With his bizarre and fearsome images, the enigmatic master of apocalypse still speaks to us across five centuries. A half-millennium ago when Europe was moving out of the Middle Ages, Hieronymus Bosch, a prosperous painter and landowner in the duchy of Brabant in what is now the Netherlands, was widely admired as one of the cleverest, most pious, most perceptive, most apocalyptic masters of his times. He then slipped into several hundred years of obscurity. The symbolism and message of his terrifying masterpieces seemed bizarre and unsavory and even heretical. But he has been rediscovered in the 20th century. American tourists, who have little Bosch at home, now crowd through the museums of Europe to be awed by his great triptychs or to track down his smaller masterpieces...

Isolated and tormented, he once said that he was going to murder his paintings, but fortunately they are still with us. When I graduated from the City College of New York in 1952, my Uncle Morris had a heart-to-heart talk with me. He told me to work hard, get a steady job and not spend the rest of my life struggling in a Paris garret like his cousin Soutine. "Chaim Soutine, the painter?" I asked. "You mean you've heard of him?" replied Uncle Morris. My late Uncle Morris' ignorance might seem inexcusable. By 1952, Soutine's paintings graced the collections of the Phillips Gallery in Washington, the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York, the Chicago Art Institute and other museums throughout the United States. MOMA and the Cleveland Museum of Art had recently mounted a major retrospective of his work. His reputation had been set in the art world for many years...