In 2014, an Oklahoma student named Amelia Hamrick noticed something on the right-hand panel of Bosch's triptych: a tiny line of musical notation, written on the backside of a tormented figure. She transcribed it into modern notation and posted a recording of the result, and the song went viral as five hundred years of hell music.
It is an apt joke for a painting full of them. The Garden of Earthly Delights was painted by Hieronymus Bosch between about 1503 and 1515, and it is a three-part sequence. The left panel shows Eden, with God presenting Eve to Adam. The center is a crowded garden where naked figures ride animals, eat enormous fruit and play in pools. The right panel is a night-time hell, where musical instruments have become instruments of torture.
When the wings are closed, the exterior shows a grey globe, the earth on the third day of creation, floating in a glass sphere. Bosch designed a painting that can be read as a sequence, from the creation to the pleasures to the punishment.
Nobody knows exactly what he meant. It has been read as a warning against lust, a celebration of an innocent paradise, and an alchemical allegory. A visitor to Brussels in 1517, the year after Bosch died, described it only as paintings of various strange things. The Spanish king Philip II later acquired it in the 1590s, kept it at the Escorial, and it has been in the Prado in Madrid since 1939.
In Spain, it was long known by nicknames, among them the Painting of the Strawberry Tree. The giant strawberry-like fruit at the center is the reason.
Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights appears on our: