bosch and the narrenschiff-a problem in relationships-charles d. cuttler

8/13/2019 Bosch and the Narrenschiff-A Problem in Relationships-Charles D. Cuttler

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Bosch and the Narrenschiff: A Problem in RelationshipsAuthor(s): Charles D. CuttlerSource: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 51, No. 3 (Sep., 1969), pp. 272-276Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3048632.

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272 The Art Bulletin

BOSCH AND THE NARRENSCHIFF:A PROBLEM IN RELATIONSHIPS

CHARLES D. CUTTLER

The painting in the Louvre generally known as the Ship of Fools(Fig. 1), by Hieronymus Bosch, presents a moralizing satire. Almostall comment on the work has stressed this since LafondI in 1914related the painting to Sebastian Brant's Narrenschiff, first pub-lished in 1494 in Basel by Bergmann von Olpe. Many of its illustra-tions have been attributed to the young Diirer.2 Other printingsfollowed, authorized and unauthorized. In 1497 Jacob Locher trans-lated the Narrenschiff into Latin, greatly aiding its spread to othercountries. Less than a decade after its first appearance numerousvernacular versions that stemmed from Locher's translation camefrom the presses; for example, the Flemish version published byMarchand in Paris in 1500, and based on a French edition of 1498by Josse Bade. Bosch could have known the original edition of 1494,considered by many a terminus post quem for the painting, as wellas the Marchand Flemish version of 1500. Either 1494 or 1500 is apossible date for the Louvre panel in relation to Bosch's develop-ment.

The painting has resisted identification with any tradition otherthan literary. No close parallels to its composition have been citedexcept for drawings and engravings made after it.3 Twelve figuresare found in the painting; the most prominent are a Franciscanmonk and a nun who plays a lute. They sing merrily, a pancakedangling before them; three other figures accompany them, one thesteersman who neglects his duties to join the singing. In the bowof the boat a Beguine seems to be offering a wine jug to a man inthe bottom of the boat; seemingly he has already had too much,as has certainly the man leaning over the stern. The sole figure seenin the act of drinking is a fool, who is smaller than the other figures,and is seated backwards on a dead tree branch growing out of theboat. Another figure climbs the mast, which is shrouded in branches.Knife in hand, he is about to cut down the cooked goose tied to themast. Above, a banner floats in the breeze, its insignia a crescent.Higher up are more branches, in the midst of which appears, seem-ingly, an owl. Bosch's painting gives prominence to the religiousfigures, and so is much in keeping with Brant and his literary ante-cedents, who also excoriate and satirize the clergy. As in the Nar-renschiff, Bosch has put the clerical and the lay populace in the sameboat, and, like Brant, has accentuated the sensual pleasures in theoverindulgence of which mankind is bound to sin. The parallelstrongly suggests the influence of the Narrenschiff on Bosch.

In 1919 Demonts related the painting to the illustrations in JosseBade's French edition of 1498, and interpreted the theme as a satire

on gluttony. He considered the mast a tree symbolic of good andevil, of the Tree of Knowledge, and considered the owl, which hecalled a skull, to be the serpent.4 After associating the work withthe several later engravings whose lost originals have been attrib-uted to Bosch, he concluded by proposing that the painting wasoriginally part of a triptych illustrating the Narrenschiff.

This interpretation was generally accepted until Enklaar in 1933published a study of a late medieval society that organized burlesquecarnivals and took the name of Blaue Schuit, or Blue Boat, follow-ing a poem of 1413 by Jacob van Oestvoren of Zeeland.5 Enklaardeveloped further in 1937 the idea of a Society of the Blue Boatwhose bohemian members came from all classes, including theclergy. As evidence that the society participated in carnivals witha boat mounted on a wagon as its entry, he cited a sixteenth-centurymanuscript from Nuremberg, the Schbnbartbuch, which describesthe annual masquerades celebrating the return of spring. One of itsminiatures, illustrated by Enklaar, shows a blue boat on wheelspulled by ropes; the boat flies a pennant with a crescent on it.Attacked by armed men, the boat is defended by a fantasticallydressed crew.

Not all writers have accepted Enklaar's conclusions: for onething, Bosch's painted boat is not blue; for another, the boat is notunder attack, nor is it on land. Bax in 1948 rejected both theDemonts and Enklaar theories, preferring to see in the Louvre paint-ing stereotypes emblematic of folly, intemperance, and debauchery,and buttressing his thesis with exhaustive references to popularNetherlandish literature.7 He followed Charles de Tolnay in consid-ering the mast and branches symbolic of the May Tree.8 In 1962Helne Adhemar concluded that the Louvre painting is not a Shipof Fools, since only one figure is dressed in fool's costume; that notonly do the singing and drinking figures make a satirical statementagainst monks, but also the work is a satire against drunkennessitself, of which monks were often accused. The monks lose controlof their senses (she notes the redness of the faces), for drunkennessengenders folly; and like sparrows they eat cherries. The dissolutemonks neglect the boat, which she sees as the Church, and the soulswho cling to it. One of these she sees in the naked figure in thewater. The mast-tree is understood by her as a tree of evil, and theyoung peasant climbing the mast to steal the goose is, she thinks,taking advantage of the singer's drunken obsession that they cansatisfy their passions by catching and eating the pancake.1?To support these varied interpretations of Bosch's meaning onlya minimum of visual evidence has been put forward. In my opinion,however, Bosch's paintings satisfy the iconographer's dictum thatevery work of art has its progenitor or progenitors in other worksof art. It seems appropriate, therefore, to emphasize that Bosch's

1 P. Lafond, Hieronymus Bosch, son art, son influence, ses disciples,Brussels-Paris, 1914, 79ff.2 E. Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Direr, Princeton, 4th ed.,1955, 29ff.3 For a summary of opinion on the painting and relationships to it,see H. Adhemar, Le musee national du Louvre, Paris, I, Les primitifsflamands,I, Corpus de la peinture des anciens pays-bas meridionauxaux quinziemesidcle, 5, Brussels, 1962, 20-32.4 L. Demonts, Deux primitifs neerlandais au Musee du Louvre, Ga-

zette des Beaux-Arts,6th ser., 15, 1919, 4ff.5 D. T. Enklaar, De Blaue Schuit, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, 48,1933, 37-64, 145-61.6 Idem,VarendeLuyden,Assen, 1937; 2nd ed., 1956, 90ff., and fig. 5.7 D. Bax, Ontcifferingvan JeroenBosch, The Hague, 1948, 189-94.8 C. de Tolnay, HieronymusBoschi,Basel, 1937, 68, and n. 112; 2nd ed.,Baden-Baden,1965, 347-49.9 Adhemar, Corpus,29.o10 bid.


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BOSCH INARRENSCHIFF 273

artistic sources must be sought first in visual imagery, and onlysecondarily in literary material, despite the obvious fact that a num-ber of his works are program paintings.Some of the motifs in the Louvre painting have striking connec-tions with Flemish manuscript illuminations of Bosch's own day.Monks in a boat shown parallel to the picture plane, as in Bosch'spanel, can be found in several manuscripts that illustrate theMiracles de Nostre Dame. One of these, now in Paris, and probablymade in the Tavernier shop in Bruges in the 1470's, shows a groupof monks on a pleasure outing in a boat (Fig. 2).11 They are fright-ened by the sight of devils carrying off the soul of an apostate. Infear of drowning from demonic attack, they pray to the Virgin foraid, which is given to them.12 The scene is clearly not an exactparallel to Bosch's painting, but it does portray monks in a boatengaged in what the text implies is pleasure-seeking, and thus sin-ful behavior. From this we may conclude that a boating party andsinful monks were readily associated ideas in Bosch's time.A related kind of scene, that is, a boating party without monks,allows a closer approach to the Louvre painting. Another manu-script from Bruges, roughly contemporaneous with that just dis-cussed, contains a different boating scene. This appears in the lowermargin of the Visitation scene in an horae in the Musee Conde,Chantilly (Fig. 3).13 Youthful couples are seen in the boat, andbranches as well. A similar scene is found in another horae, at-tributed in part to the Master of the Dresden Prayerbook, whichwas sold from the Dyson Perrins Collection at Sotheby's in 1958.14In the calendar illustration for the month of May young couples aremaking music in a boat on a canal.

A boating party as the May calendar illustration became popularin Bruges horae. The Chantilly May miniature shows a pair oflovers seated on the ground, but apparently it was made (seeminglyit dates from the early 1480's) before the boating scene becamecanonical for May illustrations in manuscripts from the Ghent-Bruges region. However, by the end of the first decade of the six-teenth century, a boating scene as the May calendar illustration isa constant in works from the shop of Simon Bening, Bruges' leadingilluminator. The scene is found in a closely related group of sump-tuous manuscripts: the Breviary in the Musee Mayer van den Bergh,Antwerp; the Golf Book in the British Museum, London (so calledbecause one of its miniatures shows a golfing scene); the Hennessy

Hours in the Bibliotheque Royale, Brussels; and the Da CostaHours, Morgan Library, New York.15 These manuscripts have beenattributed to Simon Bening or Gerard Horenbout, or to the twoartists in collaboration,16 and their May calendar scenes depict amusical boating party with one or more polers, male and femalemusic-makers (usually flutists and lutenists), and leafy boughs inthe boat. The Morgan Library manuscript illumination (Fig. 4) evenshows a bottle hung over the side of the boat to keep its contentscool, as in Bosch's painting.17Bosch's influence does not appear in these works, even where, ifthere were to be any influence, one would expect it-in the treat-ment of such a subject as the Fall of the Rebel Angels.18 The styleof the miniatures can be traced to the greatest innovator of the lateGhent-Bruges school of illumination, the Master of Mary of Bur-gundy, who has often been associated with Sanders Bening ofGhent, the father of the illuminators Simon and Paul Bening ofBruges. It is worth mentioning that the Master of the DresdenPrayerbook was an occasional co-worker with the Master of Maryof Burgundy.

It has been seen that at the end of the fifteenth century and inthe early years of the sixteenth, a musical boating party was sub-stituted in May miniatures for one of the several earlier icono-graphic norms. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, Mayscenes show a mounted young man hawking, as in the RohanHours, a type also widespread in the fourteenth century, or, as inthe Limbourgs' calendar illustration from the even more famousTres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, a scene of the whole courthawking in May. Earlier, however, in northern Italy May was repre-sented as a pleasant outing, with strolling couples and a luncheonal fresco, in the landscape painting in the Torre d'Aquila of theCastello de Buon Consiglio at Trent.19 Then, in what is, accordingto Schretlen,20 a German copy of a Netherlandish calendar for theyears 1458 to 1477 (Fig. 5), we find May characterized in a sceneof a youthful courtier seated beneath a tree playing a lute for hislady love, an iconographic motif seemingly of Italian derivation,though the lady's immersion in a tub has another source. Themotif of a naked woman in a tub probably derives from the repre-sentation of one of Venus' children in the popular planet pictures.21Northern illuminations and prints repeat the theme of amorousdalliance as a characteristic of the May scene in the fifteenth cen-

11 Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, Ms. fr. 9199, fol. 6; often illustrated,e.g., L. M. J. Delaisse, Le siecle d'or de la miniature flamande, Brus-sels, Amsterdam, 1959, pl. 39.12 For the text see A. de Laborde,Les miracles de Nostre Dame, Paris,1929, I, 33ff. A close copy of the illumination is found in Oxford,BodleianLibrary,MsDouce 374, fol. 15.13 J. Meurgey, Les principaux manuscrits a peintures du musee Condea Chantilly,SFRMP,1930, No. 79, pl. cxu.14 Sale of Dec. 9, 1958, Sotheby and Co., London,Dyson Perrins Collec-tion, Part I, Lot38, pl. 44.15 For the Breviary (fol. 3v) see Camille Gaspar, Le breviaire du muskeMayer van den Bergh a Anvers, Bruxelles, 1932, pl. v; for the GolfBook, British Museum, Add. Ms. 24098, fol. 22v, see Paul Durrieu,La miniatureflamandeau temps de la cour de Bourgogne,Paris-Brus-sels, 2nd ed., 1927, 89f., pl. xc; for the Hennessy Hours, Brussels,Bibliotheque Royale, Ms. II, 158, fol. 5v, see Durrieu, La miniatureflamande,89, pl. LXXXIXattributedto Simon Bening and his atelier);for the Da Costa Hours, N.Y., The Pierpont Morgan Library,see ThePierpont Morgan Library,Exhibitionof IlluminatedManuscriptsHeld

at the New York Public Library, ntroduction by C. R. Morey, cata-logue by B. da C. Greenand Meta P. Harrsen,New York, 1934, 62, No.132.16 P. Wescher, Sanders and Simon Bening and GerardHorenbout, ArtQuarterly,9, 1946,198ff.17 I wish to thank Mr. Robert E. Morris for bringing this to my atten-tion.18 For the Fall of the Rebel Angels in the Antwerp Breviary (fol. 552v),see Gaspar, Le breviaire,pl. LXII. or the date of the Breviary as notearlier than 1515, see E. Beck, The Mayer van den Bergh Breviary,BurlingtonMagazine, 62, 1933,266.19 O. Pcicht, Early Italian Nature Studies and the Early CalendarLandscape, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 13,1950, 38, pl. 13a; a contemporaryFrenchparallel is also discussed.20 M. J. Schretlen, Dutch and Flemish Woodcuts of the Fifteenth Cen-tury, London, 1925, 20, pl. 12.21 See, inter alia, A. M. Hind, An Introduction to a History of Wood-cut, New York,reprinted. 1963, I, 253, fig. 104.


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tury. The scene of a young music-making couple became the pre-ferred type, though the earlier hawking scene also appeared, butwith far less frequency. However, only in the Ghent-Bruges regiondoes the musical boating party with boughs in the boat appear asthe May calendar scene.

How can this iconographic innovation, the transportation of themusic-making couple beneath a tree to a boat riding on the Flemishcanals, be accounted for? One may hazard a guess that the sceneis the outgrowth of a local facility; the canals of Bruges and Ghentare still famous, particularly Bruges' Minnewater, or Lake of Love,for which there is nothing comparable at 's-Hertogenbosch. Thatthis custom existed where the facilities allowed is evident in a paint-ing of a canal scene in The Hague, thought to represent a nowtransformed portion of Haarlem,22 painted by J. A. Berkheyde in1666 (Fig. 6). The departure for a boating party is seen here. Theleafy boughs of the Flemish miniature appear in the bow of theboat, and a keg, probably of beer, has replaced the Flemish winebottles. The participants, including the fiddler, are also less elegantthan their earlier Flemish counterparts. Berkheyde too was repre-senting custom. It also seems probable that the Master of Maryof Burgundy was the inventor of this distinctive iconographic trans-formation of the normal May scene. He was the most inventive ofthe late fifteenth-century miniaturists, as Otto Picht has pointedout,23 and his relationship to the painter of the manuscript from theDyson Perrins Collection and to the Benings has already beenmentioned.

It is possible that Bosch became aware of the new May iconog-raphy on a trip to Bruges and a visit to the shops of its illumina-tors, perhaps in 1504, the year in which he received a paymentrelated to the Last Judgment altarpiece for Philip the Handsome.24

So it seems that Bax and those who preceded him in relating theLouvre painting to a May festival were correct in their surmise, al-though they could adduce no artistic and literary models, exceptthat the painting reflects local custom rather than festive formality.And it is to local custom that the leafy boughs in the boats in theminiatures, now gathered about the mast in the painting, may beattributed.

Out of the boughs about the mast peers what Demonts thoughtwas a skull, and what Tolnay considered to be a carnival mask.Nevertheless, it suggests an owl, the common symbol in almost all

the bestiaries of those blind to Christianity. And the pennant flyingin the breeze carries the sign of the most threatening pagans of theday, the Turks. Their crescent insignia was frequently used byBosch to indicate the enemies of Christian belief.25 In short, Boschhas presented in the Louvre painting a satirizing and moralizingparallel to the musical boating parties of the May miniatures. Hemust have been aware of the May miniatures, and there is also thepossibility that he was aware of the miniature of monks in a boatfrom the Miracles de Nostre Dame cited above. We are, it seems,a step closer to Bosch's intent, but at least one question is still un-answered: is the subject a Ship of Fools? Seemingly the painting isrelated to Brant's famous work, and Bosch was undoubtedly ac-quainted with it, but the images presented here do not add supportto a conclusion that this is the dominant theme.One may view the work in the same light as Bosch's Lisbontriptych of the Temptation of St. Anthony, to which it may be re-lated in time and style. As the Lisbon triptych presents a synthesisof medieval belief and the several themes of St. Anthony's tempta-tions, so the Louvre work forms a whole in which the monk and hiscompanions are, according to Bosch, fools like those who go onmusical boating parties, which lead the participants into sinfulbehavior. A conclusion that Bosch was a fifteenth-century AnthonyComstock seems particularly apt at this point.26

Bosch's imagery in this painting seems subsumed under the head-ing of Gluttony, presented as a moralizing satire castigating theun-Christian vices of excessive drinking and roistering. ApparentlyGluttony was uppermost in Bosch's mind; in the popular moralizingtreatise La Somme le Roi a man at table vomiting to the side charac-terized the sin, and Bosch too shows a vomiting man. The treatisewas popular in the Netherlands; it was printed five times in thedecade 1478-88-in Delft, Hasselt, and Haarlem. In the treatise arepassages which seem to relate to Bosch's painting. Gluttony is a sinof the tongue: . .. the evil tongue is the tree God cursed in thegospels for he ne found nothing but leaves .... 27 If the monk leadsothers into gluttony this is the first branch of the sin, and thetwelfth branch of Lust is a man of religion with a woman of reli-gion.28 The sixth state of Chastity demands that the priest keepclean because he serves at God's table:29 Bosch's dangling pancakesuggests the Host, and the board suggests an altar table with cupand paten, though the cloth is lacking. The exact opposite of cleanli-

22 Muse . . . Mauritshuisa La Haye, Catalogue raisonnee des tableauxet sculptures,3rd ed., The Hague, 1935, No. 746.23 0. Paicht,The Master of Mary of Burgundy,London,1948, 23f.24 J. P. Sosson of the Centre National de Recherches Primitifs Fla-mands in Brussels very kindly informed me that the 36 livres Boschreceived in 1504 as payment related to this altarpiece, 9 by 11 feet,was not a large sum; accordingto his estimate this was the wage forone month for a carpenter.It is also possible that the swimmers in the Louvre painting weresuggested by planet pictures, probably by the Luna representationthat has been asserted as known to Bosch in its earliest Italian ver-sion (C. D. Cuttler, The Lisbon Temptation of St. Anthony byJerome Bosch, Art Bulletin, 39, 1957, 118f.). Nude waders appear inlater May scenes in German art of the late 1520's (e.g., a May'wood-cut by Hans Sebald Beham [C. Dodgson, RareWoodcuts in the Ash-molean Museum, II, BurlingtonMagazine, 63, 1963, 116, and pl. Iia]),and nude waders engage in amorous play in planet Venus scenes ofalmost the same date (e.g., in the woodcut series of the planets possi-bly by Georg Pencz [Anna C. Hoyt, The Woodcuts of the Planets

formerly attributed to Hans Sebald Beham, Bulletin of the Museumof Fine Arts, Boston, 53, 1954, 2-10, and fig. 3]). The nude swimmersseem to have resulted from combining the twins of Gemini, May'szodiacal sign, with Venus scenes. The twins were normally shown asnaked, as in the Beham woodcut.25 E.g., the FrankfurtEcceHomo, the LisbonTemptation of St. Anthonytriptych, the LondonCrowningwith Thorns, the EscorialCarrying ofthe Cross. The crescent is also prominent in the drawing in theAlbertina, Vienna, of the Man-Boat-Tree (commonly attributed toBosch despite its very poor quality).26 E.Panofsky, EarlyNetherlandish Painting, Its Origins and Character,Cambridge,1953, I, 357, calls Bosch ... one of those extreme moral-ists, who, obsessed with what they fight, are haunted, not un-pleasantly, by visions of obscenities, perversions,and tortures.27 W. N. Francis,The Book of Virtues and Vices, A FourteenthCenturyEnglish Translation of the Somme le Roi of Lorens d'Orltans, EETS,O.S., No. 217, 1942,55.28 Ibid., 45.29 Ibid.,261.


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1. Bosch, Allegory of Gluttony ( Ship of Fools ). Paris, Louvre (photo: A.C.L., Brussels)


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2. Monks in a Boat, from the Miracles de Nostre Dame. Paris, BibliothiqueNationale, Ms.fr. 9199, fol. 6

3. Visitation, from Horae. Chantilly,Musee Conde, Ms1141, fol. 54 (photo: Gi-raudon)

4. May, from the Da Costa Hours. New York, The Pierpont Morgan Library,Ms399, fol. 6v (photo: The Pierpont MorganLibrary)5. Calendar,John of Gamundia.London, British Museum (photo: British Mu-seum)


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76. J. A. Berkheyde, Canal Scene. The Hague, Mauritshuis (photo: A. Dingjan)7. Bosch, Allegory of Intemperance. New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery,

the Rabinowitz Collection of European Paintings, Gift of Hannah D. andLouis M. Rabinowitz

8. Bosch, Allegory of Avarice ( Death of the Miser ). Washington, D.C., Na-tional Gallery of Art, Samuel H. Kress Collection (photo: National Gallery ofArt)


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9. Avarice, from La Somme le Roi. London, British Museum, Add. Ms 28162,fol. 9 (photo: BritishMuseum)

10. Illustration to Chapter XVII of Sebastian Brant, Das Narrenschiff, Basel,1494 (photo: The Pierpont MorganLibrary)11. Bosch, Temptation of St. Anthony, central panel, detail. Lisbon, MuseuNacional de Arte Antiga


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BOSCH INARRENSCHIFF 275

ness at table, that is, before the altar, is presented here seeminglyas an expression of the monde renverse, which Bosch also symbol-ized on the left wing of his Lisbon triptych.30

For the moment, then, it may be asserted that Bosch, with theNarrenschiff, the May miniatures, and La Somme le Roi in mind,transformed his borrowings into a moralizing satire on gluttony,with possibly an admixture of lust as a sub-theme.

The Louvre painting has been associated with a panel in the YaleArt Gallery (Fig. 7), to which it is closely related in style, and withwhich it is almost identical in width.31 The theme of the Yale panelis probably an allegory of lust, as is indicated by the couple in thetent, with a gluttonous overtone in the other figures. A loving couplecharacterizes Lust in Bosch's Seven Deadly Sins painting in thePrado, and such a couple is common in Venus planet pictures. Boschcastigated belief in the planets in his Lisbon triptych,32 and it seemsthat he has done the same in the Yale fragment.

Although the Yale picture has been cut down at the top and onthe right, it and the Louvre painting have been suggested as havingoriginally been placed one above the other to form the interior wingof a triptych for which the Death of the Miser in the National Gal-lery, Washington, formed the opposite wing (Fig. 8). 3 The Louvrepainting has been cut only at the bottom; thus if the two panelswere once united the Yale panel would have occupied the lowerposition. Such a combination seems unlikely on compositionalgrounds, and Tolnay has pointed out34 that the two panels are dif-ferent in color. Bosch in his preserved work never balanced a doublescene with a single scene, and the Death of the Miser in theme andcomposition is not a double scene.

The Washington panel, whose theme is the deadly sin of avarice,has been related to the popular Ars moriendi, or the Art of DyingWell, which was illustrated in woodcuts and engravings. Tervarent,however, preferred to see its source in a death scene in a Germanminiature of the second quarter of the fifteenth century, in whichhe found a greater number of motifs related to the painting thancan be discovered in Ars moriendi scenes.35 Bax, however, cited adeath scene from the Miracles de Nostre Dame in which a figurelooks into a chest placed at the foot of the dying man's bed; this hethought even more closely related to Bosch's painting than theminiature cited by Tervarent.36 However, in these two scenes thechest is not that of a miser, which it certainly is in Bosch's panel.The association of the miser with a chest is an old one, and canbe found illustrated in a number of late thirteenth- and early four-teenth-century manuscripts of La Somme le Roi (Fig. 9). 7 Boschmust have been well aware of this tradition, for demons aid themiser in his hoarding in the illuminations and in the Washingtonpanel. The Louvre and Washington paintings, but not the Yale

panel, take a moralizing viewpoint and use the imagery of LaSomme le Roi (for example, a vomiting man to symbolize gluttony).However, though there is a relation to La Somme le Roi and itstraditional imagery, this is not the dominant aspect of the Louvreand Washington panels.

The Louvre and Washington paintings are actually more stronglyrelated in time and conception to the Narrenschiff than to LaSomme le Roi. The illustration to Chapter XVII (Fig. 10) of Brant'swork, entitled Of Useless Riches, seems to be related composi-tionally to the Washington panel, and the final lines of the ac-companying text present the moral:

Who from the poorhis treasure ocksWill find God deaf whene'er he knocks.38This chapter, significantly, follows one which castigates drunken-ness and feasting, whose sinful overindulgence Bosch also warnedagainst in the Louvre and Yale panels. Bosch, one may conclude,drew upon his memory of the Narrenschiff when he sketched outthe composition of the Washington panel. Bosch's miser is in keep-ing with the tradition of La Somme le Roi illustration, but is moresubtly expressed than the obvious fool's capped figure from theNarrenschiff.

The Narrenschiff beggar before the low wall has been trans-formed by Bosch into a veiled disparagement of knights and chiv-alry, suggested by the helmet, lance, gauntlet, sword, and shield.The objects seem to be related visually and conceptually to thenearby draped cloth and the little evil monkish figure behind it.There is a vague allusion to jousting and tournaments, a very popu-lar form of entertainment in the late medieval period. Naturallytournaments were castigated in the literature, as in the sermons ofJacques de Vitay and in other writings. 39Several chapters in theNarrenschiff also condemn knights; in Chapter LXXIX they areunited in greed with clerks to fleece peasants by the sale of safeconducts, and in Chapter LXXVI, Of Boasting, they flaunt falsepapers of legitimacy, both ideas that Bosch seems to illustrate in theactions of the standing figure at the foot of the bed, and the demonto the left of the chest holding up a sealed paper. This can be re-lated to the lines from Brant's Chapter LXXVI:

Some own a seal and patent goodThey prove they are of noble blood.They're first, they claim quite rightfully,To be dubbed in that family,....4oThe lines that follow stress the moral that nobility flows fromvirtue. This is also, it seems, Bosch's point by implication: in thisworld greed and falsity go hand in hand in evil union. This al-legorical statement was even stronger as Bosch first conceived it.

30 Cuttler, Temptationof St. Anthony, 114.31 C. T. Eisler, New England Museums, Les primitifs flamands, I, Cor-pus de la peinture des anciens pays bas meridionaux aux quinzimesicle, 4, Brussels, 1961, 46. The Yale panel is 32cm wide, and theLouvrepanel is 32.5cm wide.32 Cuttler, Temptationof St. Anthony, 118f.33 Eisler,Corpus,48.34 Tolnay, Bosch, 2nd ed., 348.35 G. de Tervarent, The Origin of One of Jerome Bosch's Pictures,Message. Belgian Review, Jan., 1945, 61ff.

36 Bax, Onticjfering,244, fig. 60.37 E.g., British Museum, Add. Ms.28162, fol. 9v; also see E. G. Millar,An Illuminated Manuscript of La Somme le Roi Attributed to theParisian Miniaturist Honor,, Oxford, 1953.38 S. Brant, The Ship of Fools, trans, by E. H. Zeydel, New York, 1944,101.39 M. W. Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins, E. Lansing, 1952, 129,172.40 Brant,Ship of Fools, 253.


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The underdrawing, revealed by infrared photography,41 shows thatthe dying man in bed holds the viaticum in his hand, but in thefinal rendition the greedy sinner is still more interested in themoneybag offered by the demon than in the salvation the angelvainly tries to make him see might be his. Bosch had thus originallyindicated that the avaricious would sell even the viaticum.

Chapter LXXVI of the Narrenschiff also contains the followinglines:A hawk is like a heron dressedAnd on the helmet eggs in nestAnd on the nest a moulting cockHe's breeding out the little flock ... .42

This image cannot be found in the Washington panel, but it is aclose parallel to a figure in the group to the right of the platform inthe central panel of Bosch's Lisbon triptych of the Temptation ofSt. Anthony (Fig. 11). A castigation of knights is clearly visible inthis motif, and the condemnation of tourneys is also visible in thegroup in front of the platform at the left. The suggestion that thisfantastic group is a censure of tourneys-for such folly leads todeath-has been made before.43

The Death of the Miser is generally considered to be earlier thanthe Lisbon panel, and the artistic idea expressed in the later workis apparently a fully developed conception seen only summarily andwith a different emphasis in the Washington painting. Viewed inthis light, the association of the appurtenances of knighthood withthe main theme of Avarice becomes understandable. This is not asocial satire of the nobility, as Tolnay thought,44 but a satire on thegreed of false knights; it is also a statement of Bosch's inherentpessimism. That all life leads to death is a truism, he seems to say,but men's actions, because of the enormity of their sins, lead to

an everlasting death without hope of resurrection to a new andbetter life. The baleful little man on the far side of the cloth hungover the low wall (a visual anticipation of the mounted skull-toppedarmored figure trailing a long cloth in the Lisbon panel) is a pictorialexposition of Bosch's meaning, for in his thinking all the things ofthis world are permeated with evil.

The association of the paraphernalia of knighthood with the ac-tions of the miser and the standing figure may seem illogical to themodern mind, but surely it was not so for Bosch. What is seen hereis the leap characteristic of his symbolically oriented thinking. Heused his motifs with full knowledge of their traditional significa-tions, but so combined them in his unprecedented moralizing pic-tures that the motifs take on allusive rather than explicit import.For him, apparently, their intrinsic meanings were not changed bythe alteration or removal of their traditional framework, but for usthey have become so transformed by time that they are almostunintelligible.

In sum, in these paintings, as in all his work, Bosch appears as abiting commentator on the folly and sins of man. The vivid trans-position into woodcuts of Brant's pungent text, and the text itself,clearly struck a response in Bosch's thinking. The earlier assertionof a relationship between Brant and Bosch seems to find additionalsupport here. The disparate character of the Paris, New Haven, andWashington panels does not, however, allow any valid conclusionabout a relationship either to one another or to any multi-paneledcombination.

These panels do, however, demonstrate that Bosch drew upon hispast as well as his present to stock the vast arsenal of his imagery.His individualistic method, and his personal symbolism, thoughthey determine moralizing Gothic allegories, make him the mostmodern of his contemporaries.

University of Iowa

41 Art News Annual, 21, 1952, 113, fig. 3.42 Brant,Ship of Fools, 252 (italics mine). 43 Cuttler, Temptationof St. Anthony, 121f.44 Tolnay, Bosch,2nded., 25.

bosch and the narrenschiff-a problem in relationships-charles d. cuttler

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