Hieronymus Bosch’s Five-Hundredth-Anniversary Homecoming

The Dutch city of ’s-Hertogenbosch is as unlike Hell as a place could be. A pleasant assemblage of canals, bikeways, and colorful buildings, it often seems to border on the heavenly, at least for a certain brand of bourgie millennial. Earlier this month, on the five-minute walk from the train station to my bright, modernist Airbnb, I encountered not one but two health-food shops, one of which specialized in artisanal yogurts. But quaint appearances notwithstanding, ’s-Hertogenbosch—known colloquially (and much more manageably) as Den Bosch—is also the birthplace and lifelong home of Hieronymus Bosch, the late medieval painter famed for his bloody, sensationalist depictions of Hell and its beastly denizens. Until this year, a bronze statue of the artist looming over the market square was the most visible sign that Bosch had once lived here. But this month, in honor of the five hundredth anniversary of his death, a major exhibition at the Noordbrabants Museum and several citywide celebrations of Bosch’s work have studded the innocuous landscape of his home town with tributes to the infernal bacchanals he depicted.