Ship of Fools

A boatload of revelers drifts nowhere - a monk and a nun bawl out a song over a lute, others drink, squabble, and retch overboard, while one climbs the mast, a living tree topped by a skull, to hack down a roast fowl. The rudderless ship of humanity, steered by appetite alone, was a stock image of the age, fixed by Sebastian Brant's best-selling Ship of Fools; Bosch makes the clergy his chief offenders. The panel is a fragment: it was sawn from a taller wing whose lower part, an Allegory of Gluttony, and whose companion, Death and the Miser, are also in this collection.