Wikimedia Commons · Public domain
The Ship of Fools is a fragment - the top half of a panel that was cut down, probably in the sixteenth century - and it shows a small boat crammed with figures who are eating, drinking, singing and fighting while a fool in a jester’s cap sits at the mast. The boat is not going anywhere: the sail is slack, the oars are being used as weapons, and the passengers are too busy enjoying themselves to notice. It is an image of humanity drifting toward damnation.
Bosch painted it around 1490-1500, and it is usually connected to Sebastian Brant’s satirical poem Das Narrenschiff, published in 1494, which describes a ship of fools sailing to the land of Narragonia. The painting is a moral allegory in the form of a genre scene: the boat, the food, the music and the drinking are all real, and all of them are traps. The panel’s lower half is lost, but a copy in the Yale University Art Gallery preserves the whole composition, which included a second boat and a group of swimmers.
Bosch’s work was collected by Philip II of Spain, and the Ship of Fools was in the Spanish royal collection before it was taken to France during the Peninsular War. It entered the Louvre in 1918.
Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450-1516) was born in ’s-Hertogenbosch in the Duchy of Brabant and spent his whole life there. He was a member of a religious confraternity and a prosperous citizen, and his paintings - full of hybrid creatures, inverted worlds and moral traps - were collected by Philip II of Spain within a generation of his death. Only about twenty-five works survive.
The Ship of Fools belongs to the tradition of late medieval moral satire, in which folly, gluttony and lust are shown as self-destructive. Brant’s poem was one of the first bestsellers of the printing press, and Bosch’s painting shares its imagery. The panel’s later history - cut down, copied, collected by the Spanish crown, displaced during the Napoleonic wars - is typical of the fate of early Netherlandish painting.
Richelieu Wing · Level 2 · Northern European Paintings
The Louvre is divided into three wings — Denon, Sully and Richelieu — reached from the hall beneath the glass pyramid.
Other pieces from the same artist, period or type of object.
