The Feminists of The Garden of Earthly Delights
Michelle Veit
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Ahh, gardens. Sweet smelling flowers, pretty ponds, birds, and butterflies. Or are gardens about sex, naughtiness, lovemaking, and folly? As Robert Delevoy puts it, “…graceful forms and lovely colors realize the poet’s dream of an “artificial paradise” glittering with all the flowers of evil. Amorous encounters, lovers’ picnics, banquets of strawberries and cherries – all the senses are glutted in a languorous expanse of green lawns and shady thickets.”1 The modern ideology of a peaceful retreat is once again corrupted by the great Hieronymus Bosch and his Garden of Earthly Delights (1505 – 1510.) One look at this colorful masterpiece and thoughts of “was this man insane?” fly through your mind. Not only does Bosch use a huge amount of symbolism, but he also creates an interesting composition at the same time. So although you are being taught an
important moral lesson, at least you will be entertained while you learn it. There are many interpretations about this painting, the most common being that of man’s trip from paradise to hell through sinful sex. “The sexual act, which the twentieth century has learned to accept as a normal part of the human condition, was most often seen by the Middle Ages as proof of man’s fall from the state of angels, at best a necessary evil, at worst a deadly sin. Bosch shared fully in this view, we know, from the contexts in which lovers appear in his other works, and is further confirmed by the fact that his garden, like the haywain, is situated between Eden and Hell, the origin of sin and it’s punishment. …so the Garden of Earthly Delights depicts the sensual life, more specifically, the deadly sin of lust.”2 Wilhelm Franger believes, however, that in interpreting this painting as “just a moral story” is wrong. He thinks that the “left scene and the middle scene are connected. …The centre has borne fruit in a whole throng of the children of Adam and Eve. These inhabitants of the second Paradise are disporting themselves in youthful and unashamed nakedness, in enigmatic, vegetative erotic rites. But what speaks against any such interpretation [the interpretation that the center painting is filled of man’s folly and sin] is the fact that the Hell panel of this painting triptych shows musicians, gamblers, desecrators of churches, covetous nuns, dissolute priests, and murderous knights being tortured, but not a single adept of carnal love. That is to say, the leitmotiv of the garden of ‘carnal allurements’ is not carried any farther; the catalogue of Hell’s punishments records sins of quite a different sort.3 There are various other interpretations about the paintings of Bosch, especially The Garden of Earthly Delights. Yet, because of my topic, I am sticking with the first interpretation in saying that the garden is a scene of sinful people. Although Bosch’s painting seems to cover “everyman,” there are still some
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4 Skiva, “Bosch, Biographical,” pg. 95
things missing from this depiction of sinful goodness. Where are all the races of color? Why do the women all seem to be passive? The feminists strike back.
The good thing about writing a paper in a feministic point of view is that you can apply the methodology to just about anything. When people usually say the word “feminist” a picture of a man-hating hippie woman comes to mind. Fortunately, however, man hating is not the whole picture. Feminists are open for the equal opportunities for not only women, but for everyone; men included. Which leads me into my next point…
Let me start off by saying that The Garden of Earthly Delights is everything opposite of true love. There are no wooing couples and no smitten pairs. The entire painting, even when given the idea that the love is supposed to be good (i.e. Adam and Eve in the first wing), glows with the idea and images of lust. Bosch, in order to create more of a moralizing theme, proceeded to ignore the true love aspects of life. Maybe his moral play would be more effective if he would have included some of those lusty, loving, loyal couples. Because, as much as Bosch would not like to believe it, not everyone is a nymphomaniac who relies on fruits and strange birds to relieve their sexual fantasies. Why didn’t Bosch decide to give an actual representation of “everyman?” Is he not being fair in that he is not correctly describing the actual society of that time? I think that in his ability to group humans into that narrow “I want sex. Sex is what I want” category he fails to see that not every human is on their way to Hell.
Not only does Bosch fail to see the loving part of coupled people, he also fails to see how sexy women can be. Although times were a bit different back when Bosch was a living and breathing man, I’m sure he realized that women could be just as scandalous as men could. Why, if he knew this, did he skip over the fact that women could be pursuers of men? In the middle scene of his painting, Bosch creates a menagerie of painted pornography. He includes many men, women, birds, fruit, and much more. After scanning the painting I’ve concluded that, although women initiate sex, the number of instances are much less than that of the men. Bosch would have been more effective in giving a picture of “everyman” if he had included more women as sexual beings.
Although women are involved in their share of eating fruits, riding on strange animals, and other bizarre sexual activities, they are pretty much always the passive recipients. Even in the first panel an almost limp Eve is handed over to a very awake Adam. In many instances women are being pursued by the sex hungry men. And although all scenes are pretty vulgar, in one situation it appears that a woman is being raped by a man; the epitome of horrible sexual acts and the ideology of weakness in women. Unfortunately, I would have to disagree to what Skira writes, “…it is as if all nature were bathed in a heady, aphrodisiac fragrance. And yet – somehow there is nothing repulsive or unwholesome in the scene. Bosch never lapses into what passes for “bad taste” or vulgarity.”4
Something else that I noticed when glancing at the central scene of this painting is the lack of minorities. In counting, I saw only five people of a different skin color. This fact surprised me actually, because I would have thought that the society during Bosch’s period would have thought of minorities to be equally promiscuous and sinful, if not more. However, I also noticed that the right wing of the painting (the Hell) has no
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4 Delevoy, “Bosch, Biographical,” pg. 95
minorities. A subtle observation that, although Bosch was trying to depict the folly of men, he seemingly skipped over a large portion of “men.”
Although it seems that Bosch had some trouble depicting “everyman” that did not mean that everyone who saw it would not think that. With such interpretations like “every man is going to hell!” I realize that Bosch was very influential during his time. Because, at that time, paintings and other art forms were comparable to our modern day televisions, Bosch might have had some power to start an early feminist movement. (The chances of that actually happening? Very, very slim.) Yet, although not the responsibility of every artist to change the views of society, some may challenge it. Bosch was one to challenge what the ideal of “a painting” was in his time, yet he did not want to challenge other factors in his scene. Sure, his addition of more sexually active women and minorities might not have changed anything in his society or down the road, but then again, it never hurts to try.
Works Cited
Wilhelm Franger, “The Millennium of Hieronymus Bosch” (Hacker Art Books, New York, 1976) pp. 8 – 11
Robert L. Delevoy, “Bosch: A Biographical and Critical Study” (The World Publishing Company, 1960) pg 95
Walter S. Gibson, “Hieronymus Bosch” (Thames and Hudson LTD, London, 1973) pp. 64 – 65
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