deviance. While this ambiguity is the cause of some consternation among scholars, I would propose that that is precisely the magic of the effect – because, to some extent, it causes the conflation of the spiritual and the sexual experience. In both cases, the externalization of internal sensation and a sense of connection to something greater than oneself is evident. This confusion is clear throughout the panel. Biblically there is a distinguishment between fertile sex and sex that is purely for pleasure, but here, the lines are crossed. There is abundant symbolism of fertility (it is a garden, after all) with blossoms and seed pods and eggs, but also of sexual pleasure with isolated images such as the flowers emerging from one pair of buttocks and others half or fully submerged in fruits while engaging in an almost adolescent level of sexual curiosity. In this way, sex for the sake of childbearing and sex for the sake of pleasure are not held separately in the religious sense, but joined. Religion is not teased or vindicated, but leveled as an experience similar to that of the physical. The result for the viewer is a feeling of confusion – it is frustrating to search for a single meaning in a painting that conflates seemingly contradictory ideas, like it is frustrating that in life to find meaning when all our experiences in both organized and disorganized aspects of life are irrational. The ultimate chaos of this mesocosm of a world is moderated only by the fact that it is a mesocosm, a painting containing all this chaos – and perhaps it suggest that, in a similar way, our lives can be unified and contained. This is sustained in individual images: for the egg image pointed to above, the idea of egg fertility indicates not only sexuality and reproduction, but an implied narrative cycle of laying, hatching, growth, and new laying. Individual images in the panels such as this suggest a greater narrative giving justification for the rather bizarre images. Further, this conflict of disorder and unification is not unique to the discrete panels, but can be seen to work on the greater level of the triptych as a whole.

Bosch’s subversion of the traditional triptych form achieves narrative unification through the marriage of physical and spiritual delights under chronological, narrative structure. The traditional Netherlandish triptych in Bosch’s era was devoted to religious subject matter, with a hierarchy of importance revolving around the center panel as the primary and most significant scene, and an “additive” quality where it was visualized as a piece in three units.[3] In contrast, Lynn F. Jacobs in her article “The Triptychs of Hieronymus Bosch” argues that Bosch “brought more secular themes into the triptych, creating a shift away from the triptych's traditional religious iconography and concomitantly from its church function.”[4] Bosch’s incorporation of a multitude of secular image elements that are blatantly sexual, suggestive, and a little grotesque in theme flares in sharp contrast with the unifying religious narrative of pre-creation (exterior), Eden (left), earth (middle), and hell (right). In its movement away from traditional religious subject matter, Bosch conflates more material themes such as sexuality with the importance of religion, suggesting an alternative source through which people can find meaning – if on a different plane than spirituality. This questioning continues as he “also broke down the standard hierarchy of the triptych by making the exterior as important as the interior.”[5] The work flows from a general picture in the exterior (showing the globe in its natal and lifeless state of creation) to the micro-scenes on the interior, yielding an earthly control to both spiritual and physical subjects within that adds another layer of chaos. Finally, “Bosch challenged the additive nature of the triptych by imposing greater unity on the whole, often linking the panels of the exterior more closely together compositionally and thematically.”[6] This is achieved through a number of consistencies through the panels, particular the repetition (with variation) of various colors, micro-scenes, and objects such as the fleshy pink towers and the mermaids. Further, the landscape skyline is continuous along the first two panels, enforcing a sort of narrative unity binding together the sharply varying scenes. 

The hell panel breaks this unity with a completely discrete palette that is the most chaotic and violent; however, it is also the most aesthetically consistent panel, thematically tying up the narrative of the previous panels by using musical imagery to convey that meaning can be imposed by aesthetic regularity on an otherwise chaotic world. Aesthetic beauty in this case refers to a tragic storyline of development; we see, in three panels, a devolution from Eden images – animals, structures, people – to their grotesque hell counterparts. The beauty and meaning comes not from discrete images of chaos, but how they are mobilized to tell this tragedy. To Bosch, even something horrific can be beautiful if unified by a narrative structure. Despite its contrastingly dark color palette, many aspects of the literally hellscape of the third panel are continuations on previous panels. The animals have mutated further from their slight irregularities in Eden and now feed on humans rather than each other. Although another aspect in the chaotic scene, like all else this image seems a natural progression in the evolution of the painting – the animals always had some level of violence, after all – so even in the pain of those tortured, the viewer can find aesthetic meaning or satisfaction. Whereas egg imagery in the center panel suggested fertile narrative through the suggestion of birth and growth, this cycle is corrupted in the hell panel. The famed “tree-man” with a broken eggshell body creates an unnatural image but one that in a disturbing way develops the narrative of the middle panel of egg hatching. The face of the same creature mirrors the face of god in the first panel, also engaging the viewer directly. The pepto-bismol-colored-bagpipes phallic symbol catastrophe on top of his head similarly builds on an evolving phallic shape from the elegant but also phallic structure of the same color in Eden. The musical imagery furthers this idea that in all the chaos, everything works together to make something beautiful (if still tragic). Musical instruments, beyond contemporary associations with lust and eroticism, serve as a symbol for the meaning that can be found in something chaotic. Tattooed on the buttocks of a sorry soul under one of the instruments is a little tune that includes a tritone. This particular interval has been affectionately dubbed the “devil’s interval” from the Middle Ages due to its dissonant tone. In this panel, the interval of notes exactly three whole tones apart ties together, even in its dissonance, all the sets of three that define the painting. God, Adam, Eve; three-headed birds; three blue pods and three pink pods; three panels. The ultimate chaos or dissonance of the painting is at once united when those dissonant notes are placed on a score. Actively imposing a greater narrative or composition gives those dissonant notes meaning as being part of a larger aesthetic narrative, just like the imposition of the narrative of the painting by shoving all its gloriously bastardous elements together gives it meaning through imposing artistic story-line on them. In this way, Bosch’s horribly dissonant but aesthetically unified piece exalts itself.

In art and in narrative, Bosch finds the unifying force that allows an absurd reality to be given some level of meaning. Within the bounds of his painting’s frame, the art can have as much chaos and contradiction as it wants – so long as it is unified under a larger narrative. To the viewer, this is a frightening assertion of self-will on the chaos of the surrounding world. The effect is one of discomfort, but then of some hope, paralleling a reflection on one’s own life purpose. The idea of the absurdity of searching for meaning in an irrational world predicts later absurdist sentiment, combined with a Nietzschean flair of using aesthetic beauty in narrative to redeem otherwise chaotic and nonsensical events. In other words, the idea of events are given more significance based on their place in a particular narrative. What this narrative is has and will continue to be under some debate. The simple answer is its religious connotation – the triptych seems at first glance to clearly show a devolution from the purity of Eden to the adulteration of this purity by people to the grotesque and unnatural result of hell. However, I would argue it can’t be quite this simple; as demonstrated, there are elements of the grotesque in every panel – no part of our world, at any time, is freed by Bosch from elements of the abnormal and monstrous. Whether it is then entirely an exoneration of absolute sexuality and chaos for the sake of generating progress and meaning in rebellion within the narrative is, I think, left ambiguous. The more tangible aspect of the painting is the feeling it evokes – one of feeling comfort within the inherent discomfort of bizarre and inexplicable moments in life, if only because you know there is some kind of unity and greater meaning, though we have not quite discovered the nature of that narrative yet. Bosch, like those rare moments of connection we encounter in life, gifts us with harmony even in the most dissonant, unfortunate places. 

Bibliography

Secondary Sources

Jacobs, Lynn F. "The Triptychs of Hieronymus Bosch." The Sixteenth Century Journal 31, no. 4 (2000): 1009-041. Accessed March 1, 2021. doi:10.2307/2671185.

 Silver, Larry. "God in the Details: Bosch and Judgment(s)." The Art Bulletin 83, no. 4 (2001): 626-50. Accessed March 1, 2021. doi:10.2307/3177226.

Primary Sources

Bosch, Hieronymus. “Garden of Delights, the Creation.” Exterior, 1503-1504. Museo Nacional del Prado. Madrid. https://imagebase.stanford.edu/Obj98149?sid=4373&x=137630. 

Bosch, Hieronymus. “Garden of Earthly Delights.” Interior, 1503-1504. Museo Nacional del Prado. Madrid. https://imagebase.stanford.edu/Obj98149?sid=4373&x=137630. 

Notes

[1] Lynn F. Jacobs, "The Triptychs of Hieronymus Bosch," The Sixteenth Century Journal 31, no. 4 (2000): 1009, Accessed March 1, 2021, doi:10.2307/2671185.

[2] Larry Silver, "God in the Details: Bosch and Judgment(s)," The Art Bulletin 83, no. 4 (2001): 643, Accessed March 1, 2021, doi:10.2307/317722

[3] Lynn F. Jacobs, "The Triptychs of Hieronymus Bosch," The Sixteenth Century Journal 31, no. 4 (2000): 1010, Accessed March 1, 2021, doi:10.2307/2671185.

[4] Ibid., 1012.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.