El Bosco

Bosch painted some of the strangest images in all of European art: bird-headed demons swallowing the damned, a man's torso built like a cracked eggshell, hell as a city burning at night. It is tempting to picture the mind behind them as an outsider or a heretic.

He was the opposite kind of man. He spent his whole life in one Dutch town, 's-Hertogenbosch, which gave him his name, and as far as any record shows he never left it. He was a respected local figure and a sworn member of the Brotherhood of Our Lady, a conservative religious confraternity of clergy and leading townsmen, for whom he painted altarpieces.

His monsters were meant as sermons. The Garden of Earthly Delights, from around 1500, reads left to right from the calm of Eden through a crowded garden of naked pleasure-seekers into that fiery hell, a warning about where earthly appetite leads, made for people who shared his faith. We know almost nothing else about him, not his training and barely a firm date, only the pictures and the town.