Hierony­mus Bosch’s mas­ter­piece of grotes­querie, The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights, con­tains a young God, Adam and Eve, over­sized fruits and musi­cal instru­ments, owls, tor­tured sin­ners, some­thing called a “tree man” whose body con­tains an entire tav­ern, a defe­cat­ing avian dev­il eat­ing a human being, and “frol­ick­ing, obliv­i­ous fig­ures engaged in all sorts of car­nal plea­sures,” as art his­to­ri­an Beth Har­ris puts it in the new Smarthis­to­ry video above. Through­out its fif­teen min­utes, she and her col­league Steven Zuck­er explain as much as pos­si­ble of this jam-packed trip­tych — not that even a life­time would be long enough to under­stand it ful­ly.

“Bosch con­founds our abil­i­ty to even talk about what we see,” says Har­ris. “His imag­i­na­tion has run wild. He’s just invent­ed so many things here that we could nev­er even have thought about in our wildest imag­i­na­tions.” Zuck­er cites one art-his­to­ry the­o­ry that this trip­tych rep­re­sents Bosch’s attempt to “ele­vate the visu­al arts to the lev­el of cre­ativ­i­ty that was per­mit­ted in lit­er­a­ture.”

Even in Bosch’s late fif­teenth and ear­ly six­teenth cen­turies, writ­ers had an envi­ably free hand in choos­ing and pre­sent­ing their sub­ject mat­ter; because the direct­ly rep­re­sen­ta­tive form of paint­ing, by con­trast, “had always been at the ser­vice of reli­gion, it was inher­ent­ly more con­ser­v­a­tive.”

It’s entire­ly pos­si­ble — and oth­er analy­ses pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here at Open Cul­ture have argued it – that Bosch, too, was work­ing at the ser­vice of reli­gion. But it could also be that The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights, in its vast mid­dle pan­el, tells “an alter­nate sto­ry,” as Zuck­er puts it. “What if the temp­ta­tion had not tak­en place? What if Adam and Eve had remained inno­cent, and had pop­u­lat­ed the world? And so, is it pos­si­ble that what we’re see­ing is that real­i­ty, played out in Bosch’s imag­i­na­tion?” Not that such a vision would have read­i­ly been accept­ed in the artist’s own time and place — nor that his inten­tions alone could lead us to a com­plete inter­pre­ta­tion of his work. As any nov­el­ist knows, some­times your char­ac­ters sim­ply take over, and it could hard­ly have been with­in even Bosch’s pow­ers to deny the desires of a cast so teem­ing and bizarre.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Mean­ing of Hierony­mus Bosch’s The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights Explained

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Hierony­mus Bosch’s Bewil­der­ing Mas­ter­piece The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights

Hierony­mus Bosch’s Medieval Paint­ing, “The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights,” Comes to Life in a Gigan­tic, Mod­ern Ani­ma­tion

The Mean­ing of Hierony­mus Bosch’s Spell­bind­ing Trip­tych The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights

The Musi­cal Instru­ments in Hierony­mus Bosch’s The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights Get Brought to Life, and It Turns Out That They Sound “Painful” and “Hor­ri­ble”

A Dig­i­tal Archive of Hierony­mus Bosch’s Com­plete Works: Zoom In & Explore His Sur­re­al Art

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Cour­tesy of Wired, his­to­ri­an Alexan­der Bevilac­qua (Williams Col­lege) answers the inter­net’s burn­ing ques­tions about the cul­tur­al rebirth that came to be known as The Renais­sance. In 30+ min­utes, Bevilac­qua cov­ers an array of ques­tions, includ­ing: When did The Renais­sance begin? What exact­ly was the Renais­sance? Why do paint­ings like the Mona Lisa and The Birth of Venus remain so famous cen­turies lat­er? What did peo­ple’s diets con­sist of dur­ing The Renais­sance? How was their hygiene? How did Brunelleschi build a dome in Flo­rence that defied grav­i­ty? What is inside Leonar­do da Vin­ci’s note­books? And the ques­tions go on…

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Relat­ed Con­tent 

Michelangelo’s David: The Fas­ci­nat­ing Sto­ry Behind the Renais­sance Mar­ble Cre­ation

How the World’s Biggest Dome Was Built: The Sto­ry of Fil­ip­po Brunelleschi and the Duo­mo in Flo­rence

What Makes Leonardo’s Mona Lisa a Great Paint­ing?: An Expla­na­tion in 15 Min­utes

How to Build Leonar­do da Vinci’s Inge­nious Self-Sup­port­ing Bridge: Renais­sance Inno­va­tions You Can Still Enjoy Today

Renais­sance Knives Had Music Engraved on the Blades & Now You Can Hear the Songs Per­formed by Mod­ern Singers

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Note­books Get Dig­i­tized: Where to Read the Renais­sance Man’s Man­u­scripts Online

Machiavelli’s The Prince Explained in an Illus­trat­ed Film

Before his fate­ful entry into pol­i­tics, Adolf Hitler want­ed to be an artist. Even to the most neu­tral imag­in­able observ­er, the known exam­ples of the esti­mat­ed 2,000 to 3,000 paint­ings and oth­er works of art he pro­duced in his ear­ly adult­hood would hard­ly evi­dence aston­ish­ing genius. They do show a cer­tain tech­ni­cal com­pe­tence, espe­cial­ly where build­ings are con­cerned. (Twice reject­ed from the Acad­e­my of Fine Arts Vien­na, the young Hitler was advised to apply instead to the School of Archi­tec­ture, a sub­ject for which he also pro­fessed a pas­sion.) But their lack of imag­i­na­tion and inter­est in human­i­ty were too plain to ignore.

Could Hitler’s fail­ure to gain entry to the art world explain any­thing about the cul­tur­al pol­i­cy of the Nazi Par­ty he went on to lead? Here on Open Cul­ture, we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured that pol­i­cy’s sin­gle defin­ing event: Die Ausstel­lung “Entartete Kun­st,” or the Degen­er­ate Art exhi­bi­tion, staged in 1937 at the Insti­tute of Archae­ol­o­gy in Munich’s Hof­garten.

Pre­sent­ing 650 con­fis­cat­ed works of art pur­port­ed to “insult Ger­man feel­ing, or destroy or con­fuse nat­ur­al form or sim­ply reveal an absence of ade­quate man­u­al and artis­tic skill,” it soon became a great hit, attract­ing one mil­lion atten­dees in its first six weeks.

That may not come as much of a sur­prise when you con­sid­er the artists whose work was on dis­play: Paul Klee, Georg Grosz, Otto Dix, Hen­ri Matisse, Pablo Picas­so, Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky, Piet Mon­dri­an, Marc Cha­gall, and even Grant Wood, to name just a few. It seems that the Nazis could come up with noth­ing quite so fas­ci­nat­ing for the planned first Große Deutsche Kun­stausstel­lung, or “Great Ger­man Art Exhi­bi­tion,” whose col­lapse inspired Hitler’s chief pro­pa­gan­dist Joseph Goebbels to sug­gest putting on a show not of the work that the Nazis approved, but of the work they didn’t.

An admir­er of cer­tain Expres­sion­ists, Goebbels dis­played more cul­tur­al open-mind­ed­ness than the Führer, who prac­ti­cal­ly declared a war on mod­ern art itself. You can learn more about it from David Gru­bin’s doc­u­men­tary Degen­er­ate Art, which is avail­able to watch online. The Nazis con­fis­cat­ed more than 5,000 works of art, and even main­tained files on no few­er than 16,000 that they’d labeled “degen­er­ate,” a his­toric inven­to­ry that has been made avail­able to the pub­lic. Sur­pris­ing­ly, their black­list did not include the oeu­vre of Gus­tav Klimt, which they attempt­ed to use for their own ends. It could be that, deep down, Hitler, the failed artist, knew good art when he saw it — and that it just made him all the more resent­ful.

Relat­ed con­tent:

When the Nazis Declared War on Expres­sion­ist Art (1937)

The 16,000 Art­works the Nazis Cen­sored and Labeled “Degen­er­ate Art”: The Com­plete His­toric Inven­to­ry Is Now Online

How the Avant-Garde Art of Gus­tav Klimt Got Per­verse­ly Appro­pri­at­ed by the Nazis

The Nazis’ 10 Con­trol-Freak Rules for Jazz Per­form­ers: A Strange List from World War II

How France Hid the Mona Lisa & Oth­er Lou­vre Mas­ter­pieces Dur­ing World War II

When Ger­man Per­for­mance Artist Ulay Stole Hitler’s Favorite Paint­ing & Hung it in the Liv­ing Room of a Turk­ish Immi­grant Fam­i­ly (1976)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Diego Velázquez paint­ed Las Meni­nas almost 370 years ago, and it’s been under scruti­ny ever since. If the pub­lic’s appetite to know more about it has dimin­ished over time, that cer­tain­ly isn’t reflect­ed in the view count of the analy­sis from YouTube chan­nel Rab­bit Hole above, which as of this writ­ing has crossed the 2.5 mil­lion mark. So has this video on Las Meni­nas from Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer. What ele­ment of this par­tic­u­lar paint­ing has stoked such fas­ci­na­tion, gen­er­a­tion after gen­er­a­tion after gen­er­a­tion? Eas­i­er, per­haps, to ask what ele­ment has­n’t.

“Through the 36 years he worked for King Philip IV, Velázquez pro­duced dozens of paint­ings of the Span­ish roy­al fam­i­ly,” says the nar­ra­tor of the Rab­bit Hole video. But the large-scale Las Meni­nas is dif­fer­ent: “the paint­ing appears more like a snap­shot of dai­ly life than a typ­i­cal vis­age of roy­als pos­ing to be paint­ed.”

The fig­ures it depicts include Philip’s five-year-old daugh­ter Infan­ta Mar­garet There­sa and her entourage, as well as Velázquez him­self, at work on a paint­ing — which may be a por­trait of the king and queen, reflect­ed as they are on the mir­ror in the back wall, or per­haps the very image we’re look­ing at. Or could we pos­si­bly be Philip and Mar­i­ana our­selves?

On the rear­most plane of Las Meni­nas stands the queen’s cham­ber­lain Don José Nieto Velázquez (pos­si­bly a rela­tion of the artist), on whom it can hard­ly be a coin­ci­dence that all of the paint­ing’s lines con­verge, like a van­ish­ing point on the hori­zon. Diego Velázquez’s rep­re­sen­ta­tion of him­self bears an even more con­spic­u­ous detail: the knight­hood-sym­bol­iz­ing red cross called the Order of San­ti­a­go. Born a com­mon­er, Velázquez worked for most of his life in close prox­im­i­ty to the roy­als, and seems to have made no big secret of his aspi­ra­tions to join their ranks. Pre­sum­ably, the Order of San­ti­a­go was added after the paint­ing was com­plete, since Las Meni­nas is dat­ed to 1656, but Velázquez was­n’t final­ly knight­ed until 1659, close to the end of his life.

Dif­fer­ent the­o­ries exist to explain who exact­ly added that red cross to the paint­ing, as cov­ered by YouTu­ber-gal­lerist James Payne in the Great Art Explained video just above. Like most works of art that have endured through the cen­turies, Las Meni­nas has its unsolv­able his­tor­i­cal mys­ter­ies, despite its unusu­al­ly well-doc­u­ment­ed cre­ation. But for seri­ous art enthu­si­asts, the most com­pelling ques­tion remains that of just how Velázquez pulled it all off. “Las Meni­nas, with all its splen­did effects, is a vig­or­ous argu­ment for the virtue of paint­ing,” says Puschak. “This gets at the heart of the mir­ror, the van­ish­ing point, and the mul­ti­ple cen­ters of focus. ‘See what my art can do,’ Velázquez is say­ing to the view­er” — whether that view­er is King Philip, or some­one across the world near­ly four cen­turies lat­er.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Short Intro­duc­tion to Car­avag­gio, the Mas­ter Of Light

The Pra­do Muse­um Dig­i­tal­ly Alters Four Mas­ter­pieces to Strik­ing­ly Illus­trate the Impact of Cli­mate Change

The Pra­do Muse­um Cre­ates the First Art Exhi­bi­tion for the Visu­al­ly Impaired, Using 3D Print­ing

Sal­vador Dalí Sketch­es Five Span­ish Immor­tals: Cer­vantes, Don Quixote, El Cid, El Gre­co & Velázquez

Great Art Explained: Watch 15 Minute Intro­duc­tions to Great Works by Warhol, Rothko, Kahlo, Picas­so & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.