Vanitas (continued): lines from Ecclesiastes

This is a follow-up to an earlier post about how in a 2006 article, José Manuel Cruz Valdevinos noted that the original title of The Garden of Earthly Delights/El Jardín de las Delicias appears to have been "La Banidad del Mundo," The Vanity of the World.

More so than the better known “vanitas” still life paintings that often include skulls and/or flowers and expensive objects as a reminder of death, The Garden of Earthly Delights/El Jardín de las Delicias is about the whole book of Ecclesiastes. To start to show how the two outside panels and three inside panels relate to the book, I have picked out some verses that seem to match the different panels.

Whether its audience found them entertaining or annoying, the purpose of the innumerable seemingly nonsensical details in the painting was apparently to illustrate things that seem impossible to show in a picture, including Ecclesiastes 1:11, "There is no remembrance of the former things. Indeed, neither shall there be any record of past things in the future, for those who will exist at the very end." The exceptions include the Bible, illustrated by the picture with Adam and Eve, and the Latin Vulgate edition of the Bible, exemplified by the verse from Psalms on the outside panels. Almost everything else is obscure, leading to disagreements among art historians, but in many places things are not too obscure to decipher. Explanations tend to sound pedantic because "all is vanity" and because the artist chose some good examples of things that would be forgotten by many, including Nahuatl histories of Mexico.

I have included only the first few verses that seem relevant to the large center inside panel and the hell scene because it is easier to read the original Latin and English text separately than as a long picture caption running several pages. The text shown here is copied from an online Latin English Study Bible that shows the whole book of Ecclesiastes on one page in an easy to read format with only a little commentary. There are larger pictures of both the inside and outside panels on Wikipedia, and on newer computers the inside panels are shown in amazing detail in Google Earth (at the Museo del Prado, Madrid). The detail here, from Google Earth, shows how "the race is not to the swift" (Ecclesiastes 9:11) maybe because a swift horse is faster than a swift bear, or vice versa, or because winning has to do with motivation, or for whatever reason. If "La Banidad del Mundo" was the original title, it seems clear that the painting was not meant to be completely enigmatic.

I am working on an article that will look at one of the riddle-pictures in detail by way of texts familiar to art historians including Ovid's Metamorphoses. The picture represents Minerva turning Arachne into a spider.