Hieronymus Bosch never dated a painting, and only two dozen or so panels are accepted as his. Those few pictures were nonetheless copied across Europe, hung in a Brussels palace and in a Spanish king's private rooms, and they still send people hunting for a key to his monsters. The twelve below follow him from a quiet start to the work of his sixties.
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A Town in Brabant and the Fate of the Soul
Bosch lived his whole life in 's-Hertogenbosch, a busy town of Brabant in what is now the southern Netherlands. His clients worried about one thing above all, where the soul goes when the body fails, and he answered with crowds of sinners, angels and devils, often leaving the outcome open.
Specialists credit him with 24 to 27 paintings, and none bears a date in his own hand, so every date on this page is a range. Most hang in Madrid, at the Prado, and the rest in Lisbon, Vienna, Venice, Berlin, Brussels, Paris and Washington.
The ranking climbs toward his most famous work, and together the twelve cover his career, from a calm, conventional panel of his early years to the work of his sixties. When an attribution is still disputed, the entry explains the dispute.
12. Ascent of the Blessed (about 1505 to 1515)
High on a narrow, dark panel, a round tunnel opens onto white light. Small naked figures drift up toward it, each held by one or two angels, and at its far end two figures stand in the glow. Ascent of the Blessed contains no monster at all, which already sets it apart among the pictures of a painter known for his devils.
The panel is one of a group of four narrow boards called the Visions of the Hereafter: the earthly paradise, this rising of the saved, the fall of the damned and hell. Bosch was then in his fifties or sixties, still working in his home town, and his clients knew his hells well. In this one he painted the opposite movement, upward.
That tunnel is the puzzle. Painting before modern times offers almost nothing like it, and no one knows what model Bosch followed. Scholars point instead to texts he could have read: the Vision of Tondal, a twelfth-century account of a knight guided through the afterlife, and Dante's Divine Comedy, which was translated into Dutch in 1484 in 's-Hertogenbosch itself.
The four boards soon left the North. In 1521, five years after Bosch's death, the Venetian writer Marcantonio Michiel described paintings by him in the Venice house of Cardinal Domenico Grimani, and scholars link these panels to that description. Their attribution was doubted for a time, and most specialists now accept them as his.
Five centuries on, the tunnel drew a new kind of reader. In 2012 a physician, Carl Vander Kooi, argued in a Wisconsin medical journal that the scene matches modern accounts of near-death experiences, and even suggested that Bosch had had one. That is one man's hypothesis, and nothing known about Bosch's life confirms or excludes it.
What strikes me most is simpler. The painter remembered for his demons left a picture in which the journey ends in pure light.
At a Glance
Artist: Hieronymus Bosch (about 1450 to 1516)
Painted: About 1505 to 1515
Medium: Oil on oak panel
Size: 88.8 × 39.9 cm (35 × 15 3/4 in)
Where to see it: Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice
11. Saint John on Patmos (about 1490 to 1495)
Right beside the worn signature "Jheronimus bosch," at the bottom of Saint John on Patmos, crouches a small creature with an insect's body, a bird's head, a human face and spectacles perched on its nose. This is probably the first painting Bosch ever signed. Why would he set a demon right next to his own name?