광인들의 배

This little panel is a survivor, cut from something larger. Bosch painted it around 1500, and what you see is only the top part of one wing of a dismantled work. The lower section, showing a drunkard, is now in a museum in the United States, so the boat you look at was once taller. A monk and a nun sing together over a lute while peasants reach for food and drink, nobody steering, a branch for a mast. The idea of loading fools onto a boat and pushing it off was in the air in Bosch's day. A German book called the Ship of Fools had come out in 1494 and sold widely across Europe. The fragment came to the Louvre in Paris, where it hangs among the small number of paintings firmly given to Bosch's hand.