Il Paradiso e l'Inferno

These two panels are the surviving wings of a small altarpiece made in the southern Netherlands in the early 1500s, by a painter working closely in the manner of Hieronymus Bosch rather than by Bosch himself. Whoever made them was copying and recombining ideas from Bosch's own Haywain triptych, which hangs nearby in the same museum in Madrid. On one wing is paradise. On the other, hell. The paradise here is painted darker and gloomier than Bosch's original, which some read as a reminder that even Eden already carried the shadow of the first sin. Bosch's inventions were so popular after his death in 1516 that workshops turned out versions like this for decades.