Is there an
easy explanation for the trouble art historians have trying to explain The
Garden of Earthly Delights/El Jardín de las Delicias? Its main subject is the
book of Ecclesiastes (La Bariedad del Mundo in an old inventory, likely a joke
since banidad/vanitas usually applied to simpler pictures) and in particular
how the book of Ecclesiastes applies to Henry VIII and his attempts to annul
his marriage to Katherine of Aragon, his first wife.
{9:9} Perfruere vita
cum uxore, quam diligis, cunctis diebus vitæ instabilitatis tuæ, qui dati sunt
tibi sub sole omni tempore vanitatis tuæ: hæc est enim pars in vita, et in
labore tuo, quo laboras sub sole.
{9:9} Enjoy life with
the wife whom you love, all the days of your uncertain life which have been
given to you under the sun, during all the time of your vanity. For this is
your portion in life and in your labor, with which you labor under the sun.
From an
Anglocentric perspective (and disregarding the massive quantity of Spanish
humanist multilingual puzzles including the Nahuatl chronology), the triptych
is filled with innuendo directed against Henry VIII and England, including most
obviously the man who fell in the river and got his head stuck in the mud. He
is not really identifiable but as far as I know there is no other famous person
who fell in a river and got his head stuck in the mud. There are also what
might be pictures of the same woman in compromising settings with two different
men, unless following rumors there are two sisters with uncertain reputations.
The innuendo stretches back into the fifteenth century, for instance with
Richard III’s white boar (ruddy from being out in the sun) which seems to be
carrying an injured bird and a healthy one—the two princes in the tower, one of
whom might according to rumor have survived? The imitation Hieronymus Bosch
style might refer back to lost paintings by Hieronymus Bosch himself for Philip
the Handsome, Charles V’s father, known to have commissioned at least a Last
Judgment from Hieronymus Bosch, who along with Charles V’s grandfather Maximilian
never met a potential English usurper he didn’t like.
All of this may
have been a source of great perplexity for art historians only because art
history mostly looks at Catholic and Protestant art, and perhaps because of the
innuendo directed against Henry VIII and his predecessors, so it seems to need
to be clarified that although it may not be much of a focus in Catholic
schools, the divorce is studied in some detail in Anglican and Episcopalian
Sunday school, and Charles V’s objections to the divorce are not out of place
in a church that still opposes divorce.
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