Artist: Jheronimus Van Aken
Date: 1600
Size: 41 x 31 cm
Technique: Oil On Panel
The central scene in this painting is based on what may be an autograph version by Bosch of the subject of The Extraction of the Stone of Folly in Madrid with the inscription ‘Meester snijt de keye ras // Mijne name is lubbert das’ (Master, cut the stone out quickly. My name is Lubbert Das ‘Doltish Ninny’) (fig. a).16 The theme of The Extraction of the Stone recurs several times in the painting and literature of the Low Countries in the 16th and 17th centuries. It concerns the removal of an imaginary stone from the head of a foolish person, someone who has ‘rocks in his head’ or has been ‘injured by the stone’. The idea that one could remove ‘the stone of folly’ from someone’s head with a surgical operation was already being regarded as quackery in the 16th century.17 The Madrid scene differs so much from the one in Amsterdam that the latter cannot be a free copy but is a later imitation in Bosch’s style. The quack is literally removing a stone from the head of the man seated in the chair. Various curious onlookers are grouped around the table on the right and are inspecting an extracted stone held by one of them. It is only the surgeon and his patient who display some kind of resemblance to their counterparts in Madrid, in which there are only four figures situated in a broad landscape. Several important attributes are also missing in the Amsterdam painting, such as the tulip sprouting from the patient’s head, the inverted funnel on the surgeon’s head, and the book balancing on the nun’s head. These are all metaphors of folly, and identify the surgeon as a quack. In the Amsterdam version there is a wall behind the group of figures with a circular niche in which an owl is perched. An owl generally has a negative connotation with Bosch, standing for bad and foolish people who fear the light.18 Surrounding the central circular scene are grotesque figures in grisaille. Flying around in the top left corner is a creature with a naked human body and long, pointed wings. This is a devil of the kind seen in The Last Judgement fragment in Munich, which is attributed to Bosch, where it spews out liquid excrement over a sinner. The devil in the Amsterdam painting is discharging a similar ‘wet fart’.19 Seated on this flying figure is a second devil of a type found quite often in works by Bosch and his followers.20 In the top right corner is a large fish devouring a small one, together with a sort of sea-lion. In the bottom left corner there is a kneeling man whose upper body has turned into a house, which was inspired by the huge devil on the left wing of the Triptych with the Temptation of St Antony in Lisbon.21 Beside this figure is a small banner with a ‘B’ on it, a second ‘sea-lion’, a globe with protrusions, and a woman pinned down by a tree. According to Brand Philip, these Boschian motifs on the frame of the tondo represent the element Air. She associates this version of The Extraction of the Stone of Folly with another circular copy of The Conjurer after Jheronimus Bosch which has a similar painted frame with Boschian motifs (fig. b).22 According to her, the motifs on that frame stand for the element Water, and she suggests that those two paintings, together with The Pedlar in Rotterdam23 and a lost scene of The Hog Hunt, were once part of the outside of a large triptych with four children of planets in four tondos (fig. c).24 There are five variants of the Amsterdam version of The Extraction of the Stone of Folly. The tondo is almost identical in all of them, but only one has the frame with grisailles (fig. d), while the remainder consists of the tondo alone.25 One notable difference between the Amsterdam painting and other versions is the absence of the bird in a cage on the wall behind the standing quack. Infrared reflectography shows that the birdcage was indeed prepared in the underdrawing (fig. e) but omitted in the picture surface. Although the painting was regarded as an original Jheronimus Bosch when it was bought in the late 19th century, Friedländer suggested in 1927 that it was a copy, possibly made by the Antwerp painter Marcellus Coffermans around 1550.26 He was on the right track. It seems likely that the Rijksmuseum version of The Extraction of the Stone of Folly. (and the variants, (fig. d)) was made in the manner of Bosch in an Antwerp workshop in the second half of the 16th century, together with the closely related Conjurer, possibly as pendants. In technique, style and palette, they are far removed from the work of Bosch himself. J. Bogers, 2010 Literature updated by J.P. Filedt Kok, 2016
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