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The Renaissance and the Garden of Earthly Delights

 Here is an image.




That is a triptych oil painting by Hieronymus Bosch. The "canvas" is oak.

This has been in the Prado, in Madrid, since 1939.

There is painting on the back of both the left and right panels that works like a Mad Magazine fold-in gag. One is supposed to see the image only when the left and right panels are folded together to hide the central panel. 

But I'll stick to the front (or inside) of the painting. It is extraordinary. 

On the left panel we see the Garden of Eden. Someone (an angelic visitor? God Himself?) is presenting Eve to Adam. 

God (we will presume) is holding Eve's wrist. The gesture looks a bit as if He is taking her pulse, to assure Himself that the operation with the rib actually worked. 

One interpreter, Wilhelm Fraenger describes this detail in the painting as suggesting that God is "enjoying the pulsation of the living blood." This may be taken as an anticipation of process theology, the sort of 20th century theology associated with Whitehead and Hartshorne. To the process theologians, being IS process, and it is a necessary attribute of God that He is affected by the temporal process. That he does NOT transcend it. 

There is nothing more temporal than a pulse, the blood's proof of its own movement and the evidence of the timing of a nearby beating heart. 

In the central panel, we seem both to be in the same place and NOT in the same place as in the left panel. There is a lake in each panel and they look quite similar. Also the "skyline" in the background of each echoes the other. But the garden has opened out, and there are lots of people now, mostly as couples. 

The scene is full of odd details such as an unnaturally large strawberry one man is carrying. He is standing but bent over as he carries it in front of him, and seems to be engaged in conversation with a woman seated on the ground. It is a bit as if the odd strawberry is intended as her meal, and he is her waiter. 

The right panel is Hell. It wasn't Bosch's only depiction of Hell. He knew the terrain. 

Oddly, the scene in Hell includes a pair of human ears, which seem to be holding a knife.  Perhaps in hell we are all boiled down to the sin that defines us. Perhaps this individual's sin involves the sense of sound. And (since I'm speculating) perhaps the knife is indicative of the harm that loose gossip can do. 

The whole thing is an imaginative wildness that confirms the sense of the Renaissance not merely as a recovery of ancient learning and ideas (though that may have been the catalyst) but as the western world's mardi gras, a vacation from severity and judgment before they return with a vengeance on Ash Wednesday.   





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