Hieronymus Bosch painted monsters, demons, and torments so vivid and so strange that art historians have spent five centuries trying to figure out what he meant. The Garden of Earthly Delights remains one of the most analyzed and least understood paintings in Western art. His nightmares looked like nothing anyone had seen before, and they still look like nothing else.

This episode traces Bosch from his life in the quiet Dutch city of ‘s-Hertogenbosch through his membership in a religious brotherhood, his major triptychs, and the surreal imagination that made him a favorite of Philip II of Spain.

• The Garden of Earthly Delights is one of the most studied and debated paintings in the history of Western art
• Philip II of Spain collected his work obsessively, and many of his greatest paintings remain in Madrid
• Almost nothing is known about his personal life despite his enormous fame
• The Surrealists claimed him as a forerunner five hundred years after his death