Hierony­mus Bosch’s mas­ter­piece of grotes­querie, The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights, con­tains a young God, Adam and Eve, over­sized fruits and musi­cal instru­ments, owls, tor­tured sin­ners, some­thing called a “tree man” whose body con­tains an entire tav­ern, a defe­cat­ing avian dev­il eat­ing a human being, and “frol­ick­ing, obliv­i­ous fig­ures engaged in all sorts of car­nal plea­sures,” as art his­to­ri­an Beth Har­ris puts it in the new Smarthis­to­ry video above. Through­out its fif­teen min­utes, she and her col­league Steven Zuck­er explain as much as pos­si­ble of this jam-packed trip­tych — not that even a life­time would be long enough to under­stand it ful­ly. “Bosch con­founds our abil­i­ty to even talk about what we see,” says Har­ris. “His imag­i­na­tion has run wild. He’s just invent­ed so many things here that we could nev­er even have thought about in our wildest imag­i­na­tions.” Zuck­er cites one art-his­to­ry the­o­ry that this trip­tych rep­re­sents Bosch’s attempt to “ele­vate the visu­al arts to the lev­el of cre­ativ­i­ty that was per­mit­ted in lit­er­a­ture.” Even in Bosch’s late fif­teenth and ear­ly six­teenth cen­turies, writ­ers had …