The Garden of Earthly Delights is Bosch’s most complex and enigmatic creation. For Falkenburg the overall theme of The Garden of Earthly Delights is the fate of humanity, as in The Haywain (P02052), although Bosch visualizes this concept very differently and in a much more explicit manner in the centre panel of that triptych than in The Garden of Earthly Delights. In order to analyse the work’s me
Bosch thus shows how man, irrespective of his social class or place of origin, is so possessed by the desire to enjoy and acquire material possessions that he allows himself to be deceived or seduced by the Devil. Thus the artist proposes that we should renounce earthly goods and the delights of the senses in order to avoid eternal damnation. The painting offers an exemplum of a different type to