The Fall of the Rebel Angels

For centuries this panel hung under the name of Hieronymus Bosch, the great inventor of monsters, and it is easy to see why. Then in 1898 restorers cleaning the lower left corner found a date and a signature under the grime, 1562 and Bruegel, and the picture changed hands to a painter working two generations after Bosch died. Bruegel fills it with the falling angels turning into hybrid things as they drop, part insect, part fish, part fruit. Down near the bottom, look for the armadillo. That animal lives only in the Americas, and in 1562 it was a fresh curiosity in Europe, known from the reports of explorers. Bruegel dropped one of the newest creatures anyone in Antwerp had heard of into a scene from the Book of Revelation.