Museo del Prado — Madrid, Community of Madrid, Spain

The story behind it is a man asleep on a rock dreaming of a ladder with angels going up and down it. Most painters put the whole ladder in, from what I've read — there's barely a hint of it here, which I think is the better call.

Off in the shadows on the left, apparently that's Goya himself, working at an easel — same trick Velázquez pulled with Las Meninas a century before.

He served at the Spanish court for years after being brought there as an adult — apparently somewhere between an entertainer and a companion, depending who you ask.

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 little girl in white is a Spanish princess, surrounded by her maids, a dog, and two court dwarfs who were apparently real people with names of their own, kept around for entertainment — which reads differently now than it must have then. There's also a small mirror on the back wall that, from what I can tell, reflects the king and queen, apparently right about where they'd have been standing to watch all this get painted.

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.

It was made to order, from what I've read — he put the idea to the new government himself once the French had been pushed back out of Madrid, and got it paid for. There's a companion picture the same size showing the day before, when the fighting started.

They say this kind of fine dress and direct stare was normally reserved for nobility — here it's just a painter claiming it for himself.

This wasn't made for anyone to see — he painted it straight onto a wall of his own house, in his seventies, deaf and unwell, and it only got peeled off and moved to canvas after he was gone. Nobody seems to agree on what he meant by it, or whether he meant anything at all.

Supposedly death coming for everyone regardless of rank was a stock subject back then — a 'dance of death' you'd see on church walls and in cheap prints — and this drags it out of the church and into open country. It went through a long restoration not many years ago, which is apparently why the colours come across as strong as they do now.

These weren't painted on canvas at all — they went straight onto the plaster walls of the house he was living in, and from what I can find nobody thinks they were meant for anyone else to see. They got cut off the walls and stuck onto canvas decades later, which supposedly explains why they look this rubbed-out and battered.

This wasn't his first attempt at the subject, from what I can tell — he'd already made a widely copied engraving of the same scene a few years earlier, and this panel pair reworks it in paint. That little tag hanging from the branch is apparently his own signature, tucked right into the scene.