Original subtitles

We all bring to the painting our own experiences,

our own experiences with art.

Who are the "we"? The "we" are millions of people.

Thousands-- hundreds of thousands of people

who actually go to the Prado Museum,

see the painting in reality.

But the painting is very well known internationally,

globally, through the Internet.

So many people have visual access to the painting

long before they even go and see the painting itself.

People from all over the world,

with all their different cultural backgrounds, look at the painting

and therefore look at it in manifold different ways.

When we look at The Garden of Earthly Delights,

we usually, immediately look at the interior.

But this is not the way people started to look at the painting

at the times of Bosch.

It is a triptych,

and usually the triptych was closed regularly

and only opened for special occasions.

Going from darkness...

to the chaos when everything begins.

It's also theatrical moment

to have it closed and then to open it and enter inside.

I admire and like the patience,

the joy of doing little details, one by one.

She looks so beautiful

with the peacock on her head.

There's the mermaid again with the merman in armor.

The owl with long ears.

Painting is naming things correctly.

Look at this thistle.

I mean, it's just-- It's extravagant.

Look at this... plum maybe?

There are heaps of fruit,

including apples, pomegranates, berries.

The giraffe, for example, is innocent and clean.

The pleasure of flying. Who hasn't dreamed about flying?

This is very funny.

Lots of birds come shooting out of his body.

There's one there who's dead, with the deer,

or he's very tired.

And others, you simply don't know what they are.

Or I don't know what they are.

Where did all this come from?

From what head?

Where did this Dionysian fantasy come from?

I think maybe this is the most iconic image

in the painting, and...

Maybe it's a self-portrait, maybe not.

It must be the artist at different ages,

with that very pretty dark girl.

I don't know much about Bosch's psyche,

but I think even he didn't know.

And that brings us in a way to the question,

what kind of a man was he?

Hieronymus Bosch was a mysterious figure

not only because his paintings,

but because we don't know actually who he was.

And the records that he lived

is in the archives of this brotherhood.

That brotherhood is the oldest brotherhood in the Netherlands.

It dates back from 1318.

And, of course,

our famous painter became a member later on.

It is Sicut lilium inter spinas.

It is the coat of arms of this brotherhood.

That means, "See the lily between the thorns."

And if you were a very big nobleman,

you had the right to shoot swans.

Three times a year, there was a big meal

and they ate swans that were donated by the noble people.

There are still noble people, but we do not eat swans anymore.

Because swans are not very nice,

and they are protected right now.

What I understood is that to cook a swan...

they would take the whole skin,

including the feathers, off.

So the animal would be there completely naked.

But then they boiled them or cooked them or fried them

and then put the skin, with the feathers, back on.

It would have all its feathers again,

and there would be the-- yes or no-- delicious flesh of the swans.

The popularity of this brotherhood

was dependent on the fact that the bishop had given the members of this brotherhood

the right of indulgencia.

This is the oldest act of indulgence

of the Brotherhood of St. Mary that they keep here.

And it dates from 1335,

and it gives the possibility for a people who worship St. Mary,

it would diminish their punishment in purgatory.

When you attended services at the chapel of St. Mary--

and, of course, when you made donations

to the Brotherhood of St. Mary--

it gives you the possibility

to make your stay in purgatory not so long.

Probably, the source for his images was the market in his town,

with the cactus and strange flowers,

and particularly crustaceans,

that were starting to arrive-- slightly exotic things.

It's really nice that you can see what Bosch knew and didn't know,

what he'd seen and hadn't seen.

It's obvious he hadn't seen elephants or giraffes.

♪ When the North Sea ♪

♪ Breaks stubbornly On the high dunes ♪

♪ And white flakes of foam ♪

♪ Break apart on the crests ♪

♪ When the surly tide ♪

♪ Crashes on the black basalt ♪

♪ And a gray mist Blankets dike and dune ♪

♪ When at low tide, the beach Is as desolate as a desert ♪

♪ And the wet west winds Roar with venom ♪

♪ Then fights, my land ♪

♪ My flat land ♪

♪ When rain falls ♪

♪ On streets, squares, borders ♪

♪ On roofs and steeples Of towering churches ♪

♪ Which are the only mountains In this flat land ♪

♪ When people are dwarfed Under the clouds ♪

♪ When the days go by In dreary regularity ♪

♪ And a round east wind beats The land down even flatter ♪

♪ Then waits my land ♪

♪ My flat land ♪

This was the chapel of the Brotherhood of Mary,

of which Jeroen Bosch was a member.

He came mostly every week

to participate in the celebrations

of the Brotherhood of Mary.

He painted this triptych

for the altar sponsored by his brotherhood--

the Brotherhood of Our Lady-- which was in his town's church.

It seems he did it with great care,

with great dedication,

because he was a member of the Brotherhood of Our Lady.

I think he was responsible for the processions that they had,

for the altar decorations.

He must have been, to a certain degree,

a learned man himself.

This is what you can infer from the many paintings

and the diversity of the paintings

and the inventiveness of his work.

He is not a run-of-the-mill painter, clearly.

He's not a simple craftsman.

Originally, he was called van Aken,

Hieronymus van Aken.

He later, in 1504, signed his paintings

by "Hieronymus Bosch,"

but that was his own nickname.

And then he became very well known as Hieronymus Bosch.

Or, in Spanish, he was, of course, called El Bosco.

We don't even have a clear portrait of him.

There is a drawing, a later drawing,

that tradition says is a drawing of Hieronymus Bosch.

We don't even know for sure.

No one can paint this work

without doubting his capacity to engender a world.

To compete with God.

Medieval people thought there were two books.

Not only the Bible, or the Scriptures,

but also the book of nature,

that both were creations by God.

What are the words? The words are the creatures.

The words are the animals, are the plants,

are the human beings.

Everything would somehow contain a trace

of its divine essence of the Creator.

As you see here at the miniature,

you put them on a table exactly what we do today in a library--

the same thing, yeah, 500 years ago--

and they stand around and they read,

discuss, look at these manuscripts.

They make us aware of the fact

that it is a shared literary culture

and that the enjoyment of the images in relation to the text

is something that is part of this sharing.

And this is important for our understanding,

also, of The Garden of Earthly Delights.

Because you actually share with each other,

and that you know that the other person

standing in front of the painting may also know.

So there is a--

In art history, people sometimes use the term "period eye."

What the conception of these tapestries shows us

of the cultural environment in which they were created

is an extremely positive vision of the world.

A world that also comes from nature,

a nature which, for men and women in the Middle Ages

and even at that time of transition around the 15th century...

was very familiar,

a nature that also acts as a setting for courtly love.

All these garden metaphors were then understood

to be the place where the lovers get together.

Love is not only love in the way that we know it,

uh, important as it is in our lives.

But it is-- It can encapsulate all the virtues

that a knight, a courtier, should contemplate,

cultivate, exercise,

play with in a courtly manner.

And of course this is where Bosch goes over the top.

You go into the inner gym, inner gym of love.

You-- You try to, if you will,

to build the muscles of love.

The moment suprême

of the story of The Romance of the Rose

is that Amant, the lover,

plucks the rose of the beloved.

And we all know what the plucking means.

Legend has it

that there is only one way to capture a unicorn,

which is an extremely fierce animal.

Only a young virgin can draw it to her lap.

If it immerses its horn in water,

the water is purified.

But it is also a very obvious sexual symbol.

It's something very characteristic of medieval thought

that was developed particularly around the end of the 15th century,

and that is polysemy-- in other words, multiple meanings.

We have to imagine that we are in a pre-Cartesian world,

a non-Cartesian world,

in which men and women in the Middle ages

accepted without any problem

meanings that for us are opposed to each other,

while for them, they were complementary.

It's grotesque. It's humorous.

Just as with the choir stalls, the misericords, where they sat,

the gargoyles, these creatures,

have that common, humorous touch,

but the intention is also moralistic.

This grotesque, for example,

is a kind of crane but with a monkey on top.

This individual seems like a kind of friar with a rosary,

but he has a crozier.

It's all around.

Marginal figures, marginal motifs

that you find in the margin of these kinds of manuscripts.

He blows them up. He makes them larger.

He makes them the main figures of a huge painting

instead of keeping them marginalized, so to speak.

Yeah. All these interaction of people and fruit.

It directly comes from margins, the beasts or fruits

that you see in The Garden of Earthly Delights.

All the books of hours

have a fairly standard iconographic repertoire

with the calendar, lives of saints,

scenes from the lives of Christ and the Virgin.

And almost all have an Office for the Dead,

a kind of requiem mass,

that is exemplary, like the visions of Tondal the knight.

The vision of Tondal is about an Irish knight.

He's not very pious person.

He has a vision--

his soul being taken out of his body

and is brought into a very gloomy region

where he is being threatened by demons.

He's then being saved by an angel who suddenly appears,

and the angel then shows him heaven and hell,

especially hell,

and all the tortures that the damned souls are subjected to.

And when he wakes up,

the angel tells him that he has to tell the story

about this terrible vision that he has

and that he has to improve his life, which he then does.

He becomes a very pious person.

In Bosch, his Garden of Earthly Delights,

the whole setting is given to the viewer as a dream landscape.

We know that dreams

are real experiences we have while sleeping.

There were long philosophical debates

on whether a dream took place during the course of sleep

or if it was an illusion produced at the moment we wake up.

Could it be that we don't dream?

Now we know that it's not like that.

We do dream while we sleep.

In real time, with colors and sounds.

It's a true simulation of the real world.

Our brain receives little information from the exterior world.

It is a world formed exclusively from the interior.

That is, it's formed by our memories, by our cerebral circuits

which allow us to create perception

while we're awake and while we're asleep.

What I mean is that we sleep with the baggage

we have acquired during our life.

The objects that fill our dreams

are those from our daily experiences.

If we dream of birds, it's because we've seen them.

Maybe they're not the right size

or they're not where they should be,

but the basic elements derive from everyday experience.

There are things that are imaginable only in dreams.

"Keep dreams and ghosts of the night far from us."

So they pray that far away should remain dreams--

They don't say "insomnia." They say "somnia."

They should remain very far away, the dreams

and the phantasmata of the night.

So here you have paintings full of all that.

But the monks pray that, in the night,

they don't have to see all this.

So there's something very forbidding in all that.

When I think of the monks praying that they shall not have to see it,

how did they look at it?

A good question,

because his paintings weren't made for monks.

Bosch shows something that is real

and that is actual

and that he criticizes also in the courtly life.

I mean, all the sins are there.

All the sins are there.

As artists, we have the ability to animate the inanimate.

I see concomitants here with the comic.

Because it has a lot of drawing. It has narrative.

Bosch worked by commission.

I know how to please the client, without ceasing to be yourself

and, if you can, slipping your own concerns into the work.

I think Bosch did that magnificently.

He has a technique,

with very fine glazes, full of nuances,

and minimal brushstrokes.

We see in places that he let the drop fall.

He also painted the terminations with a magnifying glass.

For example, here, the rouge on this shepherd

is done with lines of brushstrokes,

and these expressive eyes are done with a detail

that requires a magnifying glass and an extremely fine brush

and tremendous precision in the stroke.

The layers of color are done by mixing the pigments

with linseed oil, with egg yolk,

with egg white.

There are many materials,

and those recipes are no longer known.

They've been lost.

-They were his secrets. -They were.

Bosch's family were all painters.

-Yes, his father, his grandfather. -That's right.

And they passed on those recipes, like cooking recipes,

as to how to make colors.

-Family secrets. -Hmm.

Yes.

We'll start with God the Father.

When you tell me, I'll look to see if we're at the edge.

-You can look now. -Okay.

Thanks to the infra-red,

we can see the underlying drawing,

and the X-ray lets us see all the stages of the painting.

The surface of the painting now lets us see what changes were made,

including those done at the last minute on the surface.

It goes a bit deeper than what is visible.

And it's particularly effective

for seeing the underlying drawing

especially if, as the Flemish did,

he drew in black on a white background.

And that is precisely what Bosch did.

Was he thinking about the kind of painting that we see now,

or did he think of the concept

in an entirely different fashion?

And all these things, we don't know.

It's like an archaeology.

We do like an archaeology of the image.

But the interesting change that occurs here

is in the type of face of the Creator

and in the direction where he's looking at.

The Creator is not now the man with the long beard,

which many people associate with God the Father.

But he has given the Creator the shape of Christ the Son.

And since Adam and Eve were created in the image of God,

I think that Bosch wanted to emphasize their identity

as being created in the image and likeness of God.

And in order to show that, he would need to present God

with an image that is very similar to the human face.

The Creator was looking in the direction of Adam.

Now, as many people have observed,

the Creator is looking at the viewer.

And he really pierces at you

as if to involve the viewer in the Creation scene.

When you look at those eyes, they speak to you.

When I do a portrait, I like the person to look at the camera.

Because what those eyes say...

The eyes never lie.

My relationship with The Garden

began long before I joined the museum, of course.

I used to come here when I was younger.

Well, much younger. That's almost ancient history.

And the guard opened and closed the panels every day.

So it's something I knew from seeing it so often.

In working very directly with Bosch and his work,

one of the things I most liked studying was the whole creative process--

how he worked from the underlying drawing to the surface.

Look at those parallel lines

which he makes in the underlying drawing,

as if he'd applied carmine.

He uses very fine brushes. It requires great skill to do this.

All of these creatures, all these--

most of them have highlights.

And at those times when the highlight sticks out, he doesn't care.

But in order to do those things,

he probably had to lay the painting horizontal

and do it like this...

Because a bit of ink could have dripped,

no matter how thick it was.

It's been variously said that he drew with his left hand,

with his right,

that he was left-handed, that he wasn't,

that there were two painters.

But in fact, he could move the painting--

put it the right way up, the other way round.

For example, I'm not left-handed,

but I can make strokes as if I were.

Maybe not outlines, but I can make strokes.

Another thing he always does is line the contours

with either light or shade.

He lines them with a suitable tone.

For example, this is in the light,

and he lines it with a white tone.

But here, he doesn't want it in the light

because the light's coming from the left,

so he lines it with the same tone as the cloak.

Everyone doesn't usually do this.

They are completely new things that he does,

because he draws like a painter and paints like a drawer.

The painter shows what is invisible.

Bosch also adds his imagination.

Here everything is possible.

Many birds form shapes as if they were clouds.

I've seen that he, too, paints this.

Yes, I see many links between this work and mine.

For example, many animals drinking.

I have a work called The Legacy

which shows tigers, bears, pandas, lions, wolves, goats.

All sharing the water at the last pool.

It's a metaphor for the end of the world.

From the perspective of eastern civilization,

paintings are narrative scrolls which have to be unrolled.

Like this painting, Along the River During the Qingming Festival.

It transmits change in time and space.

It is the city of Kaifeng.

It's a work in which spaces surge from within time.

That is why The Garden represents the history of humanity.

Each of us is going to see something different in those stories,

but he's telling many stories and he plays with us.

He plays with the observer.

I love this, too, this image of the people--

Almost the idea of whispering, of secrets and...

one imagines, untruths.

But it looks conspiratorial.

It doesn't look like an innocent conversation.

They are forms of conversation

that actually mirror what we-- and they-- as an audience,

were doing standing in front of the painting.

- Those people had read the Roman de la rose. -Yes.

They had read many other Dutch-language fables

and symbolic tales.

They would probably-- which I would never do--

But they would probably point to things

and literally touch things and say this and that

and I think this is this.

Who is the prince?

Who has the money to commission someone to paint this kind of work?

And then it will be exhibited somewhere.

It's intended to be seen by people to produce an effect.

What we know is that the painting was seen

in the palace of the count Henry III of Nassau,

who belonged to the highest nobility of Burgundian court.

It is most likely

that is was Engelbrecht of Nassau

who gave the commission for the painting.

And he had to take care of both his nephew,

Henry III, and Philip the Fair.

I think that he commissioned The Garden of Earthly Delights

for their entertainment and education.

Because they were used to this--

have discussion together.

That was the fun.

The fun thing is men and women

having discussions together

about important topics like:

What is natural behavior?

What is courtly behavior?

What is a sin?

Is it sinful to listen to nature,

or is it not?

In a sense, it's also like a mirror,

uh, giving thought for speculation.

Fifty years after Bosch dies,

the duke of Alba comes to the Netherlands

in order to suppress the revolution of the Protestants.

And one of the first things he does is he goes after the painting.

He confiscates the possessions of William of Orange

who got the painting through heritage.

William of Orange was a very important figure

at the court of Charles V.

When Charles V left St. Gudula in Brussels

after abdicating,

he leaned on Philip's shoulder

and on that of William of Orange.

So he was someone very close to them.

But he rose up against Philip

and, of course, abandoned Brussels.

William of Orange flees the country,

and Alba immediately confiscates the painting.

When he came, the painting was gone.

They have been hiding it.

But Alba really wanted to have this painting.

It was very important for him, so he moved heaven and earth.

He even tortured the custodian of the palace.

They pulled out the custodian's toenails and fingernails.

They did everything until he told them where The Garden was.

Philip II bought it in 1591 and brought it to the Escorial.

But it wasn't intended to be among the religious paintings in the Escorial,

but for the space where the monarch and his family had their rooms.

Did he torment himself thinking that perhaps

his destiny could be to go to that dark, fiery place that is hell?

I'm a bit skeptical about that interpretation,

I must say.

I think he really enjoyed the detail of the painting,

really enjoyed looking at it.

One has to remember he's also the king

who commissions Titian to paint the nudes out of Ovid for his bedroom.

So he was the ascetic king we associate with El Escorial.

But he didn't mind looking at a little flesh.

Philip II was a man who believed that his deeds on earth

would be judged by God.

He was convinced of that.

So he surrounded himself with things that could inspire...

his religious and moral concepts of life.

The Garden of Earthly Delights was painted with a function.

It was made for certain reasons

that were in perfect harmony with Philip II's morals.

Philip II was a great Renaissance prince

and one of the most important statesmen that we've had.

He was an intelligent, cultured man.

So I understand his fascination with Bosch's work

as the fascination of someone

who knows that appearance and what he is told is not enough.

There is a legend that Philip II,

when he was dying here in the Escorial,

he had an image--

a painting by Bosch-- brought to his deathbed.

And we know from certain letters that he advises his children

to carefully look at the paintings by Bosch.

It seems to suggest that, for Philip II,

paintings by Hieronymus Bosch contain some form of wisdom

that he can learn from even on his deathbed.

Sigüenza, the librarian of the Escorial,

wrote on this painting, um,

the king's love for Hieronymus Bosch,

called this painting, because of this detail,

the madroño painting.

I think that in the first recorded mention of the painting,

it's called a painting showing the variety of the world.

Which I think is very accurate

because this is almost encyclopedic.

The title has always struck me as very deeply ironic,

to say that this is a garden or earthly delight.

The garden of delights? Yes.

Garden of earthly delights? No.

It's a really good title. That's why it's lasted so long.

And we don't know what the title was, do we? I think.

It was first called Variety of the World.

Father Sigüenza also referred to it as that.

It was he who encouraged Philip II to acquire it,

because he said that it wasn't heretical.

It was also called the strawberry painting

because as well as being a symbol of special delights,

it's ephemeral.

The red fruits that are depicted are consumed immediately,

and it is an allegory of how pleasure is also ephemeral in this life.

Those two ideas of the garden--

that it's a place of peace and meditation and reflection,

or it's a place of extreme violence and surrealism

and, you know, death

and bizarre metamorphosis and so on and so on.

I mean, that is in his mind--

Well, I put it in his mind because that's my idea of Bosch.

I just think this is a painting

like nothing else in the history of art.

When the angels changed their shape into monsters,

they still have wings?

Dark wings, like bats?

Yeah, it's really a beautiful miniature, isn't it?

So this whole understanding of evil being in the world...

not only by disobedience

but in order to be equal to God,

as a consequence, the bad angels--

the wicked angels, the disobedient angels--

are being driven out of heaven

so they lose the likeness in which they were created by God.

This story has been represented by Bosch in the Haywain Triptych,

but it's only alluded to

on the exterior of The Garden of Earthly Delights

by display of dark and white clouds.

A very dramatic play on dark and white clouds.

"God spoke, and it was created, and it stood fast."

It stood.

What we see is one huge contradiction

of that sentence.

Nothing stands as it is.

We know that using a-- a fake owl,

birds would come, fascinated by the owl,

and they would be stuck on the branches.

And then you could take the birds from the tree.

So this phenomenon, which actually exists in reality, in nature,

was seen as a metaphor for the devil

who is able to tempt and attract birds--

which at the time were freely associated with human souls.

It's very interesting how the drama evolves.

These little black monsters coming out of the water

are already starting to show that the seed of evil is in paradise

and it comes from the purifying, life-giving element of water.

It's like the evolution of the species.

You could do a Darwinian reading of the painting,

based on the mineral from the jewels of the almost inorganic world

to these kinds of early batrachians-- toads and salamanders.

Here it's starting to have three heads,

and it's forming a shell, external bones.

It's a metamorphosis.

When they represent the Creation,

they represent two moments.

One, the creation of Eve from the rib of Adam

in the Garden of Eden.

And the second moment is when God the Creator

brings Eve to Adam.

Bringing together is understood

as what was called the institution of marriage.

Bosch has changed something.

It is not the marriage that he's depicting,

nor is it the creation of Eve from the rib of Adam.

The Bible says that God put Adam to sleep.

And in this dream, he foresaw...

the redemption of mankind on the cross,

where Christ-- who is called the new Adam, the new man--

redeems the sins of the old Adam.

And then it is striking to see

how Bosch depicts the Creator with the face of Christ

and Eve in a fashion as if they are marrying.

Who is the new Eve? That is the Church.

If this interpretation is correct...

Adam is actually dreaming.

Adam is having a vision.

Adam has a dream vision.

Bosch painted his works about the creation of humanity.

I've taken a part of the Haywain

that represents the expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise.

I've taken a part from the left of the three panels.

It's a "cryptic."

He gives them permission to have sex and reproduce.

So it isn't the sexual relationship that is sinful.

It's the desire,

represented in the fruits that are in the painting.

It looks like they're taking LSD, doesn't it? With those red tablets.

It's like the ticket to hell.

So God sends them out after the Fall into the world.

to procreate

and to govern the world.

Well, actually, in the central panel even,

you start to see that the world is governing man,

not man is governing the world.

Everybody is in that kind of state of nature,

but what is happening in the state of nature is... madness.

It's like candy for children, that pink color.

The painting seems to have flavor too.

This invites you to come in and enjoy

and... and to participate.

That's for certain. Yeah.

It's like they'd released pheromones in an ant hill.

Perhaps heaven is the earth. It's the center.

It's the question we ask, isn't it?

For the profane spectator, heaven is in the center.

It isn't the paradise created by God,

but it does have to do with that image of a place

where you don't have to work,

where you can practice sex in any way.

They're bathing. They're reveling.

But, at the same time, there is a constant sense of danger,

of grief, of pain.

They don't seem to be having a particularly great time.

And, yes, there is a lot of eroticism,

but it's very cold eroticism somehow.

-It's not-- It's not a sexy picture. -Acted out. No, it's not.

It's sort of acted and somewhat forced in some cases.

Essentially, the greatest sin was lust,

lust as the most terrible sin

which was the cause of everything.

It's what we see here.

Lust is an important element.

It seems that it's the essential center.

I think one of my favorite parts of this painting

is the two figures who are making love inside a mussel shell.

And you just think, what is going on there? Why are they doing that?

But it's one of those images that remains with you,

and you always think about this as this totally surreal, insane...

One striking thing is this arm.

This arm is reaching out for a fish that,

according to many art historians,

is a symbol of-- of lust.

Actually, of the male sexual organ.

The position of the hand and the two balls...

tell you something about what is going on inside this cup.

They're having fun.

They don't seem to be harming anyone.

They suddenly meet. They share the fruit.

They frolic. Those ones are kissing.

I'm fascinated by the degree of realism in certain points.

I mean, if you look at the two Africans, for instance.

He's quite clearly seen Africans--

probably in Antwerp or in the Netherlands-- who were slaves.

-There was a slave market. -As he has the birds.

There are, like, eight or ten birds-- He has the birds.

...that you can identify, as a biologist.

Are these birds good things? Are they scary?

I, personally, would be quite scared by a giant kingfisher.

But it's-- No one in the painting seems that bothered by them.

It's a sort of strange, upside-down world.

We see that the birds, animals, minerals, vegetables--

they all work in harmony

and in a different way from the earthly order.

At times, butterflies are bigger than men

and men are smaller than ducks.

It's a diverse, manifold world but, at the same time,

it contains the truth of Christianity.

You needn't wait for that truth from a priest.

This is an artist's truth.

Originally, this fountain was, uh...

had a round shape.

It's almost like a bowl.

Leaflike.

It seems to have some leaflike structure.

But here, you clearly see an egg form.

If we look at the triptych in Lisbon

showing the temptations of St. Anthony,

we see a paten

and we see a frog standing on the paten.

And the frog holds, actually, an egg on top of his head.

And if you zoom out from this,

you will see, in the central panel,

Christ standing next to the altar,

with a crucifix on it,

to emphasize that that is the real altar.

And then in the foreground, you see a mock-- a parody of the Eucharist.

If eggs come with the association

of parody of the Host in a triptych,

then he runs here the risk that the entire triptych

is being seen as a awful parody

on the use of altarpieces in Eucharistic context.

So for a painter who is-- complies entirely

with traditional religious convictions,

it would have been extremely problematic,

not to use other words,

to create a triptych that could be seen

as a parody on that very Eucharistic ritual.

That is impossible.

So we have, on the one hand,

a religiously very traditional painter,

who, on the other hand, artistically,

is a fantastic innovator.

There is a marvelous futuristic element in the painting.

Some buildings that could almost be by Gaudí.

They seem to be made with crab remains.

It's like a mixture of animals and of modern bombs.

It's really the vision of an artist

who is capable, in some way,

of foreseeing a future

much crueler than his contemporaries could imagine.

Today we would-- This is--

These look like factories.

It does remind me of sort of a children's fantasy of a candy factory.

We are not in a world meant to be lived in.

It's a fever nightmare or something like that.

It's like a great feverish day.

♪ In the land Of gods and monsters ♪

♪ I was an angel ♪

♪ Livin' in the garden of evil ♪

♪ Screwed up, scared ♪

♪ Doin' anything that I needed ♪

♪ Shinin' like a fiery beacon ♪

♪ You got that medicine I need ♪

♪ Fame, liquor, love Give it to me slowly ♪

♪ Put your hands on my waist Do it softly ♪

♪ Me and God We don't get along ♪

♪ So now I sing ♪

♪ No one's gonna Take my soul away ♪

♪ I'm livin' like Jim Morrison ♪

♪ Headed towards A fucked-up holiday ♪

♪ Motel sprees, sprees And I'm singin' ♪

♪ Fuck, yeah, give it to me ♪

♪ This is heaven What I truly want ♪

♪ It's innocence lost ♪

♪ Innocence lost ♪

I saw their fascination when they were looking at it,

how they laughed, how they were indifferent to paradise

and how they were fascinated by hell.

In some way, I think hell is much more like

the idea we could have today of having a good time

than that pure, untouched nature, where water springs forth,

while here there are animals transformed into perverse monsters.

There's a rabbit doing terrible harm

to that poor man who's upside down.

The animals join with the demons

to torture those poor people who were eating fruit.

Most of this is chaos

and painful and... scary

and incredibly contemporary.

The great thing about this painting

is that it doesn't look at all like... an old picture.

And how do you get out of there?

That's why Dante drew a map of hell...

-...to be able to get out of hell.

There are intervals--

...that are pure intervals.

However--

...one of the intervals found in the painting

was known as diabolus in musica-- "the devil in music"--

and represented a forbidden interval.

So it's important to know that this was undoubtedly planned with a musician.

I can read it.

Yeah. It's very legible.

After 500 years, it's incredible.

The instruments in the painting

still exist today.

They're not so far removed in their form or their use,

as many of them are folk instruments.

The bagpipe-- that stomach--

is about to be cut by a knife emerging from some ears,

and it seems to be on a table.

This is the same type of bagpipe.

It has a blowpipe, it has a chanter,

and it has a fairly long drone.

There's a chirimia.

Chirimias are no longer used, but there are still dulzainas.

The dulzaina has the classic shape

as regards where the reed goes, which is here,

and also the bell.

The hurdy-gurdy has a crank

that moves a shaft that runs across the instrument.

Bosch places a person in charge of that crank.

It has to be turned constantly to produce a sound.

Another thing that catches our eye

is a bowl that could contain grease for lubricating the shaft,

because otherwise the hurdy-gurdy sounds bad.

Some of these images, like this huge salamander,

with an enormous belly,

is painted in exceptionally-- in exceptional detail.

And then still changed.

It was finished. It was finished even.

And inside his belly, we find

at least one human being.

Possibly-- Is this an arm of another? I don't know.

And I'm saying this, of course,

based on the image that you find in the central panel.

- And a book. -And a book. A book.

So why did he change it?

When you remove...

the narrative from the work,

the background becomes the protagonist.

Remove the narrative and you're left with the architecture, the stage.

And first, artists appear on the stage,

artists who, 200, 300, or 500 years later,

in some way meet up again.

The followers of Bosch were inspired

not only by the way he drew devils and demons,

but they were also inspired by the way--

how he suggests the morphic shapes in the landscape.

And Salvador Dalí picked out the most obvious example

in The Garden of Earthly Delights --his face,

with the nose and the mouth

and the kind of a sleepy eye.

Not only do the animals draw its features in the rock,

they draw the features in my mind.

So I am-- infected

by the same dark power by seeing this.

This interaction between viewer and image

is something that we cannot escape.

These are all portraits.

He modified himself.

He added horns, tattooed... his eye.

I was looking for metamorphosis,

and I found these practices which are almost unknown to us

and which connect me so much to that part of Bosch.

And that relationship that comes to us from our culture,

with mysticism, with pain, with pleasure.

I've been calling it Bosch's Hell,

but for me it isn't a hell.

It's still limbo.

♪ Our Father who art in heaven ♪

♪ Hallowed be thy name ♪

♪ Thy kingdom come ♪

♪ Thy will be done ♪

♪ On earth as it is in heaven ♪

♪ Give us this day Our daily bread ♪

♪ And forgive us Our trespasses ♪

♪ As we forgive those ♪

♪ Who trespass against us ♪

♪ And lead us not Into temptation ♪

♪ But deliver us from evil ♪

Where is my likeness?

Is my image and likeness more like the Creator,

or is my image and likeness more like the Tree-man?

They offer two perspectives.

They also position me in the triangle

of the lines of vision where they meet.

You know, you're not allowed to have a favorite figure.

but he is my favorite figure.

The way he looks, with sort of a world weariness.

Hmm? Knowing what he has on his back and on his head.

The nightmare feeds the dream.

The dream isn't innocent.

Life isn't innocent. Creation isn't innocent.

So there's panic, there's terror.

But above all, what is underneath,

what is not visible.

You see a lot,

but there's a lot more to see that isn't shown.

Where is there a rabbit? I saw it.

There's another rabbit.

Where is it?

There was another rabbit.

There's another rabbit somewhere.

In paradise?

Yes, of course. There it is. It's wonderful.

It's like Totoro-- from the Japanese cartoon, isn't it?

I think Totoro comes from here.

The look in the rabbit's eyes

is a mixture of indifference and evil, isn't it?

The rabbit's eye is very striking.

It has a kind of gleam in its eyes.

Also, it's a rabbit playing a horn

and with a tool similar to one that I use for my ceramic oven.

That painting has been standing there--

or hanging there all these years,

emanating its force,

its soul or whatever you would call it.

People before the French Revolution,

after the French Revolution.

People before Marxism and after.

And people before Auschwitz and after Auschwitz.

Which means that the painting has all the time

remained the same material object,

consisting of wood and paint,

but that the eyes belong to heads

of which the minds had completely changed.

Bosch is very influential for several generations

and then hugely successful with viewers throughout history up until today.

This is a very busy room in this museum.

But after about 1570 or so, you don't find any more artists

who are painting Bosch-like paintings.

Slowly, as new scientific attitudes emerge in the world,

the worldview of Bosch is losing ground, I would say.

Already in Patinir,

you find that the realistic impulse is more present here,

and that's why such a great focus on landscape

than in Bosch where it's all fantasy.

If he is staring at you, you are his next.

So you are his next passenger.

And you can decide whether you want to go to hell

or whether you want to go to heaven.

You have to understand the metaphor--

the biblical metaphor of the broad way

and the narrow way, the narrow gate,

that leads you to paradise

and the broad road that leads you to perdition.

And that is, in essence, what Bosch also teaches us.

Don't simply trust the outward appearance of things.

Try to see through things.

I made it very big,

area by area,

drawing by drawing.

Paradise, the garden of earthly delights,

and hell.

What's important in life isn't culture. It's life.

It's people. It's to not kill, to not harm others,

to not increase the misery in the world.

This painting is wonderful because that's what it says.

If it were necessary to destroy works of art,

we'd have to destroy many, but not this one.

Part of the pleasure is exactly not being able

to decipher what's going on necessarily.

And I think a lot of it remains very memorable

even though you have no idea what it's about.

So you have this urge to complete the story.

So, yes, one could write a-- I'm sure people have.

You could write a novel about this painting,

you know, very easily.

A novel with a thousand stories.

It's as if he wanted to tell us that his works are like books.

This could be a fantastic opera.

Counterpoint, polyphony.

There's a dance here, an immense dance.

It's enormously theatrical.

All the passions are here-- desires, fantasies.

I look at it very pictorially.

I say to myself, why is it so moving?

And the answer, to me, is because it works.

Perhaps it would be the equivalent

to something like Dante's Divine Comedy or Balzac's Human Comedy.

It's an encyclopedic painting,

and it's also extremely poetic.

He's talking about freedom.

There's a bird, and he's setting it free.

I've never liked interpretations.

I prefer literalness.

There are so many interpretations that really...

I can't decide which.

He's fooling us. It seems like a pretty melody, but--

Then he goes in there and--

To explain what this means, we'd have to invent words.

Huh.

Hmm.

It's what I mean by "different eyes."

You know? Because what most people see

is themselves.

If we realize that the painting

is a mirror image of us

standing in front of the painting...

immediately when we look at the interior,

we start dreaming.

That is the phenomenal invention of Bosch,

to create this kind of machine, this active machina,

to fire the imagination of the viewer

and to push the impulse of interpretation...

without ever giving us a clue,

except for the face of Christ.

He looks at me.

And the devil.

The painting wants to involve the viewer.

It wants to be understood,

but it does not want to be solved entirely.

The author does not want you to solve the mystery.

He wants you to remain in the mystery.