THREE CENTURIES after Bosch painted the original version of The Conjuror, the Marquis de Sade wrote a line that would make a very suitable epigraph for it: "Only two things are required to accredit an alleged miracle: a mountebank and a crowd of spineless lookers-on."nWill the Real Hieronymus Bosch Please Stand Up?
Copyright © 2000 by Damon Knight
Chapter 4 The Conjuror and the Fools In The Conjuror we see a trickster keeping the attention of his audience with sleight of hand, while his confederate lifts the purse of the old person who is leaning over the table. The panel is believed to be a faithful copy of one of Bosch's early works—an early one, partly because of the rather stiff composition and partly because the conjuror himself (or herself?) seems awkwardly drawn.Bosch, The Conjuror. Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Musée Municipal.
I find it easier to believe that the conjuror is deformed, like the one in Thomas Mann's twentieth-century story "Mario and the Magician." Like that story, and like the films of Ingmar Bergman, The Conjuror is subtly disturbing—it doesn't seem to quite fit into our ideas either of fantasy or reality.A point usually overlooked is that although the mountebank is a trickster, he must be a real magician as well, or those toads couldn't be dropping out of his victim's mouth.Bosch, Conjuror (detail).
The two upright red figures in the foreground suggest the hidden presence of a glove puppeteer. Perhaps this painting is based on a medieval puppet show, in which case the trick of dropping the toads would have been easily managed.In The Stone of Folly we see a quack doctor cutting a peasant's head open to extract a stone that causes the peasant's stupidity. This was a familiar jest in the Netherlands: the peasant's stupidity is proved when he pays a charlatan to cut his head open. In this version, however, the charlatan is producing a tulip blossom from the patient's scalp; another is already on the table.Bosch, The Stone of Folly. Madrid, Prado.
The inscription reads, Meester snyt die keye ras. Myne name is Lubbert das. (Master cuts the stones out. My name is Lubbert Das.) The quack doctor is assisted by a quack priest and a quack nun. The funnel on the doctor's head and the book on the nun's are derisive.
The operation to remove the "stone of folly" is a satire on both quackery and credulity, but similar operations, perhaps with the same object, may really have been performed. The Prado has Juan de Seville's San Lucas, in which we see St. Luke, with a gesture just like this one, putting a knife to the scalp of a bald little patient.One of the people we see in The Ship of Fools (above) actually is a fool in the professional sense, identified by his costume and the bauble he carries. We can tell the others are fools by nature, because they are idling away their time singing and drinking, and will probably have headaches in the morning. Rooth points out that the mast in this painting is a Netherlandish version of an albero della cuccagna, a greased pole to which a goose or ham is tied. Albero means tree or mast; cuccagna is abundance, and paese di Cuccagna is the Italian "land of Cockaigne," where roast fowls grow on trees.nBosch, Ship of Fools. Paris, Louvre.
Notice the little owl in the branches. From a little distance, it looks like a death's head.a crowd of spineless lookers-on. In "Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man." This translation is by David Coward, from The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales, Oxford 1992.^
Notes
roast fowls grow on trees. Anna Birgitta Rooth, "Exploring the Garden of Delights," FF Communications no. 251, p. 113.^Contents
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