Lately, the once peaceful Garden of Delights has been haunted by sinister creatures. One man thinks he sees a connection between their appearance and the behavior of the garden’s inhabitants. Will you keep your eyes open and help him learn more about the suspicious situation?

Hieronymus Bosch’s most famous work, The Garden of Delights, joins his canon of apocalyptic works, such as his depiction of the Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things or the Judgment Day. Seduced, decayed and finally expelled people inhabit these paintings, whose sins are repaid in hellfire for eternity and torment. The fact that both the Fall and the sinfulness in the Garden of Delights are not explicitly conveyed by captions, devil figures, or the punishing God the Father, has led to disagreement in attempts at interpretation as to whether the central panel of the triptych depicts a paradise that has been won and preserved or one that is threatened, even lost. The painting is a riddle that wants to remain enigmatic, and so none of the manifold theories has achieved interpretive supremacy. Ultimately, however, the lustful, libidinous, and incorporative encounters are so much “at odds with the everyday and class ethics of the time” that it is difficult to read the middle section as an idyll, a positive utopia. In addition to the culinary and carnal temptations, the seductive shönity of the garden invites invisible sin, supposedly innocent yet töright play, just as the painting itself invites the viewer to participate and explore on their own. The virtual reality experience DelightfulGardenVR makes self-directed exploration possible by taking the museum visitor through the canvas and into the Garden of Delights.

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