Don’t forget to visit The Morning Five this morning.
Hi there, this is Lee van Laer – and this is another installment in the Esoteric Bosch.
Today we’re going to talk a little bit about the Garden of Earthly Delights, which is now in the Prado in Madrid. And this is a painting I first saw when I was nine years old. I was living in Germany at the time, and my parents took us to Spain.
When I got to this painting, I was riveted. I had never seen a work of imagination like this before in my life, and that’s probably not much of a surprise, because there aren’t any other paintings like this, and I was only nine years old, so it’s very unlikely anyone was going to show them to me if there were. In any event, this painting is an esoteric masterpiece.
Well, how do we know it’s an esoteric masterpiece?
Well, we know it’s a masterpiece. That’s pretty obvious. It’s about seven by 13 feet. It’s a huge painting, absolutely extraordinary in terms of its size and the quality execution. But it’s also unlike just about any other painting. In fact, the only paintings of this kind that existed up until this time were the other paintings by Hieronymus Bosch. Now, he had many imitators after he died, because the style became quite popular, and it’s obvious why.
But while he was alive, he painted things quite intentionally, and he used a complex language of symbolism to describe not the outer world of man, like all the knights and men in armor and kings and queens and courts and palaces and Bible stories. No, he didn’t do any of that. It’s not in there. It’s not about the outer world.
This painting, like many of the other Bosch paintings, is a picture of the inner world of man.
