Hieronymus Bosch

This one was reportedly once catalogued as a copy of a lost original; now the thinking is it's based on one of his drawings instead — the credit's still murky.

This was originally the side panel of a bigger triptych — the centre piece is long gone, so nobody's totally sure what completed the scene.

This started life, from what's recorded, as a tabletop rather than a wall hanging — you were meant to look down into it like a dinner plate. Whether it's actually by Bosch himself or a workshop follower has been argued over for more than a century.

The two outer panels fold shut over the middle like doors, and the backs of them are painted grey — a world with the colour not switched on yet. Whether the middle is a warning about giving in to temptation or something a lot fonder than that, no one seems to have settled in five hundred years.

I couldn't find a full backstory on this one — it's usually filed alongside Bosch's other moralizing scenes about drinking and excess, but details on why it was made are thin.

The gold leaf here is heavier than usual for Bosch, from what I can tell — most of his other work skips it.

This is one panel out of four on what happens after you die — the other three are a lot less pleasant, and they were probably the wings of something bigger that's since been broken up. Wikipedia says not everyone is convinced he painted them at all.