Research at a Glance
What It Is
Reading Bosch is a research project by Aleksandra Pelikhovska that reconstructs the meaning, structure, and order of reading of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights.
The project begins from the premise that the complexity of the Garden is neither chaos nor a collection of symbolic riddles. It has an internal organization, and that organization can be reconstructed.
Central Question
Does the triptych have a unified meaning? How is that meaning organized, and how does the work itself lead the viewer toward understanding it?
Reading Bosch argues that the meaning of the Garden does not arise from the sum of individual images, but through the viewer’s traversal of the work: through the order of unfolding, composition, shifts in optical regime, historical examples, the organization of time, and changes in the viewer’s position.
Central Thesis
The subject of the triptych is human action in history.
Its central problem is how the meaning of human action can be discerned if Providence remains causa prima, while human will, power, interest, contingency, decision, and action belong to the order of causae secundae.
The triptych does not illustrate a ready-made theological answer. It organizes an act of reasoning, leading the viewer through different states of the world and different models of action.
What Has Been Reconstructed
The project reconstructs the mechanism of the work as a whole, including:
the structural framework of the panels;
the routes and constraints of the viewer’s gaze;
shifts between optical regimes;
the operation of light, color, mass, and rhythm;
the ways in which the three panels are connected;
the hierarchy of foundation, historical action, and the discernment of order;
the viewer’s position within the argument;
the historical and intellectual environment in which such an object could have been understood.
What Has Been Done for the First Time
For the first time, the triptych is shown to possess a reconstructible order of traversal that does not coincide with conventional linear reading from left to right.
For the first time, the central panel is analyzed systematically as a unified structure of movement and argument rather than as a sum of motifs and episodes.
For the first time, the route of the gaze is reconstructed, demonstrating that the image does not merely permit different paths of viewing but actively redirects the viewer.
For the first time, the shifting optical position within the central panel is reconstructed: a transition from distant overview to localized presence through incompatible viewpoints.
For the first time, a key compositional node within the central panel is identified, showing that the route of viewing is organized through a distinct mechanism of movement whose function becomes apparent only in relation to the larger hierarchy of the triptych.
For the first time, the panels are described not as a fixed linear sequence of “Paradise — world — Hell,” but as different regimes of perception connected by a system of transitions and seams. This allows the triptych to preserve its semantic coherence across different states of opening, both fully and partially unfolded.
For the first time, light, movement, and spatial organization within the central panel are interpreted as means of structuring time.
Method
The method of Reading Bosch is based on cross-checking.
No figure, group, or panel is assigned a meaning simply because an attractive analogy can be found for it. An interpretation is considered robust only if it simultaneously withstands testing against:
composition;
the route of the gaze;
the operation of light and color;
spatial logic;
historical plausibility;
the intellectual culture of the period;
the presumed addressee;
the object’s place within an actual courtly environment.
The basic unit of analysis is therefore not:
“What does this symbol mean?”
but rather:
“What function does this element perform within the movement of the work as a whole, and what ceases to function without it?”
Scope of the Research
Work on Reading Bosch has been underway since October 2025.
The task was not simply to study the literature on Bosch, but to reconstruct the historical horizon of a person living at the end of the fifteenth century: how such a person understood causality, history, power, faith, action, fate, sin, order, and responsibility — the spiritual and everyday world within which the work could have been created and understood.
For this reason, the research extends far beyond Bosch studies. It encompasses philosophy, theology, Aristotle, scholasticism, devotio moderna, chronicles, political history, the history of warfare and court culture, literature, visual culture, archival materials relating to Bosch, ’s-Hertogenbosch, the Brotherhood of Our Lady, Engelbert of Nassau, and Cimburga of Baden, as well as texts by Thomas Aquinas, Thomas à Kempis, Erasmus, Froissart, the Roman de la Rose, the Ilias Latina, and a wide range of comparative sources.
The purpose of this corpus is not to find ready-made “keys,” but to retrain the researcher’s eye and distinguish modern perception from what was historically possible to see, recognize, and think.
Structure of the Argument
Part I — Is a Man Standing on a Flat Earth Stupid?
Reconstructs the world in which the Garden emerged: the period, the court, the Nassau household, the status and cost of the artifact, its intellectual and religious environment, and the conditions of its use and reception.
Part II — Can a Thing Be Reconstructed from Its Skeleton?
Provides a complete structural traversal of the triptych: light, color, time, framework, masses, vectors, viewpoint, the position of the viewer, and the functional organization of the image.
Part III — How Do You Read a “Book of Great Wisdom and Art”?
Reconstructs meaning and approaches the triptych as a visual treatise — a sustained reflection on human action, freedom, Providence, and historical time.
The monograph consists of three substantially autonomous parts. Each has its own object, method, and scale of analysis and does not function merely as an introduction to the next.
Their relationship becomes fully visible only retrospectively: Part I does not allow the reader to predict the course of Part II, and Part II does not disclose in advance the form of the argument developed in Part III.
The unity of the book emerges not through the linear unfolding of a single thesis, but through the gradual convergence of independently reconstructed levels.
Key Independent Findings
Reconstruction of the circumstances of commission.
This reconstruction both eliminates theories incompatible with the actual historical environment and establishes a historical basis for a positive reconstruction.
The historical and literary structure of the central panel.
The project demonstrates that historical and literary references form a coherent system distributed across the panel and integrated into its semantic construction.
The optics of the central panel.
Changes in viewpoint and in the viewer’s position function as semantic mechanisms connected with transitions in time and changes in the mode of perception.
Independent verification within the triptych itself.
After the reconstruction had been completed, its structure received additional confirmation from material already present within the work. Because this material had not been used as an initial interpretive key, it functions as an independent verification of the reconstruction.
Systematic organization of the viewer.
Bosch does not merely depict scenes. He controls distance, depth, attention, pauses, and the redirection of the gaze.
Degrees of Robustness
The most robust part of the reconstruction concerns the structure of the work itself: its compositional logic, the route of viewing, shifts between perceptual regimes, the interaction of the panels, and the dependence of individual parts on the whole.
Questions for which no direct documentary evidence exists remain hypothetical: the precise circumstances of the commission, the motives of particular individuals, and the artist’s internal motivations.
The project deliberately does not claim a complete reconstruction of every possible meaning. Different levels of the reconstruction possess different degrees of robustness.
The revision of an individual historical identification does not invalidate a more securely established compositional structure if that structure was reconstructed independently. At the same time, any proposed identification must remain compatible with the system of relationships within which it occurs.
The working aim is to reconstruct a sufficient density of meaning for the route through the work to become intelligible and testable. In several areas, the analysis was carried down to the level of individual berries and minor motifs. This demonstrated the possibility of deep decoding, but its labor intensity did not justify turning the entire book into a dictionary of images.
Principal Methodological Risk
Anachronism.
The key question throughout the research is:
Who is seeing this — a modern researcher or a person of the fifteenth century?
Every interpretation is therefore tested not only for its internal elegance, but for its compatibility with what a person of the period could plausibly have known, seen, distinguished, and thought.
What the Project Deliberately Does Not Do
Reading Bosch:
does not reconstruct Bosch’s consciousness;
does not speak on behalf of the artist;
does not reduce the triptych to a single symbolic key;
does not require a definitive meaning for every motif;
does not treat a modern association as automatically historically admissible;
does not replace the structure of the work with a catalogue of symbols.
How Reading Bosch Can Be Tested
The reconstruction is presented as testable.
It can be followed and examined through:
the compositional framework;
the route of the gaze;
transitions between the panels;
the operation of light and color;
shifts between spatial regimes;
correspondence with the historical context;
compatibility with the intellectual culture of the presumed viewer.
The strength of the model does not lie in a single striking discovery, but in the convergence of several independently reconstructed levels of the work.
Significance
Reading Bosch makes it possible to explain not only the triptych itself, but also the history of its interpretation: why such radically different observations could have been made about the same work, and which part of its internal organization each of them detected.
Reading Bosch distinguishes between an isolated observation and the reconstruction of a system. The presence of a partial observation, analogy, or interpretation of an individual element in earlier scholarship is not equivalent to reconstructing its function within the whole. The project’s originality lies not only in individual identifications, but above all in the relations established between them and in the mechanism that connects different levels of the work into a coherent structure.
It therefore shifts the discussion of The Garden of Earthly Delights from competing attempts to decode isolated motifs toward the reconstruction of a complex visual-intellectual system.
Reading Bosch proposes not simply another interpretation of The Garden of Earthly Delights, but a new order of argument: the debate can move beyond the question of what an individual berry, bird, or figure means, toward the larger questions of how the work functions as a whole, how it leads the viewer, and how meaning emerges from that organizatio
The debate can therefore move beyond the question of what an individual berry, bird, or figure means, toward the larger questions of how the work functions as a whole, how it leads the viewer, and how meaning emerges from that organization.
In One Paragraph
Reading Bosch approaches The Garden of Earthly Delights as a visual form of reasoning about human action in time. The triptych organizes the problem of the relationship between causa prima and causae secundae not through a ready-made doctrine, but through its order of unfolding, composition, historical precedent, shifts in optical regime, and the movement of the viewer. Its meaning emerges through traversal: from an order that is given, through problematic models of action and historical tension, toward the possibility of discerning Providence within human history without cancelling freedom, responsibility, or secondary causation.