Hear the Song Written on a Sinner’s Buttock in Hieronymus Bosch’s Painting The Garden of Earthly Delights

There’s something unusually exciting about finding a hidden or discreetly placed element in a well-known painting. I can only imagine the thrill of the physician who first noticed the curious presence of a human brain in Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam: God, his retinue of angels, and their cloak map neatly onto some of the main neural structures, including the major sulci in the cerebellum, the pituitary gland, the frontal lobe, and the optic chiasm. It’s hard to gauge Michelangelo’s motivation for doing so...