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I think it's all about blurring the boundaries

between, uh... reality and fantasy.

This otherworldly, evocative nature.

Bosch wasn't interested in realism.

He's really not interested in making this look like the perfect painting.

It reminds us that this is not of our world.

Step into the mind of Hieronymus Bosch.

What was he thinking as he layered paradise

and punishment into one triptych?

Birds that almost look as though they're on steroids,

giant brutes.

I think a lot of this painting looks very complicated, but it's not.

Was he warning us, mocking us,

or simply hallucinating?

Whatever the answer, Bosch was painting a world

no one had ever dared to imagine.

The painting is, without doubt,

designed to be didactic and moralistic.

As an atheist, it makes me fearful of God.

It is an eye-catching world,

both captivating and unsettling,

known simply as the Garden Of Earthly Delights.

I think that we cannot look at this painting with modern eyes.

It's been reinterpreted in so many different ways.

It's been called a medieval acid trip.

It's also been called an erotic painting.

It's also been described as a critique of the church.

I think it was a painting that was designed

to give the viewer a sense of choice.

This is a really, really simple painting, actually.

It looks complicated, but it's really simple.

You have a choice.

You can live a moral life,

or you can sin, but if you choose to sin,

this is the punishment that you will have to suffer.

The end of the world has rarely looked so vivid.

And here, in Hell,

judgement isn't just delivered.

It's imagined.

At its centre is Hieronymus Bosch...

...a painter of visions.

Playful, disturbing, and endlessly mysterious.

The Garden Of Earthly Delights is

unlike anything else of its time.

Or any time, for that matter.

Around the time this painting is done, remember,

we're talking about the year 1500.

Many, many people thought in the year 1500,

as they did in the year 1000, as they did in the year 2000,

that the world was gonna come to an end.

And in many respects, that's quite a traditional approach

that people in 1500 were used to,

as a sort of final warning as you leave the church

and you enter the... the big wide world again,

a warning not to succumb to temptation.

The Garden Of Earthly Delights tells a story.

A journey in three stages.

But imagine yourself, in the late 15th century,

standing before this strange and vivid masterpiece.

What you may not have anticipated was the way the story was told.

Through a format that was common in Renaissance art,

but rare today: the triptych.

So the format of the painting is known as a... a triptych.

That is a painting made in three panels.

Triptychs are very common during this era, but for religious art.

So those panels would close in together,

and in fact, there's a very interesting painting

on the back of those panels as well.

So, normally,

the painting wouldn't be seen

in all this explosive, technicolour, uh... glory.

Normally, the painting would be closed,

and on the back, it's painted in a technique known as "grisaille."

That is painting that almost is designed

to represent sculpture, quite plain.

So the first panel is all about innocence.

The central panel is about indulgence.

And the third panel is

the consequences of the central panel.

So that makes it a very clear painting.

It is designed to be read almost like a frieze,

from left to right.

We have man's temptation,

man's choice -

spoiler alert: he doesn't make the right choice -

and then, man's punishment on the right-hand side.

The left panel presents the Garden of Eden,

a serene world where Adam and Eve meet for the first time...

...under the calm gaze of God.

It's a moment of innocence and possibility.

Moving to the centre,

the largest panel bursts with vibrant life and chaos.

Here, people revel in music,

food and strange, fantastical creatures.

A vivid celebration of earthly pleasures and temptations.

But beneath the joy, there's a fragility.

A hint that this indulgence might lead to something darker.

And finally, the right panel plunges

into a raw vision of Hell.

Twisted figures, mechanical devices...

flaming landscapes.

Torment with no escape.

This panel is a warning

of what the path of temptation will lead to.

I think this is one of the simplest ways of describing this painting.

That it's a painting about sin,

and then, it's a painting about its consequences.

It's as simple as that.

What a lot of people think is that this is a mediaeval painting.

While this painting is being painted,

Leonardo da Vinci is painting The Last Supper.

This is a Northern Renaissance painting.

This is not a mediaeval painting.

And many people do believe that this wasn't done for a church.

This was done for Henry II of Nassau.

And it's a conversation piece; that's why there's so much in it as well.

I think Bosch is making a distinct differentiation

between these three panels.

They seem to inhabit quite different worlds.

You have very clear divisions in the panel themselves.

But there is, nonetheless,

a sense or a hint of continuation.

If we look, for example, in the landscape at the background,

the landscape scene seems to continue

all the way from left to right.

The horizon runs across the top,

runs right through the three images.

That connects those three panels together.

While Italian masters like Leonardo and Raphael were

mastering the art of linear perspective,

often guiding the viewer's eye into a three-dimensional space,

Bosch seemed to reject those rules entirely.

In his work, the depth is shallow,

the perspective skewed.

Figures and objects float

in compressed, crowded landscapes

that feel less like a real environment

and more like a stage.

But perhaps that's not entirely true.

Might we be looking at the painting the wrong way?

So, it's sometimes said that the painting,

it doesn't use symmetry,

that it doesn't use perspective.

It's quite sort of old-fashioned

in terms of format and structure.

But actually, it does use perspective.

So if, for example, you were to crouch

in front of the painting, if you're quite low down,

I think the painting was designed to be seen quite high up.

And that is that your viewpoint was supposed to be quite low.

At first glance, you think it's almost a mess.

You think it's chaotic.

But in fact, if you take the middle of the central panel,

which is an unhatched egg,

and you put the perspective running through it,

it all comes together.

And when you are quite low in the painting,

your eyes are drawn into the cen...

centre of the painting quite powerfully

through two diagonal lines in the foreground

and two diagonal lines in the top of the painting as well,

right into the centre of the composition.

You've got the foreground, where most of the action is,

on all three panels.

You've got the mid-ground, and you've got the background as well.

Then, you've got, in the middle of each panel,

you've got a body of water.

You've got a lake in the first one.

You've got another lake in the last one with bathers in it,

who are sinning, of course, in the middle panel.

And, in the last one, it's a frozen lake,

because Hell has literally frozen over.

So there are elements which separate the three panels,

but also elements which unite them as well.

Everything connects. So it's very, very structured,

even though, at first glance, you don't think so.

In the Garden Of Earthly Delights,

the creatures come first.

Before the meaning, before the message,

what strikes the viewer is the sheer strangeness

of the animals that fill the landscape.

Birds that almost look as though they're on steroids,

giant fruits,

people wearing strawberry backpacks

and animals on massive potties

and ears being sliced.

There's so much in the painting

that, really, is very difficult to decipher.

The hybrid animals in this painting,

many people think that Bosch invented them, but he didn't at all.

In many, many religious texts,

they would have had these hybrid animals,

and they were called drolleries or something amusing.

But what exactly are we looking at

in this hallucinated catalogue of life?

Because when we take a closer look,

many of these images reveal hidden meanings.

I think it's difficult

for us to decipher every single detail.

But when we think about the context of the painting

and when we think about a viewer

in the 15th or 16th century,

looking at a painting by Bosch becomes

a little bit easier to unravel because there were conventions.

I think a lot of this painting looks very complicated, but it's not.

By having all these animals

and these strange configurations in this painting,

he's saying to you that, if you sin, you are becoming a beast.

So you are actually becoming bestial.

And I do think THAT is what all of these images are about.

One of the more unexpected themes

woven into the Garden of Earthly Delights is music,

but not in the way we might expect.

Now, music in painting is always a symbol of harmony,

but if you look at those instruments on the right-hand side...

...a lot of those instruments look very, very strange.

And actually, there was an experiment not so long ago.

Oxford University recreated a lot of the musical instruments,

and they found that none of the instruments could be played,

or if they could be played, they just sounded really horrible.

Perhaps the most bizarre musical imagery appears in the Hell panel,

where we find real musical notation

etched across the exposed backside of a tortured figure.

This surreal "Butt song," as it's come to be known,

has been transcribed by modern musicians,

and remarkably,

it forms a coherent, performable piece.

So you have this sense,

this evocation of a cacophony,

of this really distorted sound on the right-hand side.

Not only that, you also have a pair of ears

with a knife that's slicing through the ears.

It's almost as though it's an assault to the ears.

In a strange twist,

Bosch's vision has been brought to life,

not just visually, but audibly.

But we also can think about punishments,

the kind of punishments that were used in Bosch's own day.

So coming back to those ears that have been sliced with the knife -

which is really horrible and extremely surreal -

we know that, in Bosch's day, if someone stole,

if someone was caught for thieving,

that the punishment would be, you would have your ears cut off.

I know it doesn't really make sense to us today,

but if you're looking at it at the time,

there's this sense that, you know, "If I...

If I'm tempted to steal,

then, this might happen to me in Hell."

All of the creatures in this painting, in all three panels,

represent some kind of sin or some kind of issue.

So, for example, you get the owl running through as well.

The owl is in all of the panels, more than once as well.

And the owl doesn't represent wisdom.

We think of the owl as wisdom,

but, in Bosch's day, they would have thought of it as the devil,

always keeping his eye on you.

So that's one of the animals

and how it's interpreted differently in those days.

They're easy to overlook at first,

but the owls are quietly scattered throughout the painting...

watching silently.

They're not passively observing.

They're waiting for the judgement that will soon unfold in Hell.

There are a lot of figures in the left-hand side

who are being impaled and tortured,

and there are lots of playing cards and dice

and objects that we associate with gambling.

So somebody, again, looking at this in 1500,

would be thinking, "If this is what I do,

if I spend all my time and waste all my money gambling,

this is what might happen to me in Hell."

Similarly, there are figures

who are getting drunk in a tavern.

There's a woman who's being forced to look at her own reflection.

She... She is going to be a representation of vanity.

A rabbit who's carrying the corpse of a man in the third panel,

the rabbit in that is representing the fact that,

in Bosch's time, poaching was considered a crime,

and it's actually giving you a message.

They're all to give messages.

Perhaps one of the most mysterious images

you'll come across in the Garden Of Earthly Delights

is the figure known as the Tree Man.

At first, you might not know what you're looking at...

...but it's the face that stops you.

He turns and looks directly out at us,

not with horror or rage, but with an eerie calm.

Some scholars have speculated that this might be Bosch himself,

a hidden self portrayed in the middle of the madness.

But what makes this figure so haunting isn't

just how strange it is...

but how still it is.

In a panel full of chaos and torment,

the Tree Man seems to wait...

...watchful, resigned...

...as if he knows something we don't.

One of the interesting things in the first panel,

which is always seen as about innocence,

is you're starting to see those creatures evolve already.

So there are starting to be cracks in paradise already.

The animals are starting to form

and starting to come out of their swamps,

and they're gonna eventually evolve.

There's also speculation that Adam and Eve aren't

simply left behind in the first panel.

They may, in fact, be present throughout the entire triptych.

So if you look at the very first panel,

where you have Adam...

Adam is repeated again in the central panel

with an Eve-like figure.

And then, it's repeated again in the third panel,

but reversed underneath the Prince of Hell.

Some scholars have suggested the two figures tucked away

in the bottom right corner of the central panel

may also be Adam and Eve.

They're quietly witnessing the consequences

of their original sin.

It's almost verging on the surreal.

And what's quite interesting is to know

that the Surrealist movement,

such as Salvador Dali,

were hugely inspired by these works.

And actually there's a form on the left-hand side that,

if you turn it by about 90 degrees,

it's very, very similar to a painting by Salvador Dali,

now in the Reina Sofia Museum, called The Great Masturbator,

which is basically taken as a detail from this painting.

Hieronymus Bosch was one of the most imaginative artists

of the Northern Renaissance.

But the truth is we know surprisingly little about him.

There are no surviving letters, diaries,

or recorded conversations.

He came from a family of painters and was a respected citizen.

He even joined a religious confraternity,

the Brotherhood of Our Lady,

which suggests he was seen as pious and upstanding.

Yet, the content of his paintings is

anything but conventional.

Some modern scholars argue

Bosch was an early Surrealist,

centuries before the term existed.

It's all about blurring the difference

between reality and fantasy.

Bosch wasn't interested in realism; he's really not interested

in making this look like the perfect painting.

And he wants us to realise that this is a fantasy,

that this is another world.

In many ways, that negation of naturalistic light

makes this otherworldly; it makes it surreal.

It reminds us that this is not of our world.

And this is the world that we could go to

if we continue to sin.

So I think it is partly stylistic,

but it also adds to the otherworldly,

evocative nature of the subject.

I think what we have to realise when we look at this painting is

the artists of the Northern Renaissance,

their work was all about not showing the brushwork.

Think about the Arnolfini Portrait, for example.

There is no brushwork on there.

It's almost as if it was painted by God.

Whereas, if you look at this painting,

you look close up, you can see the brushwork on it.

You can see him working on the painting.

So I think that, had this been painted

by an artist from the South,

you'd find quite a different approach in somewhere like Italy,

a more synthetic approach as to the very analytical

and detailed approach that you find in Bosch.

Because he's not trying to recreate reality,

he wants us to be otherworldly.

And that's really important, not just for the style,

but also the technique as well.

Bosch's very different approach is precisely

what made his work stand out, and why it has endured

as one of the most recognisable paintings in art history.

I think, when I look at this painting,

the overall feeling I get is, even as an atheist,

it makes me fearful of God's wrath.

Still as captivating today

as it was over five centuries ago,

the painting continues to draw in

the imagination of anyone who looks closely.

It's a painting that refuses to be fully explained,

that was centuries ahead of its time.

The Garden Of Earthly Delights.

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