Allegorie der Unmäßigkeit

This little panel is a survivor of something bigger that was cut apart. Around 1500 Bosch painted a folding altarpiece about the deadly sins, and at some point it was sawn into pieces that scattered across the world. This fragment is the theme of gluttony and excess. A fat man rides a floating barrel in a pool while others shove him along and tip drink from the cask, and below a swimmer balances a dish of meat on his head. The upper part of the same wing became the famous Ship of Fools, now in the Louvre, and the right panel, on greed, ended up in Washington. Seeing them together again, side by side, is now only possible in reproduction. On its own the barrel-rider still carries Bosch's whole idea, appetite that has swallowed the person having it.