The Garden of Earthly Delights

No.

La Tierra-- ¿Tú viste el cuadro del Bosco, El jardín de las delicias, antes de abrirlo?

Sí.

Antes de abrirlo.

Y el cuadro del Bosco es...

Mhm.

Pon El jardín de las delicias.

Cerrado.

Yeah.

The Garden of Earthly Delights.

His biggest, biggest piece.

Yes.

We don't know what he looked like.

We don't know what he thought about the world.

And what we're going to try and do in this episode, Alastair, is to try to piece together the mystery of Hieronymus Bosch's life, and then to explore that great work, The Garden of Earthly Delights, one of the weirdest pictures in the history of art, in order to try to get to the bottom of Hieronymus Bosch.

Can I- can I add a disclaimer before we get into it? Because, uh, at risk of promising our audience that we're going to solve the mystery of The Garden of Earthly Delights, I just wanted to mention there's a very famous German art historian called Panofsky, Erwin Panofsky, and his line on Bosch is, um, about decoding Bosch, as he said, "We have bored a few holes through the door of the locked room."

His big song is He Cannot Fart Around With Love.

He becomes obsessed with Hieronymus Bosch's painting, The Art Garden of Earthly Delights.

Flood had become unable to perform sexually, and as such, he must steal porn movies.

So he does what any other addict does and gets a job in a burlesque theater, which ends with him stripping down just his panties, which leaves him going into the psych ward.

Shit.

Who painted The Garden of Earthly Delights? I have no idea what that is, but who painted it?

Michelangelo.

No.

There are a lot of paintings, and a lot of them, you know, have a narrative quality to them.

I mean, The Garden of Earthly Delights.

That, that-

That'd be awesome

Presented so there's like a many, um, forking paths, we can say that.

Many forking paths in this Garden of Earthly Delights.

Many tangents, many insults, many, uh, moments of, of body humor, moments of, of, of hatred and, and cruelty.

But alas, friends, unless he is operating on a meta- with a metaphorical subtlety that eludes my grasp, I don't think Trump alluded to his own death and his own mortality.

Yeah.

But I look at Harad of Landsberg, who puts together, she's a 12th century nun, and she puts together this book called The Garden of Delights for the Canonesses who are under her care.

And this is supposed to be, it's beautiful.

an illustrated volume of theology and natural science.

We see naked people interacting with giant strawberries, birds bigger than humans, glass tubes, strange machines, and monstrous demons.

This is the Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch.

Painted around the year 1500, right on the threshold between the Middle Ages and the modern era, it remains one of the most enigmatic works in art history to this day.

Is it a moral warning against sin? A heretical utopia of a paradise without guilt? Or the vision of a man so far ahead of his time that only today, in the age of psychoanalysis and surrealism, do we believe we truly understand him? To get close to this picture, we have to peel it back layer by layer, from the painter's biography down to the smallest, most bizarre details on the panels.

In the Middle Ages, the owl was often not a symbol of wisdom, but a bird of the night that shuns the light, a symbol of evil or of spiritual blindness.

Bosch, in other words, plants trouble right at the origin of humankind.

The central panel is the heart of the work, and it gave the painting its modern name, The Garden of Earthly Delights.

It is a scene whose radical visual language is unique in the history of art.

You know, with all the talent in the world, it didn't happen for him as a professional.

He went through a few swing changes, he... covid really sort of hit him pretty not him personally pretty hard but hit his career pretty hard so he made only you know a few thousand pounds here or there playing on the clutch tour the mina tour the euro pro tour the challenge tour and then decided no made that decision which must be a hard one to make that this isn't going to work for me so he goes off to to get a normal job, if you like, a financial advisor.

There he is now at 33, reinstated amateur, but I watch him swing it and he's playing against the world number one amateur, the identikit professional golfer in waiting in Preston Stout, who couldn't look more American if he tried, absolute.

Do people ever

Just one other thing, again, lots of emails on this, and please do send in your emails, tcf at thechippingforecast.co.uk. Email from Benj.

Why so many American commentators for a British audience? Well, again, as I touched upon there, Sky are taking...

world feed this is a feed that's provided by the the rna so it's a hybrid of golf channel and sky people and non-sky people like me people are saying well you're working for sky now no it's the same as the ag women's open i work for the rna's world feed and it's taken by by sky so um yeah ben said it was a bit confusing and started to annoy me At some point, Andrew tried to restore some balance to the endless chat about the highly ranked US players by calling out, he shanked that only for the player's ball to roll to 10 feet.

Actually, that's true as well.