A god eating his child on the wall of a dining room, a severed head painted on a parade shield, skeletons tending a garden: eight paintings that have unsettled viewers for centuries, and what their painters meant by them.

Hieronymus Bosch's Ship of Fools is a small oak panel from around 1500, and only a fragment of a larger, mostly lost whole. A slow, symbol by symbol reading of the boat that handed Sebastian Brant's Das Narrenschiff its most famous face: the singing monk and nun, the roasted goose on the mast, the owl in the leaves, and the one sober fool who turns out to be the sanest passenger aboard.