Sometime last month, an interactive version of Hieronymous Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” was released as its own website as part of a documentary. Now, I remembered that I’d spent a while staring at a book about this painting before and wondering what it all meant, so I had to go hunt it down again. Our copy was put together by Jacqueline and Maurice Guillaud, along with Isabel Mateo Gómez. This copy of Hieronymous Bosch: the Garden of Earthly Delights was published in 1989, with a preface of a historical explanation of the work. The rest of the book is comprised of close-ups printed on onionskin, interspersed with poetry. The onionskin gives the artwork a matte texture, and my personal favorite section with this effect is the outer panels of the triptych, which feature the planet in a sphere – which has been postulated to be the creation of the Earth on the third day, before the sun and moon were created. I recommend both the book and the website, since both contain different contextual information, and nothing really compares to being able to flip through a book.
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By: Morgan Ford