[mitologies] the Bosch room

- the Bosch room -

Background:
Our time of pessimistic stagnation finds its supreme artist in one of the most fascinating and puzzling painters in history, Hieronymous Bosch (c. 1450-1516). He was both a satirist and an irreligious mocker, a heretic as well as an orthodox fanatic, obsessed with guilt and also death and sin. Certainly, his art is born of the dark pessimism of his age - with the conviction that man's doom is approaching. Eustache Deschamps, a contemporary poet of Bosch, writes:

Now the world is cowardly, decayed and weak,
Old, covetous, confused of speech:
I see only female and male fools....
The end approaches...
All goes badly.

The poetic vision of Deschamps finds its supreme representation in Bosch's most famous work, Garden of Earthly Delights (1505-1510). This triptych shows the master at his best. The central panel, The Garden of Earthly Delights, which is the subject of one of our VR spaces, swarms with the frail nude figures of men and women sporting licentiously in a panoramic landscape that is studded with fantastic growths of a quasisexual form. Bosch seems to show that erotic temptation and sensual gratification as a universal disaster and the human race, as a consequence of original sin succumbing to its naturally base disposition. The subjects are derived in part from three major sources: Medieval bestiaries, Flemish proverbs, and the then very popluar dream and occult books, all mixed in the melting pot of Bosch's astoundingly inventive imagination.

Interpretation:
We have chosen the central panel, Garden of Earthly Delights, for this part of our VR space. Symbols are scattered plentifully throughout this panel. One of the most fascinating symbols is that of a couple in a glass globe which illustrate the proverb: "Good fortune, like glass, is easily broken." We recreate this glass globe in 3D and recreate, also in 3D glass globes, what the triptych as a whole represents; first, the false paradise of the world between Eden and Hell, second, the secrets of alchemy and their allegorical meanings. The user is able to enter the glass globes which reproduce the movement of the heavenly bodies. As the user navigates from one globe to the next, the walls gradually move backwards to reveal various globes. A fragment from Wagner's opera , Gotterdammerung, is used to illustrate the overall allegory of the painting.

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