The imagery of Jheronimus Bosch, full of fantastical monsters, bizarre creatures and curious incidents has captured viewers’ imagination for centuries. Bosch repeatedly painted apocalyptic scenes. However his version of the Last Judgement deviates fundamentally from the prevailing iconography of his age. The artist breaks with tradition by showing the earth populated by the demons and damned souls, but he leaves out the resurrected dead. Equally striking is the worldly nature of the pleasures to which the inhabitants of paradise abandon themselves on the left-hand panel. The greatest attention is devoted to the omnipresence of evil and the cruelty of humankind. In comparison with the blessed, the damned form a huge majority, illustrating a veritable compendium of hellish punishments on earth. In its bizarre and fantastical representation of beatitude and damnation, the Last Judgement is the perfect vehicle for Bosch’s vision and forms an exceptional work in the history of religious painting.
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