Concert in the Egg

A group of singers crowds inside a giant broken eggshell, reading from an open songbook while a monk, a nun and assorted fools quietly pick their pockets. The music in that book is real. Someone painted in the notes of an actual chanson, Toutes les nuictz, printed in 1549 by the composer Crecquillon, which tells us roughly when this was made, around 1560, in the manner of Hieronymus Bosch but after he had been dead for more than 40 years. Bosch himself never touched this canvas. It is a follower's version of a lost Bosch invention, one of many that copied and recombined his crowded, moralising scenes long after his death, when a painting in his style still sold. The subject is folly: people singing while they are being robbed.