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Here's the image we are discussing:
http://www.computus.org/journal/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/the-garden-of-earthly-delights.jpg
Shane you are wrong, deeply wrong---but for a highly interesting reason. I am putting on my art-nun habit as shown on PBS to explain. This gives me a chance to play art history professor.
First thing to notice is the painting is a tryptic, which means it could have been or probably was installed in a church and folded shut. The left swings counterclock wise and the right panel swings clockwise to cover the middle panel. This explains the 1/3, 2/3, 1/3 physical proporition. You have to be pretty good at geometry as a craftsman to construct this painting. You construct two panels of about any size of the same LxW and saw one in half. The latter are your side panels. The technology is high, because very likely the panels are painted wood. The wood panels are made in an interlocking well joined checkerboard (lapped join) of highly seasoned hard wood, sanded very smooth and coated with many thin layers of water based gesso--marble dust ground with water and binders (usually rabbit skin or some other organic glue). The painting materials were probably a combination of tempera and oil. The oil was used as a toned varnish (umber earth) overlay to help create a three dimensional effect. The more coats you apply the darker the image. This varnish was made with damar resin, soaked in turpintine which comes from distilled wood pulp---probably made locally. Dammar gum comes from a tree native to India and South Asia---which also might have been grown in the Middle East. Many of the pigments probably came from Italy.
The painting is also a material product that reflects-embodies the economic and trade system of the period. The main route in Germany to all the necessary materials not available in Germany was Venice---and or trade routes up the Danube. The Danube empties in the Black Sea. Either way you end up in Arab Muslim territory. Art history is actually driven by political economic geography. Nevermind.
Getting back to the narrative. The narrative of the right panel is the gardin of eden with adam and eve. All the visual elements of the panel are a fairequeen world of happiness with little birdies sailing blues skies, unicorns drink in the river with snowy egrets, antelop and domestic cattle. About the only predator is a small fox carrying a rat away to munch on. God, somehow mysteriously the son of god holds eve's hand to explain the apple tree behind them. A magic pink fountain of purity, health, and eternal youth feeds the river. Even the imaginary creatures coming out of a hole or cave in the earth seem beign curiousities. Blinking creatures in sunlight.
The central panel depicts the fall from grace. In the near foreground the carnal nature of fallen mankind is centered on eve eating the apple and adam sitting nearby. Notice also racial mixing on the foreground left, as well as many other sins. In the high background the pink fountain has been ruined.
On the left panel we have hell proper of endless night, endless war, and fear. And much of that world is associated with the begiling pleasures of music which isn't for God's glory but our own sensual pleasure.
In effect this is the illustrated hand book of Dante's Divine Comedy.
These kinds of panels were used to deliver sermons, illustrate the Catholic calendar which also reflects the Christian cosmology and lecture the feudal masses on their evil ways, and how to gain the road to redemption, follow church orders in the wonderous journey toward the hierarchy of beatitude.
The psychological depths of these narratives had a tremendous hold on the collective mind of society. We are no longer compelled by them entirely, although we have the residue to reconstruct them them. We still share much of that world. Just consider nudity itself is still subject to universal taboos almost everywhere.
CG
