Look around. What is this place? We are certainly in Hell, yet parts of the landscape look surprisingly normal, and a tall cross stands just beyond the little bridge in the left background.

Bosch, Temptation (detail).

    This discordance is explained by the fact that the construction we see is a stage, the temporary kind that was built in front of church doors on feast days. It consists of a proscenium and a painted backdrop. Although the artist has carefully concealed the borders where the stage and backdrop meet, we can easily determine which is which, because the natural light is all in the backdrop; the illumination onstage is theatrical.
    Now we can see why the groups of imps and demons are arranged the way they are and why the pillar stands where it does. They are placed there to conceal the edges of the platform where it meets the backdrop—to put off the moment when we will realize we are looking at a theatrical illusion, not a real landscape.

Bosch, Temptation (detail).

    Frustrating as they may seem, these discordances are helpful because they make us notice signposts that point toward a solution. For instance, we observe that the actors are illuminated from the left front; therefore we know that the shadow on the left side of the chapel can only be cast by the cloud of smoke from the burning village. Since the village is painted, the chapel must be too—not only the back wall and the archway, but the little round platform as well.

Bosch, Temptation (detail).

    The curb Anthony is leaning on is as real as he is (for whatever that's worth), but the mismatched continuation of the curb, behind the Pink Lady's head, is painted on the backdrop, and that's why it fits so awkwardly. The rear wall of the building seems to follow the shape of the round upper platform; that is an illusion too. Cover the stage with your hand or a piece of paper, and you can see that the rear wall is flat.

A walk around the painting

    Unlike The Garden of Earthly Delights, the center panel of Temptation looks like a story, but one written in a language that we have not yet learned to read. Let's decipher it one piece at a time. We'll take a turn around the painting, counterclockwise, starting in the lower left corner.

The red berry

Bosch, Temptation (detail).

    The large red object at the lower left has been called everything from a pumpkin to a pomegranate. Fraenger describes it as a mandragora fruit, and Delevoy says it is "the boiler of the alchemist's still, sometimes called in old texts 'the philosopher's cucurbit.'"    It is certainly a product of Bosch's bubbling imagination, but just as certainly it is not a pomegranate or a calabash—it has all the parts of a berry. The green leaflike things are sepals, and the sepals make up the calyx (Latin for chalice). Variants of this giant berry appear in several Bosch paintings, always in a fantasy scene, and always broken.
   An old person in a basket, brandishing a sword, emerges from one of the openings in the berry. Bax tells us that fifteenth-century people convicted of minor offenses were suspended over water in a basket, and were sometimes given a knife to cut the cord with—ending their punishment by ducking themselves.
   Below the basket is a goldfinch, a bird that appears also in The Garden of Earthly Delights. Wertheim Aymès calls it an emblem of the human soul, but in that case what is it doing under this berry?

Bosch, Temptation (detail).

    I think it is there, not because it is a goldfinch, but because it is the right shape to be a mirror image of the goose-rump to the right. The two together leave a negative shape that reminds me of an upside-down chalice. (That word again.)

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