While exploring the details of Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights, I noticed in the screencap above that the die on the woman's head has the "2" pip and the "5" pip on adjacent sides of the cube. I wonder if the positioning of the pips was not standardized in the 16th century, or whether Bosch was unfamiliar with dice and made a simple error. Anyone know?
It is traditional to assign pairs of numbers that total seven to opposite faces (it has been since at least classical antiquity)
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possibly the artist was ignorant of this, or possibly there is a significance to the numbers 5-4-2 that he wanted to convey subtly. (a way to remember his locker combination maybe?)
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