LITMIR.BIZ

      In his book, Foucault examines the ideas, practices, institutions, art and literature relating to madness in Western history. He begins with the middle Ages, noting the social and physical alienation of lepers, and argues that with the gradual disappearance of leprosy, madness replaced the dreaded and disfiguring disease in the public’s perception, hence the practice of sending mad people away on long-distance ships. During the Renaissance, madness came to be regarded not as a consequence of impiety but as an omnipresent disorder brought on by man’s obsessive search for God. It was also thought to signify the limits of social order and point to a deeper truth. A century later, insanity was regarded as the obverse of common sense, as the inability (or unwillingness) to reason. The mad had lost, or surrendered what made them human; they had become animal-like and were treated as such. It took another 100 years for insanity to be regarded as an illness that must be treated.

      Like Brant, the painter of The Ship of Fools attacks with biting wit the weaknesses, ideological deformities and vices of his time. He aims his sharpest barbs at the Church.

      Whatever the source of the work might have been, the painting beckons us aboard an overloaded craft brimming with wantonness and psychosis. Hugging the shore, its course unknown, with nary a wharf in sight, it drifts on currents of metaphor and dark premonitions. Madness spares no one, least of all the clergy and its compliant flock. The waters are opaque and congealed, clearer at the far end of an inhospitable coastline. A leafy barrier rises from an inaccessible beach.

      Eight travelers huddle in the narrow boat. Another is perched on a tree branch grafted into the hull. Two more wade in the water, another emerges from a hedge. Emaciated or grotesquely bloated, their faces express mulishness and angst. In a scene rife with sexual over-tones, a Franciscan friar and a nun who plays the lute, a symbol of eroticism (as are the luscious cherries scattered on a makeshift table) are poised to take a bite out of a loaf of corn bread hanging from a string. Leaning on the prow, another nun clutches a pitcher, an allusion to her sex, as she pesters a man holding a large glass container, also a phallic symbol. Hunched over the stern, a man retches convulsively. More than the consequence of intemperance or debauchery, his queasiness is the first echo of the terrible nausea that grips the damned. It also diagnoses the early symptoms of the diabolical disintegration of the spirit.

      The two men in the water are naked. Are they enjoying a swim or are they immersed in ritual purification? Brandishing a knife, a phallic symbol, a rapscallion roosting in the boughs, attempts to cut the thread that ties a fried chicken, or swan, to a mast from which flutters a banner decorated with a crescent-moon, a symbol of lunacy.

      The oddest character, perhaps the most noteworthy, is the hunchback astride a three-pronged tree stump: He is The Fool, the twenty-second card of the Tarot, and he represents the highest degree of initiation into the hermetic sciences. He is the ninth voyager, with nine being both the universal integer (the sum of any number multiplied by nine equals nine) and a symbol of regeneration. Turning his back on madness, he drinks from a chalice. Two horns protrude from his hood. With his left hand, he clasps a pole from which dangles the head of a nun or witch. The fluttering fringes of his tunic accentuate his agility and cunning.

      In an article published in the Revue des Arts Initiatiques, Michel Montvert, a noted art historian and Surrealism expert says there is little doubt that