In 1463 a fire tore through the Duchy of Brabant town of 's-Hertogenbosch, burning roughly 4,000 houses to the ground while a 13-year-old boy named Hieronymus watched. He grew up to become Hieronymus Bosch, the painter whose name is synonymous with visions of hell. This episode dismantles the myth of the tortured outsider. Bosch came from a family of painters, married a wealthy older woman around 1480, and joined the elite Brotherhood of Our Lady, a devotional group that financed cathedral expansions and hosted banquets of roast swan. We argue that this social security is precisely what gave him the freedom to take enormous artistic risks.

We then look at what he did with the brush: rejecting the smooth, glass-like glazes of the Van Eyck tradition in favor of rough, visible impasto that brought the demonic down to a tactile, earthly level,  ...