The Prince of Hell swallows a naked man

Date

c. 1490–1510

Description

Creator of the image: Hieronymus Bosch
Date of the image creation: c. 1490–1510
Medium: Oil on oak,
Person depicted: A naked man

The image is cropped from a larger image painted by the great Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–1516). Regarded as one of his best-known and most ambitious surviving works, ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ is a large triptych. The left-hand panel God with Adam and Eve in the psychedelic Garden of Paradise. The larger central panel features a vast and vibrant cacophony of nude figures, magical beasts, surreal fruit and bizarre rock formations. The lines between these categories blur. The right panel depicts a hideous hell-scape of torture and demonic damnation. The combined effect of this immensely detailed work — which becomes more compelling and grotesque the more one probes its intricacies — is a sense of dizzying and deranged eroticism, rendered into an unstable composite of desire and fear; a hybridized fever dream of ultimate liberation and unlimited corruption.

The cropped image shows an outlandish demon with a bird-like head and humanoid body sitting on a throne-toilet wearing a cauldron as a hat. This beast is ramming a naked human head-first down its throat, while its victim excretes black birds and burning material from his anus. After passing through the fiend’s digestive tract, victims appear to move through an organic blue sack before being dropped into a vile septic pit of stinking suffering. This is a hellish non-human encounter, particularly for the individual whose legs and torso we see.

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