Visio Tondali

Down at the lower right, beside the angel and the naked man kneeling with his hands together, the panel letters its own title in gold, Visio Tondaly. The story was already three centuries old by then, the vision of Tondal, an Irish knight carried through hell in his sleep. The poem was printed in Antwerp in 1482, and the Prado counts it among the written sources behind Bosch's work. What the copyist made of it is a small panel crowded with the machinery of punishment, a vast head lying on its side with a tavern inside its mouth, boats loaded with severed heads, gamblers still at their cards and dice in the corner. A royal inventory of 1745 described the thing as strange dreams of Bosch, but very carefully finished. When Ferdinand the Seventh's pictures were listed in 1834, this one was in the Sala Reservada, the locked room the museum kept for paintings it judged unfit to show.