Open

My first decent walk for several days, as the rain eased. The pub on the far side of Hollingworth Lake, to the right of centre in this photograph, was open for the first time in almost four months but was far from full of customers. I didn't go in.

As Hieronymous Bosch was developing his career in the late fifteenth century, a battle of ideas was raging in Europe. Italian Renaissance philosophers, such as the Florentine Pico della Mirandola, celebrated the excellence of mankind, with free will and the power to exercise that to determine nature and destiny. By contrast, in Northern Europe the poet Sebastian Brant published his Ship of Fools in 1494, satirising and condemning humanity's failings and foibles.

Bosch painted his Ship of Fools as part of a triptych in about 1500. It shows a boat with a number of peasants, two nuns and a monk, carousing. The monk and a nun are singing lustily, resembling the medieval images of couples playing music before making love. A peasant shows gluttony by cutting down a roast goose tied to the mast. A fool sits in the rigging and two swimmers seek wine.  A pink banner shows the Turkish crescent rather than a cross. An owl perches at the top of the tree/mast.

This imagery chimes with Brant's descriptions of folly and sin. Just nine years after Bosch's painting, Erasmus in his Praise of Folly described human weaknesses and stupidity with delicate irony, implying that folly is a natural and not entirely undesirable condition. Does Bosch's painting seek just to condemn what he shows, depicting the brazen horror of his ship of sinners?  Or do his comic images say that whilst the behaviour may be morally wrong, everyone is a sinner?  Perhaps he is saying that the church should not be too strident in condemning immorality because they too are on board on the Ship of Fools.