Iconology of the Wayfarer Triptych – Detail

Yet throughtout all the adventures of his wanderings he has managed to hold on to one things: his pack. This is his only token of home, his mainstay, to be preserved at all costs. The pack is, morally speaking, the most important feature of the painting. To its owner it is a veritable sheet anchor; it alone holds out hope of reconciliation. This reassuring aspect of the pack is expressed by the pale pink in which Bosch has painted its lid. One would almost expect the spindly fellow to fall apart if it were not for the carrying strap holding him together. In those days it was a point of honor for the traveling journeyman to bring his pack home intact. Jeremias Gotthelf, whose knowledge of folklore is inexhaustible, gives a beautiful illustration of this tradition in Jakobs Wanderungen durch die Schweiz [Gotthelf, 1948]. (p. 259)

This faithfully kept symbol of home shows that, while profligacy may have overgrown basic human goodness, it could not choke it. (p. 259)

The pack is first and foremost a large basket. There is no way for the viewer to know what it contains or whether those things are for sale as they would be in a pedlar’s pack. Small late-fifteenth-century prints are known in which Christ is shown as a child with a pack on his back. This can contain virtues, but also the weight of the world [Schreiber, 1926, 32-33, no. 820-825]. (p. 334, note 10)

We know from representations of the time that mirrors formed important part of the goods which peddlers carried in their back-baskets [Philip, 1958, 68:note 142; Bruegel, 1562; van Bastelaer, 1908, 148; Hollstein, 1949, 284]. (p. 68)

That pack certainly explains why Bosch’s figure is an itinerant, wandering the countryside. Because of his specific occupation, the Rotterdam vagrant cannot be fully allegorized as a true everyman, Augustine’s man-the-pilgrim moving through this world, as some scholars have argued [Chew, 1962; Tuve, 1966, 145-218]. Of course this allegory underlies the Puritan John Bunyan’s famous Pilgrim’s Progress [Bunyan, 1678], a consideration of the World, the Flesh, and the Devil. But peddlers in the sixteenth century were frequently associated with tavern life, that is, with gambling, drinking, and deceit. Such a figure actually appears with his pack behind the name figure in the Prodigal Son by Jan van Hemessen [van Hemessen, 1536]; he holds dice, and his clothing contrasts with the extravagant fasluons of the Prodigal Son himself (the denouement of the parable with both the swine and the return to the father appears in miniature in the background) [Renger, 1970, 27]. (p. 254)

…de Bruyn considers that the heavy pack on his back contains not just the stuff of the peddler’s trade but rather his burden of sins another common metaphor, then and now [Zupnick, 1968, 121-122, no. 25]. The presence on his pack of a prominent large spoon (or ladle) of self-indulgence as well as a cat skin ensures that this peddler is neither without desires nor an innocent [Silver, 2006, 410-411:note 30; Bax, 1979, 216-217; Renger, 1970, 129-142; Bruegel, 1568 (Les Mendiants ou Les Culs-de-jatte); Tóth-Ubbens, 1987, 73-76]. (p. 256-257)