Death of the Reprobate

In Bosch's world the moment of death was a battle, and this panel shows it directly. A dying man lies on his bed while an angel and a demon contend for his soul above him. It is only a fragment, the right wing cut from a larger altarpiece of the Last Judgment, and it once faced a scene of paradise where the saved climb toward the light. Late-medieval preaching taught that the deathbed was the soul's last and most dangerous test, and printed guides on the art of dying spread the idea widely in Bosch's lifetime. He painted it around 1490 in the Dutch town of 's-Hertogenbosch, whose name he took as his own. The demons crowding the bed are already recognisably his.