The Ship of Fools
Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450-1516) · c. 1490-1500
A small boat drifts nowhere, its mast a living tree, its crew a company of the self-deceived. At the centre a nun plucks a lute and a friar sings with her, mouths wide open, across a table where a bowl of cherries stands untouched by anyone with any sense. A cake or pancake dangles from a cord and two heads strain upwards to bite it without using their hands. One man has climbed the mast towards a roasted fowl tied there and is sawing at the rope; another vomits over the side; swimmers in the water beg for more drink. Perched apart on a branch, cup in hand and back turned, sits the only figure wearing a fool's cap.
The tall narrow shape is the first clue that you are looking at a fragment. The panel was once the upper part of a wing from a dismantled triptych, and the lower section, the Allegory of Gluttony and Lust, is now at the Yale University Art Gallery, while the companion wing, Death and the Miser, hangs in Washington. Bosch paints thinly and very fast, sketching faces with a few loaded strokes so that the drunken flush and the open throats read instantly at arm's length. An owl, his usual emblem of ambiguous wisdom or of folly, sits half hidden in the leaves.
Sebastian Brant's satire Das Narrenschiff, published at Basel in 1494 and a European bestseller, made the ship of fools a common image, though Bosch was probably drawing on the same broad stock of proverb and carnival rather than illustrating the book. The picture reached the Louvre in the early twentieth century and remains one of very few securely autograph Bosch paintings in France.
Did You Know? The panel is only the top half of its original wing, and the rest of the scene, complete with the same boat's underside, hangs at Yale.
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