The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things

Bosch lays out a moral mirror in the form of a great staring eye: at its pupil the risen Christ shows his wounds above the warning 'Beware, beware, God sees.' Around the iris, seven wedge-shaped scenes act out the deadly sins in ordinary Netherlandish life - a drunkard, a vain woman at her glass, a wrathful brawl - each named in the world of the street rather than of allegory. The four corner roundels hold the Last Things that await every soul: Death, Judgment, Hell, and Glory. An early and relatively restrained Bosch, made for a tabletop, it watches the viewer as steadily as the viewer reads it.