It is difficult to look through, or even look past, the peculiar images in Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings like The Garden of Earthly Delights and The Hay Wain. Figures like a knight with a tail, a nude man carrying a giant fish, a blue fairy with a trumpet for a nose and a peacock’s tail, and a stag with scaly, green legs are commonplace in Bosch’s macabre oeuvre. Anyone who has seen Bosch’s panoplies of the bizarre knows that Bosch is not a typical sixteenth-century painter. Perhaps this is why we cannot help but modernize him as much as possible, because he does not fit neatly into a prepackaged art-historical narrative about the Renaissance.

Since his death in 1516, descriptions of Bosch’s art have run the gamut from the psychedelic and the nonsensical to the proto-surrealist and the heretical. Scholars and artists marvel at the incongruous and topsy-turvy worlds he imagined. Even the sixteenth-century art historian Giorgio Vasari could not resist pigeon-holing Flemish masters like Bosch, whom Vasari found valuable only for their skill in depicting “fantasies, bizarre inventions, dreams, and suchlike imaginings.” In Bosch’s art, angelic and demonic figures peep out from behind the curtains; monstrous beasts torment holy saints; the lavish, the disgusting, and the glorious intermingle with unnerving familiarity; trees have ears and grass has eyes; and base, domestic drudgery bleeds into the spiritually luminous. Bosch strips even the most sacred scenes, like the passion of Christ, of any idealistic invention, preferring to depict the