I like the idea that Bosch depicted himself as half hooded man, half crustacean monster in the bottom right hand corner of the altarpiece that he painted for the Brotherhood of Our Lady, the guild of which he himself was a ‘sworn brother’ in 1487 and hosted its annual banquet in the summer of 1488.   It shows exactly the sort of respectable, bespectacled, thoughtful and earnest man one would expect him to have been as recorded by the church archives, but whose mind was nevertheless teeming with half crazy and fantastic visions of paradise and hell, populated by sarcastic images of his fellow citizens, the evidence for which is in the pictures themselves.