by Colin Marshall

Hieronymus Bosch’s masterpiece of grotesquerie, The Garden of Earthly Delights, contains a young God, Adam and Eve, oversized fruits and musical instruments, owls, tortured sinners, something called a “tree man” whose body contains an entire tavern, a defecating avian devil eating a human being, and “frolicking, oblivious figures engaged in all sorts of carnal pleasures,” as art historian Beth Harris puts it in the new Smarthistory video above.

Throughout its fifteen minutes, she and her colleague Steven Zucker explain as much as possible of this jam-packed triptych — not that even a lifetime would be long enough to understand it fully.

“Bosch confounds our ability to even talk about what we see,” says Harris. “His imagination has run wild. He’s just invented so many things here that we could never even have thought about in our wildest imaginations.” Zucker cites one art-history theory that this triptych represents Bosch’s attempt to “elevate the visual arts to the level of creativity that was permitted in literature.”

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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