bosch's garden about the painting
	The Garden of Delights is one of Hieronymus Bosch's most famous paintings. Painted around 1515, it is a triptych, the wings of which can be folded in to reveal an image on the outside. On the verso, there is the image of creation, a transparent globe with the world inside and God hovering in clouds above. Inside, the left panel we see the Garden of Eden with fantastic creatures and God -- perhaps Jesus -- holding Eve's hand, while Adam looks on. The center panel is the actual Garden of Delights replete with sensuously cavorting nudes, giant alchemically-symbolic owls and luscious pools surrounding unimaginable structures. The right panel, known as the hell panel contains unforgettable images of excitingly grotesque suffering. It is here that the giant instruments are featured prominently in the torture of the sufferers. Steve Jobe on how the painting informs the production: In the most immediate sense, the imagery in Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights speaks of innocence, the loss of innocence through sensuous abandon, and a kind of descent into madness. But the scale and proportions of the scenes in the paintings create a sense of distance, as if we were looking down from an omnipotent perspective, and this permits us some latitude in how we read or interpret the imagery. At this remove, the stages of human life seem less significant, the cycles of human history less fraught with meaning. And in some impersonal way, the ostensible suffering depicted in the Hell panel is simply, like the decay and rotting of fruit in the Fall, the inevitable result of incarnation. However removed the perspective, one feels intuitively that The Garden of Delights reveals something profound about humans, though it is difficult to say exactly what that might be. And from our own distance in time from the world of Bosch and its recondite play of allegory and symbolism, we still feel a response of deep wonder at the great spectacle Bosch has revealed. With our Bosch's Garden collaboration, we aspire to bring some essence of this painting into the arena of linear time, and we hope that our exploration of this landscape reveals something of the wonder and spectacle of what it is to be incarnate, to be human.	introduction giant instruments music dance design painting performances supporters contact