What is Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights" doing in a television adaptation of a middle-grade novel?
Stay with me here.
I’m sitting on our couch next to my beloved partner, watching the most recent episode of the new Percy Jackson and The Olympians television show, an adaptation of the first novel in the celebrated middle-grade series. After our eponymous hero, Percy Jackson, learns he is a demigod—in this case, the son of his darling mother Sally Jackson and the God of the Sea, Poseidon—he’s charged with a difficult quest: return Zeus’s master bolt, presumed stolen on behalf of Poseidon by a demigod, before the summer solstice, lest the whole world be thrown into chaos and war between the Gods of the Sky and the Sea. It’s a tall order.
But Percy pursues this quest with an agenda of his own: rescue his mother, Sally, from the Underworld, to where she was recovered by the third brother of this troubled sibling trio, Hades, God of the Dead. Early on in our story, Sally was at risk of dying by the hand of the Minotaur (see: Episode 1), and the long-lambasted Hades intervened at the last moment, whisking her away to the Underworld as a lure for her son, Percy, who Hades believes is the key to his own mission.
So here we are, seven episodes into this television show, after trial and tribulation from New Jersey to St. Louis to Las Vegas to downtown LA, as Percy and his friends trekked west to find the entrance to the Underworld, and Percy has finally arrived at Hades’ spectacular stone palace. Suspended from the ceiling of the Underworld, the palace comprises gargantuan columns of basalt (MY FAVORITE ROCK FORMATION), that open and rise unprompted and elevator-like, to bring Percy and his companion Grover to the intimidatingly grand and sparse throne room of the God of the Dead.
They’re just taking in their impressive gray surroundings when a sprightly being walks towards them: it’s Jay Duplass, iconic that guy of squirrely roles, chipper and clad in a deep green cigar jacket, welcoming the two of them to his household with a wave of his hand and a “Sorry about all the pageantry.” He brings Percy and Grover around the corner of his enormous throne, a seat of great and terrible power, and the scene opens to a mid-century domestic sitting room: a couch, two squashy armchairs, a coffee table, and a rug, distinctly out of place amidst their dramatic surroundings. Jay-Duplass-as-Hades starts fluffing his pillows and refolding a shawl as Percy gets down to business, confronting the God of the Dead, pleading with him to return his mother (who, conveniently, is frozen in a statue of gold on the corner of the rug). Hades counters with what he sees as a fair deal: Percy hands over what he illicitly holds in his possession, and Hades will grant the trade.
It’s all very cordial, but it’s a minor comedy of errors. Hades assumed that Percy’s illicit goods in hand are something he actually wanted: his Helm of Darkness, which, like Zeus’s bolt, was stolen at the winter solstice (unlike his brother, however, he didn’t advertise his conundrum). There’s a beat of confusion, and for a split second, blink-and-you-miss it shot, the camera pans from our alternating views over Percy’s shoulder, looking at Hades, and over Hades’ shoulder, looking at Percy, to a new widescreen view. Hades is on the left, Percy on the right, the couch set between them, and behind that, a grand, terrible, shocking painting.
This one is for the art historians: Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights.
I immediately paused and was about to start yelling when my partner said, “No! Let it happen in real time! Experience it!” I press play, the camera pans again, and this wink flashes out of view.
For those of you unfamiliar with this absolutely wack-ass painting, the Garden of Earthly Delights, painted by Hieronymus Bosch sometime between 1490 to 1500 in the Netherlands, is a gigantic triptych (three-paneled) painting that depicts Eden before the Original Sin, the false paradise of Earth, and the inevitability of punishment in Hell. It’s worth reading Museo del Prado’s full description of the painting, but there’s nothing like staring at it for yourself. As I described it in a text to friends-of-the-blog Jeremy and Harrison, “Bosch was a total effing weirdo who was definitely into psychedelics and/or used his art to deal with some majorly effed shit that had been revealed to him by divine powers.” Click on that link and zoom in on the panels. You’ll see some truly wild, surrealist depictions of lust, avarice, and gluttony, in unsparing, bright colors, with fantastical architecture and creatures setting the scene for human exploits. In the rightmost panel of Hell, those creatures transform into tormentors, consuming and expelling sinners, using their own faults and, strangely, musical instruments to terrorize them.
I first saw Garden of Earthly Delights when I was 22 years old and visiting el Museo Del Prado for the first time during a trip to see my family in Madrid. (I had argued my way into free admission because while I had forgotten my student ID at home in London, I had brought my student visa, which surely counted.) I wandered the corridors and interconnected rooms of the collections and found myself in a dimmed cube, surrounded by a crowd of enthralled visitors. All eyes were turned to this spectacular and garish painting—taller than I am—on its custom pedestal, with only a rope cordoning off the safe viewing distance.
I couldn’t tell you how long I stood there, gaping at it. But when my partner and I returned to Madrid this winter to see family, I insisted we end our visit at El Prado by visiting Bosch’s brainchild once again. Jet-lag stupor sloughed right off. I love Bosch because he is a total freak and his art accomplished 500 years ago what provocateurs dream of today. I don’t agree with his depiction of pleasure or pain at all—it certainly bears no resemblance to my own theology—but it makes me read closely, which I relish. This painting looms large in my consciousness.
So when Earthly Delights popped up in this episode, my first thought was a high-pitched shriek of recognition and joy. My second thought was that, somewhere, the art historian-turned-production designer (Dan Hennah?!) responsible for this choice must be quite pleased with themselves. As they developed Hades’ palace set, they said, “You know what? We have an opportunity here to do something that, like, four people will appreciate.”1
They were saying hello to me, personally.
But why would they choose this painting for Hades’ living room? And by extension, why would Hades choose this painting for his living room?
How does this iteration of Hades interpret this triptych? Perhaps he sees it as a direct analogue to the divisions of his world: Olympus, The Mortal Realm, and the Underworld mapping onto Bosch’s Paradise, Earth, and Hell. Bosch depicts the isolated, demure pleasures of a pure world in Eden; but he skewers the false security of happiness and pleasure after the fall of Adam and Eve into the earthly plane, and, consequentially, the inevitability of punishment for those sins, especially lust, gluttony, and profanity. That’s a simple enough analogy that allows Hades to self-mythologize as the inevitable conclusion to all Mortal matters, how everyone eventually dies and moves into his realm, as well as the eternal outcast from the paradisiacal ideal.
But why jump through all the hoops of securing permission for commercial image use from el Museo Del Prado just for a clean one-two-three match-up? It’s too simple for such a deliberate design choice. Perhaps there are layers. Does Hades see Earthly Delights as an encompassing allegory for each of the subregions of his realm?
The clearest analogue to the righthand panel, Bosch’s Hell, is the Greek Tartarus and the Fields of Punishment, where beings mortal and immortal receive their due for their actions in life. The lefthand panel, Bosch’s Paradise, the self-contained purity of Eden, could be considered an analogue for Elysium, or the region of the Underworld reserved for those who lived benevolent, righteous lives. The center panel represents the Earthly Delights, or the excesses of pleasure that people experience in passing as they live. This is where the subregion comparison admittedly splinters: these earthly delights do not clearly map onto Asphodel, the passive fields of eternity where souls simply wait. These two could be read as an inverted pair—the excesses of life transformed into the absences of death. That’s a second potential reading of why this painting hangs behind Hades’ Pottery Barn couch: the one-to-one pairing of how Hades perceives his domain.
But what if Bosch’s Earthly Delights isn’t just an exact reference to this universe or this location? What if the painting tells us about our characters, their journey, and the narrative arc of this particular story?
Harrison hit the nail on the head first: “Hades is putting forth this out-of-place, homey set up in a barren, stone palace. He’s clearly trying to communicate something: The gods have similar tendencies to those of the human condition. Despite having immortality, they’re subject to the same comforts and follies: nice home goods, yes, but they’re ignorant, selfish, and greedy, they don’t care for each other. These are basic human things that we struggle with. Why is he choosing to reveal this? If the art is communicating something about the people, it’s also communicating something about the gods themselves.”
Bosch’s central panel depicts the false security of the pleasures of Earth, and Hades and our heroes frame this panel on either side. Notably, the triptych is revealed in the moment where the conversation turns from a business negotiation of Helm vs Bolt vs Mom into a revelation of the underlying mystery of this season, a revelation that portends the terror of Bosch’s final Hell panel, where Percy slightly trails. The wicked strings of this conflict are being pulled by a power far greater than Ares or Hades, but Kronos, the Titan of Time. Percy shares this observation aloud to Hades, interrupting his rant about never-ending grudges, who replies in a low voice that betrays a dash of fear, “Kronos is in a thousand pieces in Tartarus.”
Hades’ response reeks of the false security of his position and the other gods’ positions in their respective seats of power, acquired only by the fall of their treacherous father. But the gods have indulged in their perceived Eden, their Olympus, for millennia, all while being ignorant, selfish, and greedy to one another and absentee parents to their long-enduring children, employing human pawns to enact their bidding and discarding them when they fulfill or fail their tasks. This is behavior unbecoming of Eden, but far more characteristic of Earthly Delights. And the gods have yet to suffer the grotesque consequences for their mortal-like flaws.
That’s the arc of the Percy Jackson series: the great bearing down of consequences on the gods from their many opponents for all of their slights over the course of Greek mythic history, and we follow our protagonists as they determine which side to fight on (Percy does have one foot in Hell, after all). This first season has received a lot of flack from long-time readers for allowing its monsters-of-the-week to expound on their perspective of their inhabited mythic world: a world that has pigeon-holed them as outcasts, villains, and threats. But the writers are establishing a deeper conflict: who gets to typecast all the characters of this Pantheon, and who benefits from that status quo? This season is a five-paragraph essay with a blueprint thesis, recited by Sally at the top of the first episode: “Not all who look like monsters are monsters; not all who look like heroes are heroes.”
I don’t agree with much of the criticism lobbied at this show, which has taken aim at the unavoidable challenges of interpreting the characters, themes, and arc of a source text through a different medium. Rarely have screen adaptations of beloved middle-grade and young-adult novels been received universally or even pluralistically well. Unlike many of my peers kicking the can on the Internet, however, I am not interested in a beat-by-beat replication of the book’s original text. How boring that would be. Case-in-point: The screenwriters allow our protagonists to bypass the “research and discovery” of their monster-of-the-week encounters (i.e. figuring out who they’re fighting), a decision that has garnered criticism for making the kids “too smart” (which is pretty insulting to the kids, who are well-trained to identify iconic monsters).
Instead of wasting time on the whodunit of it all, we dwell on the more engaging question of why these characters are fighting, which deepens the tensions of the plot and sets the groundwork for a more emotional finale, provided we reach the end of this five-novel adaptation. Rather than immediately align the viewer with our protagonists’ perspective, as the novel necessarily does (remember, this was written for 11-year-olds in the classic us-versus-them, good-versus-bad dichotomy), the show is justifying the opposition’s perspective: What if the gods are the bad guys? What if they deserve to be punished? This balance of perspective provides real stakes, real conflict, and real consequences when the action comes to a head.
I return to the framing of this shot, with Hades on the edge of the central panel, facing down this demigod and all he brings with him. Throughout the season, we’ve seen Percy face off this same way with multiple gods. And each time, his decisions, not theirs, drive the action. After all, the painting is entitled Garden of Earthly Delights. Not Heavenly or Hellish, not Olympian or Underworldian, but Earthly, the plane on which humans experience their lives and exercise their agency, and so too, the plane on which the gods engage in their machinations and from which derive their relevance, and thus, their power. The plane that ties these two entities inextricably together. Their fates are linked.2
In backdropping Hades’ domestic scene with one of the most brilliant, provocative, and, frankly, blood-curdling depictions of human avarice and divine consequence, the production designers captured the many-layered issues at play in this story: how the gods necessarily manipulate human affairs for their pleasure, the parallel flaws of gods and their human pawns, and the forthcoming consequences for which they are utterly unprepared.
Just as humans are lulled into a false sense of security in their garden of earthly delights, so too are the gods. What is to become of them?
More later.
Worth noting that the production designer for PJO is Dan Hennah, the Academy Award-winning art director for The Lord of the Rings films. They hired the real deal.
In the second novel of the series, a mentor of Percy’s explains to him the unique role of the demigod in this inextricable relationship: “You fight the battles humanity must win, every generation, in order to stay human.”
Shiranators unite!
Ugh, fine I’ll reread the series before the next season, this pushed me over