OnePotato
Debra said:....I think it's legitimate and interesting to ask, "What might a heretic see in looking at Bosch?" This doesn't require establishing or even claiming that Bosch intended heretical ideas. It could be an exercise in the flexibility of symbols, an intellectual game....
Why have you singled out heretics, and why single out Bosch?
Once you stop to consider what heretics "might have seen" in other works of art, the "significance" quickly fades.
"Perhaps" The Garden of Eden is deliberately strange looking because it it not of an earthly location.
"Perhaps" Bosch is creating a vision of someplace that is by definition unfamiliar looking, and more-or-less unfathomable.
How would YOU paint Paradise?
Probably not as an ordinary pretty landscape.
EDIT, upon further reflection:
Bosch certainly didn't paint it as an ordinary place.
As I understand it, most churches did not hire heretics to paint for them, and they did not blindly accept works that didn't make perfect sense to them.