The inverted Triptych by Hieronymus Bosch

Résumé 0

In the Renaissance, to say that an Italian was "furbo" (tricker) was a compliment. In those daystrickery - like facetiousness and mischief - was the hallmark of great minds,gifted minds, we would say more specifically today. Leonardo da Vinci may be renowned for the excellence of his pictorial achievements, but the intelligence of his works seen through the prism of trickery is only just beginning to be recognised... That of Hieronymus Bosch, his contemporary and northern alter ego, the "devil-maker", is little known, if at all. The aim of this study is not to offer yet another reading of the Flemish masterpiece known today as the "Garden of Delights", but to explore the possibility of a deliberate inversion of the order of this triptych in order to blur its underlying message - heterodox and sacred for the initiated - under cover of an apparently more orthodox reading for the profane. This inversion reinforces Wilhelm Fraenger's earlier claim that the central panel of this triptych is a "Feast of Metamorphoses".