Hieronymus Bosch’s extraordinary pictorial vocabulary had a widely felt impact on the visual arts that endured for decades after his death in 1516. His vividly imagined, tormented hellscapes — populated with hybrid creatures, unsettling inversions of the natural order, and grotesque punishments for sin — were extensively reproduced and reworked by painters active in the Netherlands throughout the sixteenth century. For contemporary audiences, Bosch’s visionary scenes offered both moral instruction and visual spectacle, and their ubiquity was further reinforced by the wide circulation of reproductive prints, which ensured that his disquieting imagery reached far beyond the confines of his native ’s-Hertogenbosch. By the mid-sixteenth century, “Boschian” imagery had become a distinctive artistic language in its own right, employed by numerous followers and workshop painters to meet the demand of a broad international market.

The present panel is a striking example of this phenomenon. It presents an apocalyptic scene taken directly from Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights triptych, painted circa 1490–1500 and now preserved in the Museo del Prado, Madrid. The composition almost exactly reproduces the lower register of the triptych’s right wing, devoted to the depiction of Hell and the torments reserved for sinful humanity. Rendered with painstaking fidelity, it transmits Bosch’s vision of retribution, in which the seven deadly sins and a host of moral failings are given concrete form as inventive yet terrifying punishments. Musical instruments — symbols of sensual excess and misplaced pleasure — are grotesquely transformed into engines of torture: a lute and a harp serve as racks for the suffering damned, while a figure is crushed beneath the hollow body of a giant flute. Close by, a monstrous demon wields a gaming board as a weapon, while playing cards tumble to the ground — a clear admonition against the dangers of gambling. Everywhere, Bosch’s characteristic inventiveness is on display in the hybridization of human, animal, and inanimate forms, lending the scene its surreal and otherworldly quality.

The panel not only conveys Bosch’s moral message but also demonstrates the dynamism of his legacy. By faithfully reproducing this section of the Garden of Earthly Delights, the anonymous follower situates himself within a network of Boschian production in which replicas, variants, and adaptations circulated widely among collectors. Such works were prized both for their fidelity to Bosch’s invention and for their capacity to distill its most spectacular passages for independent display.

Dendrochronological analysis of the oak support, conducted by Dr. Peter Klein, has established that the panel could have been created from 1502 onwards, placing its earliest possible execution during Bosch’s own lifetime. This early dating raises fascinating questions about the transmission of Bosch’s designs: whether this panel was produced by an artist closely connected to his workshop, or by an early imitator already responding to the unprecedented demand for “Boschian” imagery during the first decades of the sixteenth century. Either possibility underscores the rapidity with which Bosch’s visions entered the artistic mainstream, circulating not merely as isolated motifs but in entire compositional transpositions.