Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, c. 1480-1505, oil
Before the Flood, the new National Geographic documentary film by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Fisher Stevens and Academy Award-winning actor and United Nations Messenger of Peace Leonardo DiCaprio, opens with an image of The Garden of Earthly Delights, painted by Heironymous Bosch between 1480-1505. The triptych, on view at the Prado Museum, Madrid, one of the most famous paintings in Western art history, shows the Fall of mankind, as we travel from the pleasures of the Garden of Eden through the complex world of virtue and vice, to a dark and devastating Hell that offers no respite from it all.
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DiCaprio muses on this painting, a poster of which hung over his crib, becoming his first visual memory; indeed it leaves an indelible impression upon all who encounter it. We recognize ourselves in the second and central panel, finding our way in the world, overcome by the complex mixture of beauty and perversion, virtue and vice. Eden, while idyllic, seems impossible, but it is Hell that strains our imagination so much that we hope to never know what might befall us in this realm.
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