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1983; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 52; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00233608308604022

1651-2294

Madeleine Bergman,

European and International Law Studies

Summary The Praise of Folly Did the great humanist Erasme of Rotterdam appreciate his fellow‐countryman Jerome Bosch's paintings? The answer must be a guess as Erasme never mentioned the painter in his writings. Georges Marlier proposes an answer in his book Erasme et la Peinture Flamande de son Temps 1954. Being a humanist, he says, Erasme could only have appreciated Bosch's witty and satirical paintings, such as The Conjurer and The Cure of Folly. The Cure of Folly Prado, is a plain but yet not easily deciphered painting. An operation of a peculiar kind is taking place: a surgeon with a funnel on his head extracts flowers from a patient's head. The performance is watched by two serious onlookers. Above and below this scene is a text: Meester snyt die keye ras Myne name is Lubbert Das (The master cuts out the stones My name is Gelded Badger). There is an old Dutch saying “iemand van de Kei snijden”, which means to cure somebody from his folly. Bosch is, as far as we know, the first painter to use this saying as a subject for a picture. The motif becomes fairly common in 16th and 17th century Dutch painting. Jan Sanders van Hemessen's version has the character of a genre painting. The surgeon extracting the stones from his patient's head is evidently a charlatan— the stones are probably put into the wound before being shown as extracted. We do not know if «operations« like this ever took place; anyhow, we cannot interpret Bosch's painting in the light of this or any other genre picture, as the symbolic character is evident from his text and, not least, from the fact that he has replaced the stones by flowers. Taking the text Meester snyt die keye ras Myne name is Lubbert Das as a point of departure for an interpretation, Wilhelm Fraenger sees the painting as a disguised description of a castration. There are details in the picture supporting this reading, but no account is taken of the fact that cutting out the stones to the Dutch idiom really meant to be cured of folly. What does Bosch's painting tell us if we consider this as well as the flowers? The flowers in the painting are spongy, wet and with white petals. I agree with Patrik Reuterswärd, who identifies them as water‐lilies. To the Dutch mystic Jan van Ruysbroeck the water‐lily was a symbol of the nature of man: the root in the ground corresponds to his bodily nature; the water to the soul and the flower that blossoms in the sun shows how the spirit may attain perfection in Christ—the Sun. It is hazardous to draw a parallel between a text and Bosch's painting, but the painter's symbolism may be analogous. The surgeon is by his funnel, turned up‐side‐down, characterized as a fool—he is the real fool, that extracts the stones of folly, which Bosch by replacing them with flowers has shown to be of human value. The painter may have had the same opinion as Erasme of Rotterdam, who in his famous book The Praise of Folly defends human madness as necessary for life. To him the real fool is the rational man, the so called “sage”, who deems all passions as madness; the passions are, as a matter of fact, “the only motive behind every good action”. Referring to St. Paul Erasme concludes, that the Christian madness is the supreme folly beyond the understanding of the intellect. A Dutch 16th century poet, Jan van Stijevort, reflects Erasme's opinion saying that “the stones of folly must ripe in secret”. This seems to be the message of Bosch's The Cure of Folly. The stones are like flowers that must ripe to blossom. Without “folly”, the irrational, man is like a “Lubbert Das”, that is he is mentally castrated. Georges Marlier probably was right in supposing Erasme could have appreciated Bosch's The Cure of Folly though not for the folly being rediculed but because it is here defended as a most necessary aspect of man.