How Hieronymus Bosch Defied the Ideals of an Age: Bosch (c.1450-1516) did not celebrate human folly. He painted it as an affront, innate perhaps, to God’s order. Mankind, for him, found it so much easier to disobey God’s strictures than to obey them, and humanity was one long parade. The people in his pictures – the misers, the licentious, the drunken, as well as, far less often, the devout – are always on their way to one of only two destinations: heaven or hell.
