The Extraction of the Stone of Madness

Bosch painted things nobody has satisfactorily explained. Hybrid creatures, giant fruit, figures crawling into eggs and shells, instruments of torture built from musical instruments. The Garden of Earthly Delights opens from a grey exterior of the world on the third day into three panels of paradise, excess and punishment. He worked in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, a prosperous Dutch town, belonged to a religious confraternity, married well and appears to have lived an entirely conventional life. That gap between the biography and the paintings is part of why the theories multiply. Readings have ranged from heretical sect membership to alchemy to straightforward moral instruction in a visual language his contemporaries understood better than we do. Philip II of Spain collected him seriously, which is how the best work ended up in the Prado. The Surrealists claimed him four centuries later.