Italian and Northern Renaissance Assessment

Welcome

    Hello, and welcome back to my blog. Today's blog post is centered around all things Renaissance, including my favorite piece of visual art from an artist emerged in the Northern Renaissance, Hieronymus Bosch. Learning about the Italian and Northern Renaissance the last two weeks of class has been wildly fascinating. The art birthed from this time period proves to be influential, powerful, and timeless to this day. There's a lot to learn and take in from this era, the leading artists, and their artwork so let's get into it. 

Hieronymus Bosch and The Garden of Earthly Delights

    Hieronymus Bosch was a Dutch/Netherlandish painter of the Northern Renaissance that specialized in strikingly and surreal iconography. Throughout his career, he explored religious themes and used his art to portray the sins and follies of humankind. One of his most famous visual arts that I have found to love is The Garden of Earthly Delights. This painting of his stands as one of the greatest masterpieces of the Northern Renaissance. Bosch created this piece between the time 1490 and 1510, and it is currently housed at the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid. 
    Studying The Garden of Earthly Delights made a great impression on me; it was trying to convey something extraordinary. This painting incorporates such a wide variety of well thought out, remarkably deliberate tools to indicate the meaning of the images portrayed. Painted in oil on a triptych, a sequence of Creation is depicted. In the first section (left), you can see Adam and Eve standing before Jesus, surrounded by the beautiful, untouched garden and fantasy animals. This section of the triptych is peaceful and quiet. Life as they know it is pure - just beginning. The emotions evoked are peace, clarity, a sense of togetherness. There isn't a lot surrounding Adam and Eve, just Jesus, the fantasy animals, water, a few other earthly aspects. In this section, the color pink is used to describe heavenly and inner influences, while the color blue is consistently used to indicate earthly and outer ones. 
    The centerpiece of The Garden of Earthly Delights represents a passionate, playful, and sexual image.  Life on earth for humans is represented with carnal desire and delightful wickedness. Nude men and women commence in sexual play, dance, and laughter. Everyone's spirits seem to be gleeful. A detail that caught my eye in this section was the representing wheel of life, a Tantric Circle. The Tantric Circle represents a universal circulation of the material world towards and away from divine influence, and I believe that it must be understood as a realm representing the spiritual life of man. Men are depicted riding on animals around, what I believe, the fountain of youth.  For me, this centerpiece evokes pride and joy in sexuality and youthfulness. The colors used are bright and entertaining with pink, green, blue, and cherry red. The shapes used in this painting portray endless imagination of fantasy animals, fruits, and structures. 
    The last section we see (right) illustrates a daunting new environment for the previously joyous humans. I see a disastrous hellscape, where the people are being punished for their sinful actions shown in the center. The mood is dark, brooding, and devilish. However, I believe this Hell isn't necessarily created by a Devil. Just like Earth, it was a creation of man. Hell is a direct consequence of the corruption of divinity through the agency of man. In this section, I see Hell and Earth. The top portion of the piece is smoldering and colorless. The middle portion is considered the purgatory, where the sinful humans are purged and later sent to Hell. Eerie and disfigured structures are shown in this purgatory, I think to evoke a sense of uncomfortable-ness and to show the action of purging the human. The bottom portion is still Earth, but not as we know it anymore. People are filing into the hellish Earth and they seem to be tiresome and hopeless. The world they once divulged in with their sinful sexuality is now punishing them for their wrongdoings. This section of The Garden of Earthly Delights makes me feel uncomfortable, sad, and worrisome for the sinful people. The shift in color palette for this section instills serious discomfort, with the use of black, fiery red, and dark green. The eerie shapes of the figures purging the people consist of a broken statue of a person (which I believe to be Bosch himself), ripped open in the middle with sharp edges, an animal's skull, two large human ears pinned together on top of people, and an upside down pink fish (ballon maybe?) looking like its about to swallow people whole. These figures also instill some serious discomfort.

Aesthetic Appreciation

    My most appreciated aspect about The Garden of Earthly Delights is Bosch's use of symbolism. Bosch's overarching complex theme for this painting is heavenly divinity, sin, punishment, and Hell. All of Bosch's work is religiously themed with biblical allusions. At that time, religious themed artwork was the only acceptable artistic content, given the Christian orthodoxy of the kingdoms in the Middle Ages. While maintaining a religious theme, he also exhibited a whimsical weirdness that was pretty much unheard of in devotional art at that time, which typically presented rare depictions of good and evil, virtue and sin, and Heaven and Hell. I truly enjoyed dissecting this piece and I most appreciated the use of unnatural, eerie shapes to illustrate the sense of fantasy and imagination with anxiousness and discomfort. 
    
    Thank you for reading my blog on The Garden of Earthly Delights, I hope you enjoyed! 

    From, Chandler 




Works Cited 

Commentary on The Garden of Earthly Delights

Commentary on the Tantric Circle 




Comments

  1. UnknownOctober 4, 2020 at 10:46 PM

    Hello Chandler!

    Your explanation of The Garden of Earth Delights blew me away. You really took the time to examine each section of this work thoroughly and explained it in a way that others could relate to. This work truly depicts what the Northern Renaissance was all about. It is full of oversized creatures/animals, odd structures, human figures that are slightly off from their normal shape, and its color range is spectacular. This work is appealing to me because it incites conflict within me. On the left side, you can see and feel the innocence of scene that is depicted. Then, as you move to the center of the painting, you feel the glee and excitement of ruckus of people celebrating and indulging in sin. Lastly, on the very right side you feel the presence of doom and the condemning consequences of the actions that were taken by the humans in the center of the painting. This painting shows the consequences of sin and the conflict that humans face day to day. It also ties religion into art in a unique and interesting way.

    Thank you,
    Allie

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