Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights shows a world waking up to the future | Jonathan Jones

With its giant strawberries and nudity, Hieronymus Bosch’s painting has been seen as a celebration and warning about sin – but it’s really about a Renaissance-era curiosity that helped better explain the world

The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch is a wonder of art. By that I don’t just mean it is one of the world’s greatest paintings. It is also something we wonder at, astonished, like a rare relic in a cabinet of bizarre curiosities. What is happening in this outrageous display of unfettered imagination and what can it possibly mean?

Last year, the 500th anniversary of the death of Bosch was marked by a thrilling exhibition of his paintings and drawings in his home town Den Bosch, in the southern Netherlands. Yet one masterpiece was missing. The Garden of Earthly Delights does not travel from Madrid, where it hangs in the Prado museum. A book of the Prado’s own Bosch quincentenary published this month by Thames and Hudson makes up for that absence. It explores the latest discoveries and theories about Bosch’s most stupendous work with accurate colour images of many of its hypnotic details and infrared images of the three wooden panels that make up this religious – or pseudo-religious – painting.

Related: Art researchers uncover 'lost' Hieronymus Bosch – and sausage link

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