Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–1516) was born and lived nearly his entire life in 's-Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands. Surviving documentation about him is exceptionally thin; his birthdate, training, and patronage network are largely conjectural. Most of his works are unsigned and undated — the Garden of Earthly Delights has been placed between roughly 1490 and 1510 by dendrochronological analysis of its oak panels.

The triptych closed shows the third day of creation in a near-monochrome grisaille: a crystal sphere holding God's not-yet-watered earth. Opened, three panels appear: on the left, Adam and Eve in Paradise; in the centre, the chaotic 'garden' of naked figures, oversize fruits, and bird-mounts; on the right, a red-and-black Hell with a burning city and demons torturing souls with musical instruments. The whole measures 220 × 389 cm.

Its interpretation remains contested. The traditional reading: the central panel represents the temptation of sin, hence the descent into the Hell of the right wing — a moral warning. Some contemporary historians read it otherwise: the centre is not a warning but a hypothetical depiction of humanity's pre-Fall state, to be received by the viewer as a dream allegory. A third school once associated Bosch with the heretical Adamite sect and read the centre as Paradise's earthly continuation — there is no documentary evidence for this.

The painting can be tracked from 1517 onward: bought by Philip II of Spain, kept at El Escorial, and moved in 1939 to its present home in the Prado. The familiar description of Bosch as 'surrealist five hundred years early' is a modern framing; in his own century he was probably read as orthodox Christian didacticism — though even that certainty is not really certain.