Our 52:52:52 project, launching on social media in 2026, will help you address 52 issues with 52 responses over 52 weeks.
Welcome
On Hieronymus Bosch
Over the half-millennium since Hieronymus Bosch painted it, The Garden of Earthly Delights, which I revisited in the Museo del Prado in Madrid in January 2026, has produced an ever-widening array of interpretations. Is it “a painting about sexual freedom”? A “medieval acid trip”? An “erotic fantasy”? A “heretical attack on the church”? The work of “a member of an obscure free-love cult”? James Payne, the London curator behind the Youtube channel Great Art Explained, argues in an in-depth video analysis, that the late-15th or early-16th century triptych as, “pure and simply, hardcore Christianity.”
Yet is painting a condemnation of sin or a celebration of hedonism? Art historians still aren’t sure.
For the 500-year anniversary of Bosch‘s death, the MOTI Museum in Holland commissioned a modern re-interpretation of the painting.
PARADISE - A contemporary interpretation of The Garden of Earthly Delights from STUDIO SMACK on Vimeo.
Topics
Spaces
Signifiers
Please see below selected recent clarity-related change.
See also:
February 22026
- From the perspective of environmental psychology, we benefit from spaces of high perceptual clarity with limited stimuli, coherent forms and minimal clutter. Research has shown that such clarity reduces mental load, meaning that the mind doesn’t have to sort through endless visual information, and the nervous system can settle into a slower rhythm
November 2025