Visioni dell'aldilà: il Paradiso terrestre

This is one of four narrow panels Bosch painted around 1500, imagining what becomes of a soul after death. This one shows the earthly paradise, a green rise where the saved are gathered before going higher, their last sins rinsed away at a fountain, angels tending them on the grass. Its companion panel is the more famous of the group, where naked souls drift up a long dark tunnel toward a disc of white light, an image people still reach for when they try to describe a near-death experience. The four came from the collection of a Venetian cardinal, Domenico Grimani, who died in 1523, and unusually they never left the city. They hang today in the Accademia in Venice, a rare survival of Bosch far outside his native north.