The Garden of Earthly Delights is a triptych painted around the year 1500 by the Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch, and its three panels – taking up almost four meters in width – are crammed full of tiny details ranging from the Garden of Eden to a Hellish landscape in which its inhabitants are being tortured. So many details are present, in fact, that if you were to look very closely at the painting you might find some interesting things. Amelia, a music and information systems double major at Oklahoma Christian University, sure did:
Luke and I were looking at Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights and discovered, much to our amusement, music written upon the posterior of one of the many tortured denizens of the rightmost panel of the painting which is intended to represent Hell. I decided to transcribe it into modern notation, assuming the second line of the staff is C, as is common for chants of this era.
So yes this is LITERALLY the 600-year-old butt song from hell.
Click through to listen to Hieronymous Bosch’s butt-music from hell. Also: a choral version.
