From Bosch’s crazed party to the homoerotic images Michelangelo smuggled into the Vatican, this was an age of taboo-busting. And, as our writer argues in a new book, it sparked its own culture wars
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.
So where is this? It’s a new world, perhaps even the New World. In the wake of Columbus crossing the Atlantic in 1492, tales of the so-called “naked peoples” of the Americas were popular. Bosch at the dawn of the 1500s is inspired by them to imagine what it would be like to live a totally natural life without Christian law. And God obviously loves these innocents: he gives them huge strawberries so they don’t need to toil or spin.
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