"colors are only applied on this page"

This is a digital reproduction of the middle panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s famous triptych painting “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” The painting struck me for a long time since I first saw it. As people usually categorize it as a “Northern Renaissance painting” for it was painted around 1515, it stands out quite obviously from most of other Renaissance paintings for its unconventional subject matter, unlimited imagination, and the use of colors.

The colors applied to this painting can be categorized into simply three groups: light blue tone, earth tone, and pink tone. And their respective uses are also very apparent: light blue tone for water and sky, earth tone for earth and plants, and pink tone for human bodies and exotic objects around them.

As the color essay mentioned, ultramarine, this deep blue, used to “depict the robes of the Virgin Mary”, and to be associated with “the dignity of monarchs and the morality of the church.” During medieval times and the Renaissance period, ultramarine was “the material wealth it had heretofore signified.” However, there is no trace of ultramarine or any deep blue alternative in this painting. All we see in the sky, in the water, are different shades of cyan, and light blue. Personally speaking, I don’t believe this is because Bosch could not afford the ultramarine pigment, but rather he emphasized on the vibrancy of the scene by using lighter color tones and presumably rejecting the sacralized and overused ultramarine.

Pink, usually considered “wild” and “flamboyant”, makes people “want to have dream, hope toward their future and to be tender in mind.” While pink also appears in quite a lot of portraiture paintings, it is never used such heavily as in this painting, especially in the Renaissance. This vivid, wild color exemplifies the subject matter, an extravagant, sensual “earthly delights.”