‘And God looked upon the earth, and behold, it was corrupt,
for all flesh had corrupted his way upon earth.’
This quote from Genesis tells us about why God was prompted to flood the earth in the time of Noah,
cleansing it of sin and destroying it.
And this painting, the so-called, ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’ by Hieronymus Bosch,
shows that moment of corruption.
The painting depicts the world before the flood.
Its imagery is very mysterious.
No other artist was painting like Bosch at the time:
his naked figures, his monstrously sized fruit and his larger than life animals.
This is one of three major reproductions made during the 16th century.
However, this is only the central panel of a larger three-panel triptych.
The exterior closes over the central panel like a book,
depicting an image of the world during the flood.
And when you open up the triptych, the left-hand panel
has an image of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
The centre panel: this image of corruption.
And the last panel, an image of Hell.
So this middle panel is somewhere between Heaven and Hell,
and it's one of the great mysteries of art history.
I love to look at it each day in the gallery considering how it tells us
so much about the culture of Europe right before the Age of Enlightenment.
Some art historians have connected this imagery to alchemy
because of the presence of the centre symbol right here,
which resembles an alchemical pelican.
It's unlikely the entire painting is about alchemy,
but there's no question that Bosch would've been influenced by alchemical symbols
– his wife’s family were chemists.
But if it's not strictly about alchemy, what could it be about?
Some scholars have linked this painting to a group called the Adamites,
a group of heretics who wanted to return to the days before original sin,
the days before the judgement of God.
In rebellion to the strict rules of the Church,
groups of Adamites sprung up throughout the Middle Ages all the way through the Age of Enlightenment.
They believed if they could live like Adam and Eve, no man, no laws could judge them.
Could this type of rebellious sin have been inspiration for Bosch?
At the time this work was created in the year 1500, there was something called 'Millennial Fever'
and this was a belief that the apocalypse was very near.
So there was a great focus on damnation,
on purity and sin in everyone's daily lives.
Groups like the Adamites might have been a symbol that the world was near its end
and that it was about to be cleansed again by God.
This book, Petrus Comestor’s Historia Scholastica, from the 12th century
was at the time of Bosch just as popular as the Bible.
And we know that Bosch took a lot of influence from contemporary literary sources.
The book explains the world before the flood.
Comestor says that people were as large as animals and fruit was large and abundant.
The book then goes on to say that the soil of the earth was so depleted after the flood
that God granted man the ability to eat animals.
If you notice in the painting, man and animals are frolicking together
because before the flood man was a vegetarian.
Comestor’s book also proclaims that man caught fire after having intercourse with other men,
and that every 500 years the world accumulated more and more sin.
So by the year 1500 it must've felt like the world was very heavy with sin.
The book also makes more clear man's intimate relationship with fruit in this painting,
although some images are more debauched than others.
The narrative of the artwork suggests that people are aware of the sin of Adam and Eve and are doing it anyway.
They fornicate with fruit, they live freely and they sin, but they don't care.
For a medieval person, ignoring the consequences of going against the Church and God
was even worse than sinning without knowledge.
So what does the apocalypse really look like?
Well, it depends on your historical context.
But in 1500, this is it what the apocalypse would've looked like.
And if you saw yourself in this central panel,
you would've most certainly been headed to Hell quite soon.
So what would you do?
Continue to sin without care?
Or repent knowing that God has the power to destroy the Earth and you with it?
The fires of passion are momentary,
but the fires of Hell are most certainly permanent.