Our Garden of Earthly Delights
Excerpt from Chapter 54 of The Journey Across Forever by Wayne Saalman
THE MONA LISA’S COY, enigmatic smile may be the top attraction of the Louvre Museum in Paris and, while its galleries are stuffed to the rafters with some of the most celebrated paintings and sculptures in history, I have always preferred basking in the ethereal beauty and light of the scores of Impressionist paintings at the Museum d’Orsay. The works of Monet, Manet, Gauguin, Pissarro, Renoir and their fellow artists easily sets my spirit soaring and keeps me in a sublime state of bliss for days.
Then there are the phenomenal paintings of Vincent Van Gogh, who worked his way through Impressionism with hundreds of wondrous canvasses, but who in his hallucinatory madness ultimately raised his art to a level of transcendentalism that has dazzled viewers ever since. He has given us magnificent works like the “Starry Night”, “Café at Night”, “Cornfields and Ravens”, his “Room at Arles” and those haunting self-portraits with his piercing blue eyes blazing and sparking out to daunting effect. The striking beauty, the furious riots of color and the bursting golden light in Van Gogh’s work can leave one feeling as dazed as the artist himself surely must have been while lost in his exalted delirium, painting feverishly, his mind and body full of anguish at his numerous failures in life and suffering in every way possible, haunted especially, it is said, by a terrible presentiment of impending death.
Indeed, Van Gogh’s works have always held me spellbound and entranced when I looked on them, but on a recent trip to Madrid, I came upon a painting in the Prado by another artist that left me even more stunned. In fact, the work left me riveted and reeling, for there were scores and scores of naked bodies dancing, prancing, cartwheeling and frolicking through a bizarre surreal setting. There were women bathing and men riding animals of every kind. There were people making love or engaging in every form of depravity imaginable. There was Jesus and Adam and Eve and an inferno of strange creatures on the left side of the work, while the right side was overflowing with doom, gloom and stupendous demonic debauchery.
I knew, of course, that I would be viewing famous Spanish artists in the Prado, men such as Francisco De Goya, El Greco and Diego Velazquez among others, but not this staggering masterpiece. This enormous triptych had been conjured by a Dutchman; his name Hieronymus Bosch; his famous masterpiece: The Garden of Earthly Delights
What a surprise. And what a painting! I had seen photographs of the work many times over the years, but to lay eyes on the real thing left me breathless.
As mentioned above, the left panel of the triptych depicts an earthly paradise with Jesus holding the hands of Adam and Eve, while the right panel slips into deeply disturbing and gruesome scenes of hellish proportions. The center panel, however, looks like something a visionary shaman might see after ingesting a few extremely potent magic mushrooms and landing in another dimension entirely. Its depiction of earthly pleasures, especially those of a lustful nature, were supposedly meant to sound a warning note to fellow Christians, the message being that indulging in such ephemeral frolics as shown here would have dire consequences later once one’s soul had “slipped the mortal coil”.
The sheer number of naked bodies in the work must have shocked medieval observers back in the day. People are shocked even now, after all, and to think that this painting was presented to the world at roughly the outset of the 1500s beggars’ belief. The detail, however, is absolutely phenomenal and I found viewers lined up five and six layers deep to stare at this fantastic masterpiece of orgiastic magnificence. It had us all absolutely mesmerized.
My impression is that Hieronymus Bosch must have been an incredibly liberated man and a true visionary. There has been speculation as to whether he was a member of any underground, secret society or not, a group like the Brethren of the Free Spirit, but even if he was simply in a club of one, he was centuries ahead of those in his day.
More than once as I stood looking, I overheard expressions of unabashed astonishment as people stared at the bizarre beasts and monsters, the depicted dreamers indulging in the pleasures of the flesh and the countless demons who were clearly delighting in punishing every fallen soul they could get their hands and mouths on for giving in so willingly to their animal lust and every conceivable version of the seven deadly sins. While those exclamations were generally in Spanish or French or other European languages, I could easily interpret the breathless tones of incredulity which accompanied the words.
Then, all at once, I heard an English-speaking viewer loudly exclaim, “What the f**k! What the hell is that? What’s that supposed to mean?” he wailed in a woeful voice. His partner had no idea. She just frowned and shrugged her shoulders.
Even the Visitor’s Guide to the Prado admitted that the painting was “filled with symbolic images of unclear meaning…”
Personally, I suspect that Bosch was less a sermonizing medieval cleric-type than a man whose visionary talent was so acute that he surely must have existed in a rare dimension of his own.
For me, Bosch is proof positive that it is possible that we humans can access a higher level of consciousness of an eternal nature if only we make a mighty effort to open ourselves up enough to become both liberated and enlightened.
In the meantime, as we work toward that end, we need to realize that this earth is, and always has been, a garden of delights and need to stop polluting and destroying it. Our task is to preserve, protect and return it to a more pristine condition or we are certainly not enlightened beings; we are fools.
