Le Portement de croix

This is one of the most unsettling faces in early Netherlandish painting. Christ, eyes shut, is pressed into the centre of a shallow crowd of leering, gap-toothed heads packed edge to edge, closer to caricatures than to real men, jeering as he carries the cross. It has long been catalogued under the name of Hieronymus Bosch, the painter from the Low Countries whose hell-scenes made his reputation, and the Ghent museum still shows it as his. But its attribution has been argued over for decades. The research project that examined all his surviving work concluded this is not from Bosch's own hand, and probably a copy made after a Bosch design, painted a generation or so later. The dating is genuinely uncertain. Whoever held the brush, the invention behind those crowding grotesque faces is what people remember from it.