The Surgeon, or The Extraction of the Stone of Madness

Around 1550 a man in the Low Countries whose family had given up on him might be offered an operation. A travelling surgeon cut into his scalp and produced a stone, proof that the folly had been dug out of his head. The belief was old, and so was the joke about it.

Hemessen painted the joke at close range. The panel is nearly a metre and a half wide and the figures crowd the front of it, the patient held still by an old woman, a young woman mixing ointments, onlookers pressing in around what looks like a market square. The Prado reads the surgeon's sarcastic expression as the giveaway, a man who knows there is no stone and wants the fee.

The museum also owns Bosch's far more famous painting of the same operation, made about 50 years earlier, a small panel with the scene set inside a painted circle. Two different pictures by two different hands, and only the subject is shared.

Hemessen's was in the Spanish royal collection by the early 17th century. The old inventory numbers 875 and 1154, from the Palacio Nuevo and from the Buen Retiro palace, are still painted on the panel.