The Structure of the Central Panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights: A Functional Reconstruction of Compositional Hierarchy

Although the central panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights is perceived as a coherent visual whole, it lacks an obvious compositional center and is commonly interpreted as a polycentric image. This study argues that its visual organization is nevertheless governed by a reconstructable functional hierarchy. To investigate this structure, the study develops a functional method based on the analysis of compositional operators and the viewer’s perceptual route. The method is first applied to selected fifteenth-century paintings and then used to examine the central panel of Bosch’s triptych. The analysis demonstrates that Bosch preserves the traditional principle of compositional hierarchy while transforming its spatial organization: instead of unfolding along the vertical axis, the hierarchy is reconfigured through pictorial depth. The study therefore offers a new explanation of the compositional coherence of the central panel. It also extends the concept of visual engineering by treating compositional hierarchy as both a mechanism of visual organization and an independent object of art-historical analysis.