Cutting the Stone

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Cutting the Stone
Cutting the Stone (Bosch).jpg
Artist Hieronymus Bosch
Yearc. 1494 or later
Type Oil on board
Dimensions48 cm× 35 cm(19 in× 14 in)
Location Museo del Prado, Madrid

Cutting the Stone, also called The Extraction of the Stone of Madness or The Cure of Folly, is a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, [1] displayed in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, completed around 1494 or later.

Contents

The painting depicts a surgeon, wearing a funnel hat, removing the stone of madness from a patient's head by trepanation. [2] An assistant, a monk bearing a tankard, stands nearby. Playing on the double-meaning of the word kei (stone or bulb), the stone appears as a flower bulb, while another flower rests on the table. A woman with a book balanced on her head looks on.

The inscription in gold-coloured Gothic script reads:

(Middle Dutch):
Meester snyt die keye ras
Myne name Is lubbert Das

(English):
Master, cut the stone out, fast.
My name is Lubbert Das.

Lubbert Das was a comical (foolish) character in Dutch literature.

Interpretations

It is possible that the flower hints that the doctor is a charlatan as does the funnel hat. The woman balancing a book on her head is thought by Skemer to be a satire of the Flemish custom of wearing amulets made out of books and scripture, a pictogram for the word phylactery. [3] Otherwise, she is thought to depict folly.

Michel Foucault, in his 1961 book History of Madness , says "Bosch's famous doctor is far more insane than the patient he is attempting to cure, and his false knowledge does nothing more than reveal the worst excesses of a madness immediately apparent to all but himself."

See also

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References

  1. Ilsink, Matthijs; Koldeweij, Jos; Spronk, Ron; Hoogstede, Luuk (2016). Hieronymus Bosch: Painter and Draughtsman – Catalogue raisonné. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN   978-0300-2201-48.
  2. Povoledo, Elisabetta (October 27, 2008). "In Rome, a New Museum Invites a Hands-On Approach to Insanity". The Economist . Retrieved 2008-10-28. The logo of the Mind's Museum is an overturned funnel. It is a reference to a 15th-century painting by Hieronymus Bosch that depicts a doctor using a scalpel to extract an object (the supposed "stone of madness") from the skull of a patient. The doctor is wearing a funnel as a hat.
  3. Skemer 2006:24.

Further reading