Whoever reads this, I beg their indulgence—what follows is the result of the impact that a five-hundred year-old painting can have on a young man nursing dreams of understanding the unknowable.

How could I have been so naïve?

As any visitor to the Prado knows, you can find Philip II’s tabla mortuoria in Gallery 56a, on the first floor, where it has been for almost half a century. The room is rectangular and very warm—heat pours out of ten grilles concealed around the marble baseboard.

In order to avoid running into the wrong person, I had crossed the entire museum quickly with a scarf wrapped around my lower face and my sunglasses on. The heat assaulted me as I entered. I realized that there were a number of small areas that feel quite different from the rest of the museum, perhaps due to the paintings they house, or perhaps due to something else difficult to pinpoint.

As it happened, on that Friday, standing in the middle of the macabre Gallery 56a and clutching my camera bag, I felt something strange. It might not seem like much to the reader, but as I started to remove my outer layer of clothing a weird feeling I had never felt before began to grow in my chest. It didn’t last long, but it was as though the heat, the rushing, the many eyes staring at me from the paintings, and my own irrational fear all overloaded my system, and I began to shake from head to toe. I felt dizzy, and put my bag down on the floor Then, after a minute, I started to recover, and as I felt myself stabilizing I became aware suddenly and very clearly—as I did right after I met Mister X—who I was and what I was doing there.

I took all this as a sign. Taking a slow, deep breath, I thought, I am ready! This time, my determination was like steel, like fire—a feeling impossible to put into words but very clear to me.

Everything is going to be all right, I said to myself.

As I reoriented myself, I became aware of a strange piece of furniture sitting in the middle of the gallery containing Bosch’s paintings. It was unlike anything else in the museum. It was a table, or rather a stand built to hold a painted panel which, as I would learn later, sat in Philip’s small study until the day he died.

The guides all refer to the panel as The Seven Deadly Sins. It is an unusual circular painting in miniaturist style on poplar wood depicting the temptations of the human soul. What especially catches the eye is that these miniature temptations, or sins, are arranged in a circle contained in a giant, hypnotic eye that looks as if it can see right into your soul.

Cave, cave. Deus videt,^I I read, and drawn by the ring of scenes I walked slowly around the table to take them all in.

I’d done something right, after all.

As I orbited slowly around the “eye of God” I had the sense that I was setting something in motion, though I wasn’t sure what. A perception? A vision? Or perhaps even the spirit that Juan Rof Carballo wrote about, which is supposed to live in that very table. Carballo was a psychiatrist and art expert, and he wrote about spirits that lived in the Prado. He imagined this one, the great spirit, “mocking the critics for not having lived a better life and for not having navigated the reefs and shoals of meditation, completely unaware of this other way of looking at the world.”²

I wondered, Should I open my mind?

Or continue spinning around this table like a dervish?

Or expand my consciousness by losing myself in these hallucinatory scenes all around me?

But how?

It suddenly hit me with a start that I was lost in my circling of this apocalyptic work—another example of the craziness I found myself in.

Two scrolls in the Bosch table carried Latin inscriptions from Deuteronomy which were quite unambiguous. The first, on one side of the table, said, “They are a nation lacking sense or prudence. If only they were wise, they would understand their end and would prepare for it.”³ Below, the second banner read, “I will hide my face from them, I will see what their end will be.”⁴

Uneasy suddenly, I lifted my gaze from the table and realized that everything in that gallery was in some way connected to death. Perhaps this was why this visit felt so different from all my previous ones.

Though most of the paintings in the room were by Bosch—The Haywain, Cutting the Stone, The Temptation of St. Anthony—there were another ten masterpieces by foreign painters as well. Brueghel’s The Triumph of Death and Patinir’s Landscape with St. Jerome and Landscape with Charon Crossing the Styx. And of course, dominating all of these unsettling images is The Garden of Earthly Delights, my true objective.

At two o’clock on a Friday afternoon, Madrid was poised to begin its weekend, and the place was deserted. There was no sign of anyone, so feeling a little bolder, I sat down on the floor in front of the famous triptych and waited for Fovel to appear. He’ll show up, I thought, confidently, he always does. I took my Canon from its case, checked it, adjusted the aperture for the gallery light, and held it, ready to shoot. Like a mantra I repeated to myself, Everything will work out.

Then I finally gave myself permission to lift my gaze to The Garden of Earthly Delights.

The left-hand panel appeared to be the most serene of the three. It occurred to me that if I concentrated on it for a minute it might help calm my nerves. It worked. The painting’s colors and the tranquil, nude figures managed to slow my heart and breathing. After a moment, I fixed my eyes on the constellation of details opening up before me.

The painting was a marvel. However many times I focused on one section, I always found something new to capture my attention, even though that first panel was the least busy one. In fact, it appeared to be fairly simple to understand. Compared to the others, it seemed to have hardly any figures in it, though as I looked I realized that this was a kind of optical illusion.

The panel features three main figures in the foreground, but a seemingly endless universe of animals unfolds behind them: elephants, giraffes, porcupines, unicorns, rabbits, and, in the back, a bear climbing a fruit tree.⁵ For some obscure reason, in the next panel to the right, the animals—particularly the birds—grow and become gigantic, but here they are small and not the main focus. Clearly the artist wanted us to look at the three figures. So I did.

Only one of the three is clothed. I take this to be God. He is holding a young, naked woman—Eve—by the wrist and presenting her to Adam, who is lying on the ground, presumably because his rib has just been taken out.

Something about it unsettles me.