Cutting the Stone

The oak of this panel cannot have been ready before about 1552. Dendrochronology settled that, and Jheronimus Bosch had been dead 36 years by then, while painters went on producing versions of his inventions for a market that wanted them. This is one of those, made freely after Bosch, by a hand nobody has identified. Max Friedländer proposed the Antwerp painter Marcellus Coffermans, and it has stayed a proposal.

The subject comes out of late-medieval literature. A quack convinces a simpleton named Lubbert Das that his stupidity can be cut out of his head as a stone. Bosch's own version in the Prado is loaded with allegory, a funnel worn as a hat, a book balanced on a nun's head, a flower rising from the wound. The painter here left all of that out and put in witnesses instead, a woman with her hand to her face, a second operator holding up a stone and explaining it to two men, an assistant bandaging the head of an earlier patient.

The Rijksmuseum bought the panel in October 1893 for 530 guilders, and since 2003 it has been on long-term loan in 's-Hertogenbosch, the town where Bosch worked.