Alive
Painted around 1505. Souls are going up through the dark. Angels carry them in pairs, out of the black at the bottom of the panel towards a shaft of light at the top. Two figures already stand inside the light, and nobody is holding them. That tunnel is why people know this panel. It is one of four, called the Visions of the Hereafter. The other three are less kind: the garden of Eden, the fall of the damned, and hell. The panels have had a strange life. A Venetian called Marcantonio Michiel wrote in 1521 that he had seen Bosch paintings in Cardinal Grimani's house. Grimani died that year and left them to the city. They sat in a store room in the Doge's Palace for over 100 years. Someone found them again in the late 1600s. They were taken to Vienna, and came back to Venice in 1919. Some experts still doubt that Bosch painted them. The oak panel is 86.5 cm tall and 39.5 wide.
look closer
Two figures already stand inside the light, flat silhouettes with nobody holding them. The net of cracks across the disc is the paint's own age.