Visions of the Hereafter: Hell

In early 2016 these panels travelled from Venice to 's-Hertogenbosch, the Dutch town where Bosch lived and worked, for an exhibition marking 500 years since his death. They had just come out of about three years of study and cleaning by Italian restorers, helped by the Getty Foundation, and the museum now dates the set to roughly 1505 to 1515, the last decade of the painter's life. Of the four, this is Hell itself, which the museum describes as a sulphurous swamp full of monsters. At the top a black crag burns like a torch, throwing sparks into the dark. Below it the damned struggle in a river, one of them visible only as a raised arm, and in the lower right a whiskered, rat-like demon drives a blade into a man's throat. At the bottom left a naked man sits with his head in his hand, turned away from all of it, while a green, winged demon holds him by the wrist.