When a Work of Art Ceases to Be a Question: The History of What Became Self-Evident

This interlude is not a another history of interpreting Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights. It is a history of how one particular way of reading the triptych gradually became self-evident. Its central question is how the conditions of reading came to function as the meaning of the work itself. Beginning with the earliest surviving descriptions of the triptych and following its reception from Antonio de Beatis and the inventories of El Escorial to José de Sigüenza and modern art history, the chapter reconstructs the historical process through which visual astonishment, curiosity, moral reflection, and symbolic explanation gradually crystallized into a stable interpretive model. Rather than evaluating previous scholarship, it asks how this model itself came into being. The purpose of the interlude is not to propose a new interpretation of The Garden of Earthly Delights, but to historicize the framework within which the painting has long been understood. By reconstructing the formation of that framework, the chapter prepares the methodological ground for the larger project Reading Bosch, which seeks to reconsider the triptych beyond the interpretive habits that have shaped its modern reception.