Hieronymus Bosch was a respectable citizen of a small Dutch city, a leading member of its Christian community, but in the central scene of his masterpiece, The Garden of Earthly Delights, he imagines a crazed ecstatic party without taboos or guilt. Hundreds of naked people, “black and white” as a contemporary observer noted, make love and feast on giant fruits in this rock festival of a painting. One man carries a giant mussel shell, two pairs of entangled legs poking out. Bosch’s riotous masterpiece later belonged to Philip II of Spain and was given its name by moralising authorities who saw it as a warning against false pleasures. But this is a utopia. It is not Europe. The people have no technology, no metal tools, no houses, no windmills. Those everyday details of Netherlands life appear somewhere else – in the side panel that pictures hell.
