The Seven Deadly Sins

Bosch died in 1516, and pictures in his manner kept selling long after him. Around 1560 a Spanish writer on painting, Felipe de Guevara, complained that imitators were putting Bosch's name on their own work. This panel belongs to that afterlife. The oak it is painted on points to about 1520 to 1530, and the painted signature is not accepted as his. Most scholars now give it to a follower, though a few have argued for Bosch himself or his workshop. The painter clearly knew Bosch's round tabletop of the Seven Deadly Sins, and here the sins sit inside an open globe, spread across the whole world. Sloth is a man asleep on a pillow. Greed is a pawnbroker over his coins, with a weeping woman pledging a belt. Christ on the cross stands on top, and the globe balances on the rocks of hell. Infrared shows a squared grid beneath the paint, so it may copy a lost Bosch design. It has been in a private collection in Geneva since 1982.