Friday, February 10, 2017

The Garden of Earthly Delights

I will be focusing on one of Bosch's most famous works, The Garden of Earthly Delights, and specifically on the second panel. This panel seems to show a sort of utopia where humans and nature have collaborated and are working as one. You see scenes of the sharing of food by animals and humans, and also scenes of animals allowing humans to use them as transportation and even shelter. This is depicted by the humans on horseback and one inside of a giant clam shell.
But then when you zoom in on the pond area of the picture it starts to show signs of things that lead to the collapse of a society. You can see three malnourished and discolored bodies and two others looking afraid of them near the edge of the pond, this could represent a famine starting to take place. That could be due to the greed of humanity overusing resources. Another small detail is that you can see a man with a woman that is devilish black color sitting by the side of the lake. I perceive this as Bosch's interpretation of evil this all black luminous figure. The symbolism I see behind it is that she appears to be pregnant and that could mean the birth of evil. When you tie the two together a famine mixed with greed and evil will eventually go on to represent the last panel of the piece showing death and destruction everywhere. Image result for bosch's art

1 comment:

  1. My name is Skyler Carlson and I happen to come upon your blog. After reading your post I enjoyed how you focused to describe the second panel in-depth rather than giving a broad summary of the entire piece. I also really enjoyed how you posted pictures to help the reader follow along with some of the examples you were saying. You also happen to describe the second panel and state that “the picture it starts to show signs of things that lead to the collapse of a society”, and I completely agree. While you only lightly touch upon the third panel, one can see that humanity is in a “hell” of some sort. Bosch uses this last panel to show humanity that if they continue to “sin” then all humans will be punished. If one looks closely, one can even see the irony Bosch uses in his last panel.

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