The triptych is reproduced here for the first time complete & in life-size detail.

Now available in a new edition, this book explores Hieronymus Bosch’s masterpiece Garden of Earthly Delights. Few paintings inspire the kind of intense study and speculation as Garden of Earthly Delights, the world-famous triptych by Netherlandish master Hieronymus Bosch. The painting has been interpreted as a heretical masterpiece, an opulent illustration of the Creation, and a premonition of the end of the world. In this book, renowned art historian Hans Belting offers a radical reinterpretation of the work, which he sees not as apocalyptic but utopian, portraying how the world would exist had the Fall not happened. Taking readers through each panel, Belting discusses various schools of thought and explores Bosch’s life and times. This fascinating study is an important contribution to the literature and theory surrounding one of the world’s most enigmatic artists.

Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights takes a special place in European art history, partly because of the special late-medieval imagery. The meaning of the painting, however, differs according to every expert. After extensive research, Reindert

With Leap, Terry Tempest Williams, award-winning author of Refuge, offers a sustained meditation on passion, faith, and creativity-based upon her transcendental encounter with Hieronymus Bosch's medieval masterpiece The Garden of Delights. Williams examines this vibrant landscape with unprecedented acuity, recognizing parallels between the artist's prophetic vision and her own personal experiences as a Mormon and a naturalist. Searing in its spiritual, intellectual, and emotional courage, Williams's divine journey enables her to realize the full extent of her faith and through her exquisite imagination opens our eyes to the splendor of the world.

In a tour-de-force reinterpretation of the Christian tradition, Agamben shows that the Garden of Eden has always served as a symbol for humanity's true nature. What happened to paradise after Adam and Eve were expelled? The question may sound like a theological quibble, or even a joke, but in The Kingdom and the Garden, Giorgio Agamben uses it as a starting point for an investigation of human nature and the prospects for political transformation. In a tour-de-force reinterpretation of the Christian tradition, Agamben shows that the Garden of Eden has always served as a symbol of humanity's true nature. Where earlier theologians viewed the expulsion as temporary, Augustine's doctrine of original sin makes it permanent, reimagining humanity as the paradoxical creature that has been completely alienated from its own nature. From this perspective, there can be no return to paradise, only the hope for the messianic kingdom. Yet there have always been thinkers who rebelled against this idea, and Agamben highlights two major examples. The first is the early medieval philosopher John Scotus Eriugena, who argued for a radical unity of humanity with all living things. The second is Dante, whose vision of the earthly paradise points towards the possibility of genuine human happiness in this world. In place of the messianic kingdom, which has provided the model for modern revolutionary movements, Agamben contends that we should place our hopes for political change in a return to our origins, by reclaiming the earthly paradise.

Librarian Abigail Merchant stumbles upon the journals of an eccentric scholar, leading her on a quest to find the Great Library of Alexandria and recover a priceless artifact with the help of an ex-legionnaire with a checkered past.