ELFH_MOPIFF_002 CUTTING THE STONE / THE EXTRACTION OF THE STONE OF MADNESS _ BOSCH 1501-1505 / JAMANTELL 2020-2025
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."
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MUSEO DEL PRADO:
The Extraction of the Stone of Madness
1501 - 1505. Oil on baltic oak planks.
Room 056A
In the centre of a rectangular surface Bosch incised a circle in which he depicted this scene of Extracting the stone of madness. The resulting image is a mirror that offers a reflection of folly and human madness, located in a rural world remote from that of the nobility and urban life, hence the setting in the countryside in an open landscape. As found in miniature painting of the time, the artist gave the scene a decorative surround of interlaced gold ribbons against a black background, with an inscription in Gothic script, also in gold, which reads, at the top, Meester snijt die key ras (Master, rid me of this stone soon) and, at the bottom, Myne name Is lubbert das (My name is Lubbert Das).
Popular tradition associated madness with a stone lodged in the brain. Taking the metaphor in its most literal sense, gullible people tried to liberate themselves from this supposed stone by having it removed. Bosch sets the scene outdoors on a small promontory that overlooks a plain with two cities in the distance. He shows the patient as a stout, elderly peasant with his clogs off and tied to a chair. The charlatan or surgeon undertaking the operation wears an upside-down funnel on his head. This object symbolizes deception and reveals that he is not a learned man but rather a fraudster. Instead of a bag, at his belt he has a grey-brown stoneware pitcher of the Aachen or Raeren type so often depicted by Bosch. What he extracts from the patient’s head is not a stone but a type of waterlily like the one on the table, which is left over from a previous operation. While this motif is generally interpreted as a symbol of the money that he will be obtaining from the trusting peasant, the fact that it is a flower has led some authors, such as Arias Bonel, to interpret it in a sexual sense. In this case, rather than curing the patient’s madness the surgeon is castrating him by ridding him of his sexual desire -lust- and thus returning him to the right paths of society and Christian morality. This idea is further suggested by the name of the patient, Lubbert Das, which some authors have translated as castrated badger. As a nocturnal creature that sleeps during the day the badger (das) was considered lazy. Lubbert is a man’s name that is also used as a nickname for a fat, lazy and stupid person, while the verb lubben means to castrate. In addition, the bag hanging from the chair and pierced by the dagger has an erotic, sexual significance.
Bosch achieves something new in this work in his transformation of a popular saying into a visual image. In addition, by adding a calligraphic text and interlaced visual elements (sometimes referred to as love knots) around it, he turns it into a visual and verbal game. This play of words and images which complement each other becomes more complex when we appreciate that what is being extracted from the patient’s head is a flower and thus an allusion to lust. The innovative conception of this work, involving a play of words and images, and the way in which Bosch represented it using formal elements inspired by miniature painting and ceremonial coats-of-arms (to be discussed below) means that it was undoubtedly devised by the artist.
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