Click Here to Visit Hell: An Interactive “Garden of Earthly Delights”

No one knows for sure when the late-medieval Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch was born—the date is usually given as circa 1450—but he definitely died five hundred years ago, in 1516. Considering that Bosch saw earthly life as a brief, sinful prelude to the many elaborate forms of suffering that would follow it for all eternity, this seems the more important date to commemorate, and his home town, the city of ’s-Hertogenbosch, is celebrating accordingly with a major exhibition of his work. But his most famous painting, “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” a triptych that shows a debauched world flanked by the chaste Eden that preceded it and the torments that await its depraved residents in Hell, isn’t on display; to see it up close, you have to go to the Prado, its home, which will host a Bosch exhibit later this spring, or, as I recommend on this week’s episode of “The New Yorker Radio Hour,” to your Web browser, where a high-res, interactive version of the painting co-created by NTR, the Dutch public broadcasting service, presents a magnificently intimate view of its intricate, freaky glory.