Who painted The Garden of Earthly Delights?

Hieronymus Bosch, around 1500, and almost nothing is known about him - no letters, no notebooks, no contemporary account of what he meant. He signed few works, dated none, and lived his whole life in a provincial Dutch town, which leaves the most inventive images in European art with no author's voice attached.

It is a triptych: Eden on the left, an enormous garden of naked figures and impossible fruit in the centre, and a hell on the right full of instruments of torture made from musical instruments, a man crucified on a harp, and a bird-headed figure eating people. Nobody agrees what it argues. It has been read as a warning against sin, as a heretical celebration of it, as alchemy, as astrology, and as a wedding gift, which is a startling range of readings for one object.

The details keep producing modern discoveries. In 2014 a student noticed that the score written across a damned figure's buttocks in the hell panel is legible music, transcribed it, and it circulated as the 600-year-old butt song from hell - which is exactly the sort of thing Bosch appears to have put in expecting almost nobody to look that closely.