La Nef des fous

A little boat crowded with fools, and no one truly at the helm. Bosch's Ship of Fools is a fragment of a larger warning about excess, and it still makes us laugh and wince at once.

The story behind the painting

Hieronymus Bosch painted Ship of Fools around 1490-1500. What survives in the Louvre is a fragment: the panel was once one wing of a triptych that was cut into several parts, and the Paris piece is about two-thirds of its original length. The bottom third belongs to Yale University Art Gallery, shown as Allegory of Gluttony. The other wing, Death and the Miser, is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and The Wayfarer in Rotterdam was painted on the reverse of the right panel. Tree-ring study dated the wood to 1491, and the Paris, Washington and Rotterdam panels were cut from the same tree. Camille Benoit gave it to the Louvre in 1918.

What to look for

The source tells us that the panel depicts the sin of gluttony, as part of a larger body of work about the seven deadly sins. Its subject is a ship of fools, a boat full of people with no one truly steering. The panel is tall and narrow, about 58 by 32.5 centimetres, and the Louvre restored it in 2015. As you look, notice how the crowded little vessel fills the upright format, and imagine the missing lower third, now at Yale, continuing the scene below. A drawing of the Ship of Fools, also in the Louvre, appears to be a later copy of the composition.

Meaning and intent

The idea of a ship of fools is very old. It goes back to Book VI of Plato's Republic, an allegory of a ship with a dysfunctional crew, and it became hugely popular after Sebastian Brant published his satire Das Narrenschiff in 1493. The panel may be a response to Brant's book or even to the illustrations of its first edition; another possible source is Le Pèlerinage de l'Âme, printed in Dutch in 1486. Paired with Death and the Miser, the two wings would have shown two extremes, wasteful excess and miserliness, mocking and condemning both. The fools afloat are a mirror for anyone who lets appetite take the helm.

Legacy

The panel's history has been rewritten by science. Dendrochronology by Peter Klein has changed how several Bosch-related paintings are dated and attributed, and showed that this Ship of Fools shares its tree with the Washington Death and the Miser and the Rotterdam Wayfarer. The two to eight years between felling and use allow it to be a direct satire on the frontispiece of Brant's book. Today the scattered pieces live in Paris, at Yale, in Washington and in Rotterdam. Standing before the Louvre fragment, we see one part of a moral story that once unfolded across a whole triptych, still sharp after five centuries.