Inquisitor 1450: Triptych by Phi

In a hurry as I’m away next week when this blog is due to be published. I started to write the blog before completing the grid, but had solved the outstanding issues by the time this introduction to the blog was finished.

A long preamble:
The grid falls into three sections. Down clues are normal, as are Across entries — including the unclued trio. which form the four words of a title without its definite article (they have OTHER unchecked letters). Wordplay in each Across clue references an extra letter not entered in the grid. In clue order these extra letters provide indications as to the two ways Down entries are entered in the central section, one of each way in each column. The Down entries in the outer sections are entered in two further thematic ways. Bracketed numbers are entry lengths.

Quite a few of the across clues yielded quickly and the left hand side of the puzzle opened up with the down entries of the first three columns entered from bottom to top. I deduced a triptych of  3 columns, 7 columns, 3 columns.

The central entries seemed to be anagrams (soiled, linger etc.), but a further reading of the rubric meant that there were two different methods of entry. By this point I had enough of the extra letters from the Across clues to give me CA?E?IN??T?I??ED. Assuming two words, and guessing that the anagrams were referred to by CAPERING, this left ?T?I??ED – STRIPPED? I tried adding one letter to the beginning and end of some of my partial entries and discovered that this led to sensible answers e.g. (b)ITUME(n) at 25D (v)ENALL(y) at 4D.

Progress at last! 1A was GA?D/E???? (the D or E from [SOILED]* at 3D) so I tried Googling (remember I was in a hurry, so hope I can be forgiven) “garden triptych” and was rewarded with The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch, painted in about 1500 and on display in the Prado, Madrid (which I have seen, though would probably not have remembered, were it not for the magic of the Internet!).

The grid is not quite the right shape – the central panel of the original is square and the two side panels exactly half the central, as they are doors that close. The diagram is pretty close though, and Phi can be forgiven! The unchecked cells in the three unclued entries are ROTEH in grid order or OTHER as indicated in the preamble.

The left hand panel of the Bosch triptych is about Eden, so the rising Down entries indicate, perhaps, the rise to heaven – and one of them is PARADISE. The right hand panel is to do with Hell, and each Down entry has DIS added to it. The central panel is of many naked (stripped) dancing (capering) figures.

Fiendishly clever, Phi, though as I managed to spend an hour or so watching a plasterer make good a kitchen wall, drive for two hours to collect a mislaid tablet computer, fill up the car, mow the lawn, listen to the test match, cook supper, watch the end of the Olympic cycling road race and solve it by Saturday evening, I suppose it can’t have been one of Phi’s most difficult puzzles.

In the table below for the Down entries, I have presented the clues, panel by panel in top-to-bottom, left-to-right sequence rather than the conventional one, to preserve the links given in the rubric. The grid colours are for illustration only.