Original subtitles

Hi, I'm Matthew Collings.

Welcome to another programme in this series about Renaissance painting.

We've forgotten how to value the Renaissance.

You can see how radical it was by looking at it in great detail,

getting inside those effects and rethinking them.

Try rethinking perspective as something startling instead of familiar.

We think of the Renaissance as the art that came before modern art,

but at the time it was modern art.

It was artists given permission,

because of new ideas about what we are, to change reality.

I've chosen three great paintings, one per film.

They stand for the range of mood that Renaissance art has.

I'm going to try and show these paintings to you as they were seen

when they were new.

Light is the overwhelming effect

of the Madonna of the Meadow by Raphael.

The sense of space is what makes

Piero della Francesca's Baptism powerful.

The invention of new symbols is the big deal with this one.

Symbols that are

disturbing, so you think, "Hmm, this is where weirdness in art began."

The Garden Of Earthly Delights

by Hieronymus Bosch.

Join me on a very enjoyable trip

to the heart of this strange painting.

We start way back in time

when it was first done.

Some princes in a medieval castle 500 years ago

own a special picture.

It's kept on the wall with the shutters closed.

Inside, it's a very strange picture, very hard to understand, but you can't tear your eyes off it.

Outside, it's the wooden shutters, and when they're closed

you just see a white globe there.

All around it, in this great room, are luxurious amazing sights.

It's a room of curiosities, of great visual pleasures.

There are hundreds of paintings by geniuses and scientific marvels.

A meteor that fell from the sky,

cabinets full of weird animals and jewels that come from America,

and a bed that is so big it can sleep 50 people.

The princes entertain great men here, they show them their stuff,

they give them feasts and get them drunk, and laugh when they pass out on the bed.

The great men are amazed by what they see, but the princes say, "Wait till you see this."

They take them over to the picture with its shutters closed.

The princes call over a minion to open the shutters.

They open - the picture radiates out.

"Woah," they say,

"what the hell is that?!"

People today are familiar with Bosch, they just can't place him.

He seems confusingly modern.

He lets loose a stream

of free association,

freaky imaginings,

funny and sinister.

And yet, modern is right,

because the Renaissance mindset

is actually the birth of the modern.

The Renaissance was all about

free thinking and Renaissance art

reflected that freedom.

It's just that no-one reflected it

quite so freely as Bosch.

Bosch is confusing. It might be

possible to get a sense of what

people in his own time thought

of The Garden Of Earthly Delights.

But for us, we see the human body

and we see nature painted very

realistically, but we also see the

wires of meaning totally crossed.

In this programme, I'm going to

explain what I think he's doing,

but I have to admit first that no-one

today really knows for sure what The Garden Of Earthly Delights is about.

He never wrote anything about it and

no-one ever noted down anything that he said about it.

And in fact we know virtually nothing at all about

what Bosch the man did day to day, and from birth to death.

All we really know is that he was very famous in his own lifetime

for painting religious altarpieces, that

they were very inventive, but also that they made certain departures

from conventional religious imagery.

For example, his painting, the Adoration of the Magi.

The three wise men

lining up to adore the baby Jesus.

But there's something insidiously

creepy and menacing about the way

Bosch has treated that scene,

which is rather odd

considering it's supposed to be

a scene of love and hope.

And then there's his picture known as the Haywain,

which looks like a conventional altarpiece at first,

in that it has a scene of hell

on the right with the fiery flames and people

being inventively tortured,

and on the left a scene of paradise -

Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

But where there would normally be

some kind of picture representing

the history of humanity in the middle,

he's given us a picture

of a meaningless bale of hay

that people are arbitrarily pushing to nowhere.

But the greatest departures from normal religious-type imagery

occur in the painting known as The Garden Of Earthly Delights.

It looks normal enough at first,

a triptych, a painting done in different sections.

In one of the sections, a scene more or less of hell.

Very, very dark and fiery and frightening,

with extremely inventive tortures.

And on the left, a scene of the Garden of Eden.

God, in the form of his son Jesus,

performs the marriage ceremony

between Adam and Eve.

But the most extreme departures from conventional religious imagery occur

in that central panel,

the big moment of The Garden Of Earthly Delights.

And that central bit is what people

have wondered about and stared at for many, many years.

We still do that, wondering today.

You wonder not only "What is this?"

but given that it is so full of recognizable observed human

experience, you wonder maybe, as a human, "What am I?"

When people at the time saw it,

they were jarred by the weirdness,

as we are.

The emotion was the same,

but the thoughts were different.

We think, "Wow, surrealism."

They thought, "Gosh, morality...

"Good and evil is looking a bit different, isn't it?"

The beauty of the picture

is in its intensity of detail

but the horror of it is in that too,

so beauty and evil go together,

like in a dream.

Nude humans

living in a world of weird fruit,

humans fed fruit by giant birds.

Nude humans in nude hunting parties

out looking for fruit.

Is fruit really sex?

Is sex evil, or just human?

Beyond here there are glimpses of

decay and death and human bodies

turned into something demonic,

but back in the garden, the way

the beauty of the picture works

is that you are always forced to

look at the detail,

which can turn from harmless to repulsive

so you wish you hadn't looked.

But the beauty of the picture

also works to make the repulsive

seem familiar

so you feel you know what it's like

to be inside one of these eggs,

kissing a man.

Bosch's shocks have now entered popular culture.

They stand for a sort of 1960s revolution in the head.

But The Garden Of Earthly Delights

is a religious painting,

not a bad acid trip.

Bosch reworks religious ideas

using popular sayings of his time.

A saying about life

going hopelessly wrong, for example.

In those days, in the part of the world where Bosch lived,

you'd say, "It's a real owl's nest."

Owls did not suggest wisdom.

Because they were night creatures,

they were negative,

they suggested alarm.

The problem is, many of the sayings

he's painting are lost now,

so when one symbol is unclear

you have to think about the overall mood.

For example, a couple in a clinch -

you don't have to be

a rocket scientist to work out

that the symbolism here is lovemaking.

Everyone everywhere

greedily devouring fruit.

So the overall mood says that the

middle picture of The Garden of Earthly Delights

is a picture of unrestrained appetite,

the human animal not caring what it does.

And a note of alarm.

Is it that, on Earth,

between heaven and hell,

good and evil exist together?

We can look for clues

in those other pictures we have seen by Bosch,

where religion is much more centre stage.

When Bosch painted religious art,

like many other Renaissance artists,

he placed religion within the humble textures of everyday life.

The ordinary and the marvellous are

each painted with amazing beauty.

And then in the same picture, when there is a

creeping sense of evil,

that is amazingly beautifully done as well.

In the other religious picture

we've seen by him, the Haywain,

violent scenes go with scenes that are sinister...

While presiding over all the scenes is Jesus, infinite goodness above...

And then, down below, brute hopeless badness, which is actually

as delicately and beautifully painted as Bosch paints Jesus.

And those are the two most distinctive features of

The Garden Of Earthly Delights - detail and beauty.

In art, "beautiful"

doesn't mean the thing depicted, but the way anything is depicted is done

beautifully, whether it's a disturbing thing or a divine thing.

The divine is absolutely present in The Garden Of Earthly Delights,

fused with the earthly and even the hellish by beauty.

In the medieval age, you accept destiny.

Everything is part of the cosmic plan, which is way above you -

it's up there with the angels.

But with the Renaissance idea of mankind, man's potential,

you've got something that sounds a lot more modern,

like what we think we want today.

Man has free will and he can make his own destiny.

With self-perfection, you can create a paradise right here on Earth.

Not to get rid of religion, but to say that the lofty zone

is not just for God and the angels, anybody can get up there.

The artistic revolution of the Renaissance was caused by

fallout from a new spirit of realistic enquiry about the world.

The effect was that new religious art seemed to be radically

questioning old religious certainty.

When Bosch painted evil he looked for visual inspiration in nature.

This is his religious altarpiece

dedicated to St Anthony, who was tormented by demons.

Renaissance thought says that

old ideas of good and bad can be reinterpreted.

What is sin?

And Bosch in his experiments here

creates demons that are not just conventional signs for evil,

they seem lethal because the look is grounded in natural observation.

Bosch's free interpretations

of religion were possible

because the tradition

of Renaissance altarpieces

already had a lot of

free interpretation built in,

as we can see from the art

of Bosch's contemporaries.

Men like Petrus Christus,

who painted this altarpiece in 1460.

An altarpiece showing the Bible

is never really the Bible.

The Bible is beliefs written down in words -

an altarpiece is a picture.

The picture shows the theology that

comes from centuries of the church

interpreting the meanings of the Bible.

The picture does that by responding

to visual traditions

that have built up over centuries.

And somewhere in that process of one thing responding to another

art goes from serving culture to being a culture in itself.

It influences what it serves,

so religion starts to be what art says it is.

With Bosch, religious art takes off

even further, flying even higher,

so it starts a whole new tradition,

which is what Bosch did.

The tradition of art that tells you something only the artist knows.

Bosch invented puzzling symbols to question the world and the puzzle

extends to how he presented himself as an artist.

We know he took his artistic name "Bosch"

from the town where he lived,

's-Hertogenbosch, now on the borders of Holland and Belgium,

but in those days in an affluent region

of the Netherlands known as The Brabant.

The town was built over an area that was constantly waterlogged

so it was criss-crossed by

canals and underground waterways that exist unchanged even today.

Bosch's studio was in his house overlooking the market square.

He was a very famous figure here.

It was known that in this house, he executed artistic commissions

for clients who came to him from all over Europe.

In the 1960s, Bosch's art was seen as mad or druggy or Satanist.

In fact he was a very religious man.

He belonged to an association called The Brotherhood of Our Lady,

whose chapel was here in the main church of the town, St Johns.

The Brotherhood's activities were centred on the medieval statue of

the Virgin Mary in the church, Our Lady, which is still revered today.

The Brotherhood was an important social network -

a measure of Bosch's respectability

is that its members were mostly magistrates, clergy and nobility.

They did good deeds in the town,

like paying for hospital beds for the poor.

They provided paintings for the Church, done by Bosch.

All lost now, probably burned in the religious wars after Bosch's death.

The brotherhood's membership extended all over Europe

up to very high levels of power.

It was through these connections that Bosch got his clients.

Here he is. His real name was Hieronymus van Aken

and he was probably born in about 1450.

A man in his 60s.

Other self-portraits by Bosch are much less realistic -

they take the form of strange symbols that have to be worked out.

The name of Bosch's town, 's-Hertogenbosch

means "the Duke's woods".

Bosch, who was born in that town, gives himself that word as his name.

Bosch equals woods.

Bosch is very interested in identity.

He draws a self-portrait,

a portrait of the artistic self that he's constructed.

It's a very strange picture,

which combines images and words in a weird mix.

His own name, "the woods",

but he elaborates "the woods" so they become a saying of the time -

everything you think is a secret inside you is heard and seen by God.

The fields have eyes and the woods have ears.

And here are the eyes

and here are the ears.

"The woods" become a single blasted tree, an owl standing guard.

Bosch the tree man,

with the sign for sin inside him.

The human soul.

What really goes on back there?

Bosch's symbolic self-portraits were about seeing.

His sense of art was peculiarly psychological, to use artistic

inventions to penetrate where people didn't usually want to go.

One of the most famous symbols of The Garden Of Earthly Delights

is this hollowed out human being

with tree trunks for legs.

Bosch, the tree man,

seeing in the darkness.

We're being told that Bosch the artist, Bosch the tree man,

is in the picture.

Like the tree of knowledge,

the tree of good and evil is in the Bible.

The sights of nature surrounding where he lived provided Bosch

with the shapes and forms for his creative inventions

so he can picture moral ideas about the animal inside us

and the highest ideal imaginable inside us.

A boschvogel is the collective word for the group of birds that

includes owls. It means forest bird.

In his picture of hell,

Bosch uses another boschvogel

to stand for the devil - a nightjar.

Owls are everywhere in The Garden of Earthly Delights,

looking at all the sin that's going on in the picture,

or looking out like an artist looking out

and seeing the sin that's in all of us.

# Satan is real, working in spirit

# You can see him and hear him in this world every day

# Satan is real, working with power

# He can tempt you and lead you astray. #

With Bosch the facts are sparse,

or missing altogether, and you're dealing

with a lot of known unknowns, as Donald Rumsfeld would say.

But unlike weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,

meaning in art really does exist,

and Bosch's way of creating meaning is through his invention of symbols.

And an amazingly exquisite sense of visual beauty to the way

those symbols are disposed about the place,

the way one flows into another.

Think of the flowing shapes made by

birds in nature, flying in formation.

We don't know why they do it, but we know it's the beauty of nature.

Those lovely curves in a tiny detail

of Bosch's picture are the same kind

of loveliness that Bosch uses

to compose the whole picture.

All his visually coordinated symbols.

Each has its own precisely clear shape and form,

and inter-related set of colours

that Bosch has thought very clearly about.

So Bosch's symbols are made powerful by sheer beauty.

The eye darts about,

like a robin darting about

from twig to twig on a tree.

Try sticking to one thing, and imagine everything else muted.

And now that thing mutes,

but somewhere else another thing lights up,

and now something else does it.

Gradually they're all blinking on and off.

This is the abstract structure

of Bosch's painting.

The effect is that all those separate little scenes

don't fall over each other in a visual tangle,

they sing out in a symphonic arrangement instead.

Very close up,

the atomic particle level

of Bosch's painted world,

he creates order out of chaos.

He's incredibly accurate with gloopy blobs of painterly matter.

A dream image of man and animal,

but close to, it's a whole other

level of artistic marvels.

You can see the joy

of the black dots and the blue eye

all jingling together,

and making a unified dot pattern

along with the contrasting white dots.

It makes you happy that painting was ever invented.

A porcupine.

A fish gets conjured up out of free scrawling blobs.

Bosch's technique is peculiar for the Renaissance.

It was crude and fast and stabbing.

But his sophisticated eye makes the results appear seamless.

The new world of the new idea of humanity

that we still thrill to see centuries later.

But who was it who wanted Bosch

to paint that picture in the first place?

Who the client was gives us clues

about what The Garden Of Earthly Delights is.

The evidence points to Hendrik III of the Nassau dynasty. Here he is.

The Netherlands is ultimately ruled by Spain, but the immediate

governors are Dutch, and they come from the Nassau Family.

Hendrik inherited his power

from his uncle Engelbrecht whose

features are recorded in marble along with those of his wife

by an Italian Renaissance artist

that Hendrik hired to come up to the Netherlands

and do the best that Renaissance art can offer.

Hendrik is a connoisseur of art,

he has an eye for the best and the wealth to pay for it.

Along with the Spanish ruler of the Netherlands, Philip the Handsome,

Hendrik visited Bosch's town in the year 1504.

Bosch, Hendrik and Philip

were all members of The Brotherhood of Our Lady.

A receipt shows that Philip the Handsome paid Bosch

to paint a religious altarpiece for him.

That picture was never delivered, maybe it was never done,

but there's every reason to think that on this visit

Hendrik commissioned his own picture from Bosch,

which was finished, and that picture was The Garden Of Earthly Delights.

Why would he want such a thing?

Hendrik was a sort of Renaissance millionaire playboy.

He travelled everywhere, he did what he liked.

He liked new Renaissance ideas coming out of Italy.

He was one of the first Dutch rulers to have an Italian Renaissance-style castle.

The Renaissance for Hendrik is a springboard for free thinking,

for finding new meaning, how things fit, new truth.

The Renaissance is all about renewal, and Hendrik wants to take religious art,

art that explains existence, out of the church and into his

own space, into his own head space, which is totally re-designed as a Renaissance space.

Hendrik thinks, "How do you interpret religion?

"How do you get a newly-changed world to fit the ideals of the Bible?"

If Hendrik really was the client for The Garden Of Earthly Delights, he must have worked with Bosch to

generate ideas for it, for a kind of art that no-one had ever seen before.

Hendrik's library was full of beautifully decorated books of prayers and psalms.

They had hand-painted patterned borders, showing fruits

and plants, huge in relation to the pictures of people next to them.

Bosch makes that jump in scale weirdly literal.

It's still beautiful, but now the reversal of scale between

humans and creatures in nature is creepy as well as beautiful.

Hendrik also owned pictures that showed aristocrats how to be romantic in a beautiful love garden,

another source for Bosch's growing image bank.

# Guinevere

# Had green eyes

# Like yours, my lady... #

Beautiful people in nature, paying court to each other becomes,

in Bosch, sexy people living in nature,

literally growing out of it, eating it,

housed by it, revoltingly, physically fused with it.

You see something that is known, but also unknown at the same time.

It's what happens in disturbing dreams.

But here is Bosch doing it not in the age of psychology, where Freud

has radical things to say about what drives us, but the age of religion, where Bosch is saying,

if you really want to be moral, you have to radically examine yourself.

You have to radically wake up.

It was a revolutionary religious painting that provided Bosch with his richest visual taking-off point.

The great altarpiece in Ghent Cathedral,

painted by Jan Van Eyck in 1432, 20 years before Bosch was born.

The holy Lamb of God, the symbol of Jesus's sacrifice to save us all.

God the Father and Jesus fused into one being.

Lust, somehow in the picture, with the very frank nudity in it.

Nude Eve.

Nude Adam, the first people.

A lot of vegetation everywhere, non-European, exotic vegetation.

And countless hundreds of highly detailed individualised figures, all lining up.

What was powerful and new about Van Eyck's painting when it was done was its microscopic vision of nature.

The drops of water are designed to capture your attention, because this is the symbolic fountain of life.

But also, they capture attention because they're amazing.

Their hyperreal believability benefits a picture of moral ideas.

Evil, lust, and sin and punishment, and, on the other hand, salvation.

And that combination of symbolic meaning and nature, that you can't

help being visually gripped by, is what fires up Bosch.

All Bosch's life, Van Eyck's altarpiece was the most famous painting in the North.

It was known to everyone.

In fact, it was known all over Europe.

For Bosch, it was a model and a touchstone of great art, and it was a rival.

He was going to beat that painting.

When you see it today, it's in its weird, ugly

glass security box, to stop people graffiti-ing on it or stealing it.

But when Bosch saw it 500 years ago,

it was in its original chapel setting in the glorious cathedral,

with all the stonework and the stained glass windows surrounding it.

And the music of the church organ playing.

You can imagine Bosch talking to himself as he paced around Ghent Cathedral,

rattling off lists of ingredients in Van Eyck's painting,

thinking how to cook them up in a new way.

There would be swifts and swallows.

But how about owls and nightjars, the creatures of the night?

Nudity and fruit.

Eve holding the fruit, turning into frolicking, nude, innocent shapes.

Humanity stumbling from creation to the last things.

Fountains of life.

Pinnacle structures everywhere, standing up.

A new religious art, never seen before.

A new vision of reality.

The Garden Of Earthly Delights was probably completed in 1505

following Hendrik's stay in 's-Hertogenbosch.

Then, years go by, and records show

that Bosch died in the summer of 1516, and a funeral mass was

held in his honour on August 8th of that year in St John's Church.

His town was always prey to illness from the marshes.

When plague struck, it's likely that Bosch,

creator of strange, ornamental curiosities, was one of its victims.

So the same beautiful nature which inspired Bosch and surrounded him, in the end, did him in.

# Tell me, sinner, did you ever stop to think?

# Are you afraid to die? #

Bosch looks out from beyond time.

His fame was even greater after his death.

And the fame of his picture in the Nassau Palace grew as well.

That was where the Nassau palace stood in Brussels.

There's a different palace there now because the old one burned down.

But sometime in the early 1500s, Bosch's picture hung in a special room across there.

The first visitor to leave history a record of having seen the painting

was the secretary to an Italian cardinal.

The cardinal was invited to the Nassau Palace to be entertained by Hendrik.

And the secretary described what happened that evening.

The secretary wrote that after dinner, they were shown some panels with bizarre things on them,

like people crawling out of a shell.

And, he wrote, men and women, whites and blacks

doing all sorts of different activities and poses.

The Garden Of Earthly Delights opened up like an altarpiece and inside was something like

the history of humanity that Hendrik's guests expected an altarpiece to show.

But nothing like the moral warnings that they also expected from religious art.

Whatever was familiar wasn't doing the right familiar things any more.

The story of humanity begins with the creation of Adam and Eve.

God come down in his earthly, bodily form as Christ, the son.

And he gives to Adam and Eve the gift of love.

The medieval mind thinks sin has arrived.

But Bosch's Renaissance mind, which is all about reinterpreting old traditions, sees the next step

in the story of humanity as full of writhing new life,

sometimes natural, sometimes anti-natural.

Man rides beasts in an anti-clockwise direction,

it is our base instincts.

Not enough ruled by God, too much ruled by the Devil.

The sad look of Christ at the sinfulness of man

is countered by the cool, dispassionate look of the Tree Man,

which again is countered by the cruel look of the gleaming black eye

of the Devil in Hell.

And yet, Hell isn't the usual Hell, but stream of consciousness symbols.

A death skull leading to an egg shell.

And in the Garden of Eden, slithery creatures invade paradise.

All that insidious unravelling of morally familiar scenes

adds to the giddiness of the main action in the centre,

as if there is no longer any clear moral blueprint from God about where we're all headed.

Not because God is being mocked, but as if Heaven and Hell are no longer

places that your soul might end up in, but instead, states of being that are always inside you.

Hendrik's guests expected a Last Judgement, but it turned out the judgement was all up to you.

Look within.

What are you?

God was on the outside of the shutters, creating the world,

but what shocked Hendrik's guests and made them feel suddenly morally at sea, was that, inside,

it was almost as if he'd been left behind out there.

It was 1517, the dawn of the great religious schism known as the Reformation.

Catholics and Protestants at war.

The old religious order changed forever.

Hendrik lived through the transition for a few years, but by 1538 he was dead.

The Renaissance man who thought art could show him how to think the unthinkable.

He reckoned Bosch was the artist who could help him do that - and he was right.

Time passes, the power of the Nassau family turns to dust,

and what remains of that family is

the most curious, wise, inexplicable

and infinitely look-at-able work anyone has ever seen.

The Garden Of Earthly Delights can seem profound to different people

for different reasons, and even to different societies and different eras.

The next chapter in the story of this painting

is about quite an amazing turnaround in how it was perceived.

The painting was inherited from Hendrik by his nephew,

William the Silent, the Protestant rebel,

who attempted to get Catholic Spain out of the Netherlands.

In this religious war that lasted 80 years,

works of art and books of knowledge were thrown out the

windows of libraries and monasteries and burned on great public bonfires.

Bosch's painting was the product of a liberal Catholic Renaissance.

It could afford a degree of experimentalism which would

have been much more difficult once Protestant-Catholic wars broke out.

And fundamentalism was the score on both sides.

In 1568, The Garden Of Earthly Delights, which might well have been in danger from its Protestant owner,

was confiscated from the Nassau Palace by Spanish troops.

And, in 1591, it entered the art collection of the Spanish king, Philip II.

Far wealthier and more powerful than Hendrik, Philip was also spectacularly more pious.

Philip paces around his palace, racking his brains about how to

beat down the rise of Protestantism, and using the offices of the Inquisition to do it.

He thinks the art of Bosch is basically propaganda for true Catholic values.

Besides The Garden Of Earthly Delights, the king acquires Bosch's other religious works

that we've already seen, and also this

curious painting that Bosch did on a table top.

Pictures of heavenly goodness are in the corners.

Jesus ruling in glory.

He is also pictured at the very centre like the pupil of an eye.

But going round him, like the iris of an eye, are pictures of earthly badness, the seven deadly sins.

Together, they sum up the stuff we mustn't do, what will happen to us if we do it,

where human existence is leading to, what are the aims of God, and where we stand with those aims.

We all must be moral, we all must look within, and it is

that moral imperative that all those pictures are reminding us of.

For the sin of lust, where Bosch has carefully spelt out the word

in Latin, aristocrats feed each other, court each other,

and listen to the lovely sound of aristocratic music.

When Philip turned to The Garden Of Earthly Delights,

he saw that Bosch painted music as torture.

Musical instruments actually become torture instruments.

And the theme of feeding as a sign of indulging sensuality

is extended in many ways.

When humans gather in clusters ready for food, it's almost

as if they've been grown themselves, like human fruit, fresh bodies ready for other bodies to enjoy.

It's amusing to an audience used to contemporary art.

To Philip, it's deadly serious.

It's art exposing religious wrongdoing.

It was a time of religious high anxiety throughout the Empire.

People had to be checked for wrong thinking, for heresy, often they were tortured.

Paintings had to be checked for heresy, and often they were burned.

The Inquisition went about this business with great enthusiasm,

and it was in this climate that

The Garden Of Earthly Delights, with all its teeming unpredictable weirdness, its frolicking colours,

its wall-to-wall depraved sexuality,

its giant birds dropping berries into mouths of lewd humans...

It was in this climate of utter fanatic religious paranoia

that The Garden Of Earthly Delights had to survive.

Here's a guided tour going on at the Escorial.

A lot of tourists want to see the very bed in which Philip II died.

Philip II slept there, he woke up every day

and he saw all around him on the walls very conventional

artistic portrayals of the life of the Lord.

But on one side of the bed was an extremely unconventional

religious work - Hieronymus Bosch's Seven Deadly Sins.

Bosch, who was known to the Spanish as El Bosco, had many works here in the Escorial.

The king saw them as part of his experience of spiritually

contemplating his inner life on his periodic retreats from nearby Madrid.

On the other side of the bed was the enormous basilica, the church that

adjoined the king's bedchamber, so that the king could go in there every day and pray.

In the chapel, Philip prayed to God,

his pious thoughts prepared by the moralising sights of El Bosco's paintings.

All this holiness, the great edifice of power and religion that the King of Spain's

royal person symbolised, was thought by the king to be symbolised, too, by The Garden Of Earthly Delights.

Maybe its very weirdness enables Philip to see it as a parable, a warning.

All this life and lust is threatening.

The Holy Office, effectively, cleared Bosch's picture of heresy.

So how come there is a picture of a pig dressed as a nun?

It's a very pretty pig, it seduces a man into signing

a legal document, presumably signing away all his money.

It's only right to satirise church corruption, the Inquisition says.

Church dogma can never be questioned, but actual church

practice must always be monitored and checked for deviant behaviour.

The Garden Of Earthly Delights didn't always have that title.

We don't know what Bosch called it, but we do know Philip's officials

called it The Strawberry Painting.

They meant the brief satisfaction of appetites that

sinners pursue all the time, instead of pursuing the truth of God.

In the Renaissance, they thought you could be religious and free at the same time.

But within a few years, that was all clamped down on.

It was a lot of hippy nonsense, was the thought.

More or less.

When Philip looked at The Garden of Earthly Delights, he saw what he wanted to see.

It was no longer Hendrik's experiment to try and look into and fathom change.

It was confirmation that change never really happens, man is helpless to control himself,

and he blunders along futilely to the inevitable hellish apocalypse that awaits us.

The good are rare, and the damned are pretty much most of us.

Here we are today, normal people.

We're not the damned. We're the people who go to art galleries.

Compared to 500 years ago, ours is a secular age, and in our

no-God, or different-gods, or even anti-God society, The Garden Of Earthly Delights is enjoyed

not because of theological noodling, but because it's teeming with life.

The key to its timeless power is that Bosch shows us it's possible

to look inside your head without morality

and to come up with a picture for that feeling.

When Bosch did that, he opened up a whole new stream of art, the dark side.

The art of the unconscious, where the feelings and desires that

we have, but don't know we have, are shown by art in sharp focus.

What are earthly delights? They're lust, that's what the word means.

It's not the Heavenly realm, the Heavenly order.

It's what goes on down here on earth, out of control, unrestrained.

So, what might be a clear answer to morality and law, good and evil, right and wrong, the puzzle

of all that, is less the issue with The Garden Of Earthly Delights than understanding that you're

looking at an artist, using the means of art, sensuality and beauty,

to describe layers of existence.

Man and nature. Man's own nature.

To describe people's motivations and to evoke

the irresolvable endless conflict that goes with human nature.

Well, that's my account of why a great work of Renaissance painting goes on knocking us out.

But as with any work of art, in the end, with this one, you are on your own,

perhaps even more so, since no-one knows what Bosch really meant by it.

And as being on your own with it is the most definite and know-able

thing you can say about it,

I would say that's a good thing to take seriously about it.

Each individual one of us should think for ourselves about what it is

we're actually looking at here.

Things seem to be growing and sprouting everywhere.

Seeds sprout and grow humans.

Where are the children?

A weird world of nature where no-one is ever born and grows up,

but everyone is somehow in the process of becoming human.

We recognise that the human is also the bestial.

It's not such a conundrum to see that the picture tells us what we are.

The way our bestial side can be horrible as well as innocent

is there in the anti-nature, wherever you look.

Everything recognisable is also recognisable as not being in the natural order.

But Bosch's trick, as a great visual artist, is to make

you love those sights of nature,

even at the same time as he's busy undoing their naturalness.

There isn't a moral order, but there is a visual one,

and that's the Renaissance origin of Bosch's symbolic imagination.

New ideas about what it is to be human go with new ideas about picturing humanity.

You're looking at the dark side of existence, but also

the staggeringly beautiful side, as a balance between the two.

If it was a science fiction film,

or a bit of art done today, we'd be amazed at how he's balanced so much.

Bestial, religion, inside and outside.

The shutters image outside of God creating everything.

And God opening up his creation now and then, and having a peek at how it's all going.

Let's leave him at it now.

Goodbye.

In the next programme, space in this painting will expand your mind.

Artist, mathematician, and Renaissance space invader

Piero della Francesca takes art from a craft to a new form of knowledge.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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