Iconology of the Wayfarer Triptych – Detail

… worldly vice of luxury…show the combination of lust and indulgence known among the Seven Sins as luxuria. We can easily compare the scene of Luxuria from the Seven Deadly Sins panel, which displays a similar combination of rich costume, taste, and eros [Bosch, ca. 1505-1510]. (p.630)

…unchaste love, as represented by the couple in the tent. This couple could be regarded as the core from which all sins derive, hence this wing could aptly be titled Luxuria…(pp.31-32)

It shows a carousing couple hidden in a tent. (p. 34)

A fragment of a painting presents a somewhat similar picture of night revelry (p. 34)

In its warm, light, rose and golden tones, standing out against a deep honey brown and greenish blue, the little painting is like a prelude to the revelries of Peter Bruegel [Bruegel, 1559, “The Fight between Carnival and Lent”; Bruegel, 1567, “The Land of Cockaigne”] (p. 34)

…it may be a fragment of an episode in the story of the Prodigal Son [Hannema, 1936, 32, no. 51; de Tolnay, 1937, 90, no.9; Bosch, ca. 1500, “The Pedlar”] (p. 207)

…more likely a fragment of a representation of two of the Deadly Sins, Lust and Intemperance, and thinks it might have belonged to a painting cited in the inventory of the collection of Marghareta Boge in Antwerp in 1574 [Baldass, 1943, 22, 235; Baldass, 1959, 26, 229; de Tolnay, 1937, 90, no. 9; Bosch, ca. 1505-1510, “The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things”] (p.207)

…an allegorical satire with happy people celebrating May or Summer [Bax, 1949, 199]… it as an allegory of drunkenness [Werner, 1960, XVIII] and Venturi [Venturi, 1945, 63-64] thinks it may come from the proverb more are drowned in a goblet than in the sea. (p. 208)

The foreground scene at the bottom of the panel treats the theme of Lust in a manner similar to that of the exemplum in The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things. On the bank near the water a man and woman, whose style of dress suggests that they belong to the middle classes, have withdrawn into a furnished, pale red tent for a tête-à-tête. On the ground in front of the tent entrance are wooden clogs, a hat in the Burgundian style on top of a belt, and a section of trumpet. Further items of clothing, probably belonging to the swimmers, are draped over the withered half of an otherwise leafy tree and scattered on the ground nearby. (p. 192)

Various material analyses have proved that this small oak panel, depicting allegories of the deadly sins of Gluttony (gula) and Lust (luxuria) (p. 256)

Bosch endorsed the ideology of an urban middle class of craftsmen and small producers, for whom ‘economy’ was also a moral issue. This was certainly not a capitalist vision, although the emphasis on reason and work (expressed inversely by Bosch – the rejection of laziness and wastefulness) and the denial of prodigality and other forms of impulsive behaviour were helping to prepare the way for capitalist discourse. Bosch’s moderate view is manifest in his depictions of the pedlar on the outer wings of The Haywain [Bosch, ca. 1512-1515, “The Haywain Triptych”] and in another, dismembered triptych [Hartau, 2005, 305-338] on the front side of which were The Ship of Fools and The Allegory of Intemperance on the left and The Death of the Miser on the right, and the exterior of which was the Rotterdam Pedlar. (p. 99)

In the upper part of the New Haven panel, a man is seated on a Floating barrel, which is being pushed along by several men. The dish on a swimmer’s head holds a meat pie decorated wiith a bird’s head. The bathers have left their clothes on the shore. These figures demonstrate an interest not only in singing, eating and drinking but also in love, as is evident from the couple in the tent, seated snugly at the table. (p. 298)

“Whereas the left wing seems to depict mainly the sins of gluttony (gula) and lust (luxuria)… (p. 298)”

… the sinful behaviour of the merrymakers… (p. 299)

The rejection of enjoyment and lust is expressed in Bosch’s work in themes like the Allegory of Gluttony (and Lechery) and the Ship of Fools (originally together on one panel); Shrove Tuesday, Singers in an Egg [Follower of Jheronimus Bosch, ca. 1561], Mock Tournament on the Ice [Follower of Pieter Huys, ca. 1560] and Tavern Scene – all of which only survive in the form of copies; the drawings of the Tree-Man [Bosch, ca. 1505] and the Witches [Bosch, 15th century] (who may also represent people celebrating Shrove Tuesday); and the Blue Ship [van der Heyden, 1559] and Merrymakers Sailing in a Mussel Shell [van der Heyden, 1562], which survive in the form of prints… They tell us how human beings fall into such misbehaviour when they fail to resist the blandishments of their senses [Badius, 1502; Follower of Jheronimus Bosch, ca. 1555-1575]. (p. 123ff)

… the pendant of Death and the Usurer as a panel that was sawn in two – the Ship of Fools and the Allegory of Gluttony. Together, the two scenes must have constituted a satire of licentious merrymakers, in which Bosch attacked the opposite of avarice – the intoxication of prodigality. (p. 139)

The intimate association between Gluttony and Lust in the medieval moral system was expressed by Bosch… (p. 44)

The intimate association between Gluttony and Lust in the medieval moral system was expressed by Bosch… (p. 32)

Allegory of pleasures (p. 93)

… was first published by Tolnay [de Tolnay, 1937], who suggested it might depict an episode concerning the Prodigal Son… Adhémar… believed it to have been a whole symbolising May or Spring) [Adhémar, 1962; Bosch, ca. 1475-1500]… Baldass believed it, instead, to be part of a panel illustrating the Deadly Sins [Baldass, 1959]. Bax (1949) viewed it as the summer feast of a merry party, and interpreted the various objects as symbols of forbidden love. The fragment depicts in a lively style akin to that of The Ship of Fools [Bosch, ca. 1475-1500] and with a delightful lightness of touch, Lust (a couple of lovers under a tent) and Gluttony, in the shape of a sort of Flemish Silenus [Seymour, 1961] bestriding a floating cask from which wine spills: this figure inspired the ‘Carnival’ of Bruegel’s Carnival and Lent in Vienna [Bruegel, 1559 (The Fight between Carnival and Lent)]. (p. 93)

His symbolism has received many interpretations including psychoanalytic explanations for the erotic images. Yet a simpler and perhaps more reliable approach to understanding Bosch’s imagery is offered by Sebastian Brant’s Das Narrenschiff (Ship of Fools) [Bax, 1948, 199]. (p.18)

…Ship of Fools is a companion piece to the Miser ; it could have covered two additional sins, gluttony and lust [Benesch, 1957, 33f.; Baldass, 1943, 235; Baldass, 1968, 621; Gerlach, 1979, 14; Morganstern, 1982, 41:note 41-42]. (p. 38)

Otto Benesch suggested that the Ship of Fools could have been part of a series of the Seven Deadly Sins and signify Gluttony [Benesch, 1957, 33f]. Baldass [Baldass, 1943, 235; Baldass, 1968, 621] has suggested that the Yale panel, represents Lust and Gluttony from a similar series, and this idea has been recently endorsed by Gerlach [Gerlach, 1979, 14]. (p. 41:note 41)

In 1958 Lotte Brand Philip [Philip, 1958] associated a small panel in the Rabinowitz Collection, Intemperance by Hieronymus Bosch, with the Louvre’s famous Ship of Fools [Bosch, ca. 1475-1500] by the same painter by suggesting that they probably originally belonged to the same altarpiece. (p. 295)

The Louvre Ship [Bosch, ca. 1475-1500], decked with greenery, filled with tipplers and barrels, and trailed by thirsty swimmers, is matched in the Rabinowitz panel by a burly trumpeter astride a barrel. He holds a branch of the same greenery and is escorted by swimmers who resemble those who follow the Louvre bark. Moreover, the hint of amorous relations between the two central figures in the Ship, a lute-playing nun and a monk bobbing for a pancake on either side of a board that bears a plate of cherries, is made more explicit in the Rabinowitz painting by a couple drinking within a tent [Cuttler, 1969, 272-276]. Previous scholars had remarked the striking stylistic similarities between the two paintings [Hannema, 1936, 32f. de Tolnay, 1937, 90; Baldass, 1938, 68-69; Baldass, 1943, 235; Venturi, 1945, 63-64; Combe, 1946, 82; Eisler, 1961, 46], and after the Rabinowitz panel was given to Yale in 1959, Charles Seymour advanced a concrete reconstruction [”Reconstruction of Ship of Fools after Seymour”, 1984]. He suggested that the Yale panel had originally formed the lower part of the Ship of Fools, and that since the dimensions resulting from such a combination matched almost exactly those of Bosch’s Death and the Miser in the National Gallery in Washington [Bosch, ca. 1485-1490], this panel was probably originally a pendant to it [Seymour, 1961, 36].(p. 295) (p. 295)

The panels appear to depict allegories of three of the Seven Deadly Sins [Bosch, ca. 1505-1510]. Both the Louvre and the Yale paintings have often been associated with Gluttony and Lust [Morganstern, 1984, 300:note 30; Benesch, 1957, 33-34; Adhémar, 1962, 28-29; de Mirimonde, 1971, 34-35; Cuttler, 1969, 274-275], and the reconstruction of these panels strengthens that association. (p. 300)

Das “Gula”-Fragment schildert Szenen von Lebenslust und Zügellosigkeit. (p. 182)

The clothes and landscape in the foreground enhance this sense of unease by acquiring a life of their own. The mound or boulder nudging its way under the tent is a mysterious and silent force. The clothes parade from left foreground toward the ten in spaced intervals. One shoe almost walks through the tent doorway, while the other pair of shoes hangs strategically on the tree and points to the pig’s trotter over the tent, a sign of the devil. Though the clothes clearly belong to the naked swimmers, the ambiguity of their placement connects the two scenes of folly. In their steady march across the picture, the clothes seem a threat to both the men and the lovers and perhaps capable of some sudden rebellion. In Bosch’s painting no safety can be found on wisdom’s shore as Brant suggests, for the shore itself appears menacing. (p.22)

…lively nudes (and clothed figures) indulging their appetites for food and luxury with the implication of sex) also appear in a divided wing, shared by the Ship of Fools (Musee du Louvre, Paris) [Bosch, ca. 1475-1500] and Allegory of Gluttony (Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven) from a dismembered triptych [Morganstern, 1984, 295-302]. (p. 28)

The Allegory of Gluttony… might well carry a humorous critique of folly along with a sterner moral indictment… (p. 29)

Surmounted by the sign of a cleft hoof, the pink tent represents a house of drink and lust. The fragile decoration tracing the edges of the roof, the square hole in the roof and absence of a door suggest the impermanence of the dwelling in which the couple carelessly celebrates. Brant describes a similar abandonment to pleasure in Of the Power of Fools [Winkler, 1951, 13; Brant, 1962, 169]. (p.23)

Certainly images of courtly love bowers figure prominently within calendar page illustrations, particularly for the lusty spring months of April and May. Half a century after Bosch, Pieter Bruegel’s drawing design for a print of Spring [Bruegel, 1565 (Der Frühling)] still features not only the preparation of a formal garden under a matron’s careful supervision in the foreground but also, at its vanishing point, a love bower, where feasting, drinking, and music as well as boating provide conducive conditions for lovemaking. [Silver, 2006, 400:note 37; van der Heyden, 1570; Bening, ca. 1515; Orenstein, 2001, 236-238: no. 105-106; Wieck, 1988, 45-54]… Once more, it should be recalled that these are precisely the kinds of activities condemned elsewhere by Bosch as the sin of luxuria in his Prado table tabletop [Bosch, ca. 1505-1510] and in his wing panel of… an Allegory of Gluttony. Indeed, such activities mark gardens of love (sometimes with added ascetic figures to be discovered) in later Flemish and Dutch painting, from Pieter Pourbus, Allegory of True Love [Pourbus, c. 1547] to a nascent seventeenth-century genre of “merry companies,’ where well-dressed young aristocrats feast and flirt in outdoor garden settings [Silver, 2006, 400:note 38; Huvenne, 1979; Nevitt, 2003, 21-98; de Bruyn, 1604; de Bruyn, 1601; Hellerstedt, 1986, 42-44, no. 16; Renger, 1976, 190-203; Nichols, 1992, 32-42]. (pp. 52-53)

…the association of water with sinful self-indulgence in earlier Bosch imagery, particularly in… Allegory of Gluttony… [van der Heyden, 1559; van der Heyden, 1562] (p. 68)

The tent of mirth and the train of clothes leading up to it allude to a seduction. (p.23)

Their drinking removes all barriers to the onslaught [Brant, 1962, 97]. (p.23)

…the Paris-New Haven wing presents a consistent enactment of another deadly sin: luxuria, sensuous self-indulgence featuring lust and gluttony in combination. In some respects, this fleshly weakness can be seen as the same kind of product of prosperity that provoked the image of Death and the Usurer [Bosch, ca. 1485-1490]… Bosch exploring such lustful and gluttonous impulses in me central panel of his Garden of Earthly Delights [Bosch, ca. 1490-1500]… its giant fruits and sexually cavorting nudes display a more extreme form of the same behavior as Bosch represents in his Ship of Fools and Allegory of Gluttony wing. (p. 245)

… the New Haven fragment, we find mere a mixture of both gluttony and lust [Eisler, 1961, 44-48]. (p. 245)

… presents a shore, in the bottom foreground. There me signs of male middle-class urban lifeme hat, belt, and dagger as well as me wooden clogs worn by figures like Jan van Eyck’s Giovanni Arnolfini [van Eyck, 1434] have actually been discarded with oilier garments on the ground, presumably by me swimmers. At me right edge of the panel stands a tent under which an intimate couple in ordinary dress huddles over a table, sharing a private drink. Upon the tent sits a heraldic crest, and such pavilions normally were me exterior settings for outings by nobles. (p. 245)

Indeed, similar tents, along with branches like the one borne by Bosch’s figure on the barrel, can be found in the margins of manuscripts, where illustrations of the princely activities of May, another festive season akin to Carnival, featured boating parties wim tents and branches for the planting of the May-tree (akin to the English tradition of the Maypole) [Bax, 1979, 16, 75, 186-188; Silver, 2006, 410:note 14]. The illumniator Simon Bening of Bruges features this boating scene of noble courtship as his May image in the calendar pages of luxury prayer books, such as the Hennessy Hours (c. 1530) [Kren, McKendrick & Ainsworth, 2003, 467-470, no. 150; 324-329, no. 92, 450-451, no. 140; Smeyers & Van der Stock, 1996, 51-113, 62-63; Cuttler, 1969; Bening, ca. 1530; Bening, 1500; Bening, ca. 1515]. Clearly Bosch’s New Haven image offers revelry that is usually associated wim noble privileges, but now it has been appropriated by middle-class imitators. (p. 245)

Bosch implies a connection between drinking and love-making in the tent o mirth through the erotic symbol of a jug upon the table. Framed by the door, the whispering couple stands alone in the tent’s dim interior, involved in a private tête-à-tête. Light fails to pierce the black-reddish depths of the murky space behind the lovers, enhancing the sense of forbidden mystery within. Yet the couple does not appear to enjoy their moment of secret passion. The onslaught bold and blind remains more blind than bold, for the lovers appear sightless, their eyes blurred by shadow. Though the woman makes a small gesture towards the man (or towards the cup of wine) , she turns her face away and avoids looking at him. (p.23)

… the phrase “to plant the May” offered a euphemism of “to copulate.” (p. 410:note 14)