Couple in amniotic bubble (The Garden of Earthly Delights detail)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Featured:  Illustration: Portrait fantaisiste du marquis de Sade (1866) by H. Biberstein |
The amniotic bubble[1] is a detail from the The Garden of Earthly Delights tryptich by Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. It is a detail from the central "Earth" panel.
It depicts a nude man and nude woman frolicing within a transparent sphere. The figures's arms are entwined, while the female's head bends towards the male's attentive mouth.
Some historians have stated that what appear to be cracks in the sphere, may forecast the fragility of joyful passion.
As Paul Rumsey and others have noted, the lines on the surface are curved like veins, so it looks exactly like an amniotic sac. And so not cracks, not about the 'fragility of love'.
"Perhaps, as it comes from a flower, and has part of the flower inside it, it should be seen as organic, a mixture of the vegetable (flower / fruit) and the animal (womb) with the human figures like the seeds, - human erotism projected onto the cycles and forms of nature, and vice versa." (Rumsey)
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