Hieronymus Bosch, born Jeroen Anthonissen van Aken was an Early Netherlandish painter of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Many of his works depict sin and human moral failings.
Bosch used images of demons, half-human animals and machines to evoke fear and confusion to portray the evil of man.
His works contain complex, highly original, imaginative, and dense use of symbolic figures and iconography, some of which was obscure even in his own time.
Bosch produced several triptychs. Among his most famous is The Garden of Earthly Delights. This painting depicts paradise with Adam and Eve and many wondrous animals on the left panel, the earthly delights with numerous nude figures and tremendous fruit and birds on the middle panel, and hell with depictions of fantastic punishments of the various types of sinners on the right panel.
Bosch never dated his paintings and may have signed only some of them (other signatures are certainly not his). Philip II of Spain acquired many of Bosch's paintings after the painter's death; as a result, the Prado Museum in Madrid now owns several of his works, including The Garden of Earthly Delights.