Despite its lush and lustful depictions of a prelapsarian world and the myriad temptations of the flesh, the most arresting part of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights appears to be the final panel of the famous triptych, in which pleasure’s price is paid, excruciatingly and inventively, for all eternity.
According to new research commissioned by Madrid’s Prado museum, where Bosch’s masterpiece has hung for almost a century, visitors’ eyes are most drawn to the hell panel where sinning flesh is pierced, processed and punished.
A team from the Miguel Hernández University used special glasses to track the eye movements and responses of 52 people who visited the painting. The researchers found that the visitors spent an average of 16 seconds a sq metre studying the left-hand panel, which shows the Garden of Eden, 26 seconds a sq metre studying the eponymous central garden, and 33.2 seconds a sq metre studying the hell panel.
As well as measuring study time – the average visitor spent fractionally more than 4 minutes contemplating Bosch’s painting – the technology tracked the size of the visitors’ pupils to gauge their emotional response to the work, and yielded a heat map of the most visually stimulating areas of the picture.
The researchers discovered that the pupils of female visitors swelled from 5.2mm when contemplating the Eden panel to 5.4mm when observing the delights panel and 5.8mm when looking at the hell panel. Male pupils, in contrast, were most dilated (8.6mm) when beholding the delights panel, followed by the hell panel (6.8mm) and the Eden panel (6.4mm).
Painted by Bosch some time between 1490 and 1510, the Garden of Earthly Delights was first hung in the palace of the Counts of Nassau in Brussels before being bought and transported to Phillip II’s vast and austere palace and monastery at El Escorial in 1593. It remained there for 340 years until it was moved to the Prado in 1933.
In a statement, the Prado noted that the passage of the centuries had done little to dilute the power of Bosch’s enthralling and disturbing work.
“One of the latest theories is that the painting was intended to be a conversation piece,” the museum said. “It would appear that even in the Nassau palace in Brussels, its owners would show it to the elite of the period and then talk about it. The same thing happens on a daily basis in the room where it’s on show at the Prado – a room that boasts the museum’s highest numbers when it comes to visitors and visit times.”
A 21st-century take on Bosch’s vision was exhibited in the Spanish capital two years ago, in which 15 international artists used sound art, sculpture, painting, video, installation, gifs and digital animation to reimagine and reinterpret his garden. The exhibition showed Adam as a busy robot poring over the codes of creation, a social media sinner lashed to a hashtag for all eternity, and a Terminator cyborg stalking through a charnel house hell.
