Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Delights

The French television series “Les enthousiastes” asked art aficionados to offer their thoughts on, and interpretations of, paintings that they themselves selected. For Jean Eustache’s episode, Jean-Noël Picq (of A DIRTY STORY) chose the third panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” an apocalyptic nightmare-scape that anticipated the darkest reaches of surrealism by almost four hundred years. Looking beyond its obvious grotesqueries, Picq points out several notable qualities of Bosch’s masterwork, including its near absence of perspective, its conflation of ontological categories (human and animal, living and dead, time and space), and its objective depiction of sadomasochistic pleasure.

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