Tracing the evolution of the newly emerging iconographical
patterns of fools and folly, this book sheds light on the original
and innovative invention that was an exclusive creation of northern
Renaissance art and culture. The novel theme of the fools' journey,
as expressed mainly through prints in Germany and later in the
Netherlands in the sixteenth century is revealed as an ironical
paraphrase, parodying the well established Christian topos, the
Pilgrimage of Life or the Pilgrimage of the Human Soul, which
offered the believer the opportunity to travel on the road toward
redemption. The new mythical image of the fools' journey, however,
confronts the contemporary reader/viewer with the image of the fool
on his voyage that leads him, instead, to his doomed fate, thereby
reflecting a pessimistic world-view.
The newly emerging visual vocabulary is considered in relation
to analogical contemporary didactic and satirical theatrical
performances such as the rederijkers plays, the sotties, and also
carnival processions. Proposing a new reading of Sebastian Brant's
The Ship of Fools (Das Narrenschiff, Basel 1494), a
landmark in the new iconography of the allegorical journey, this
study recognizes as well the power of the visual image employed in
the woodcuts-illustrations accompanying the treatise as a tool of
moral teaching, used as a means of influencing the larger urban
audience for whom word and image were sometimes interchangeable.
Concomitantly, the divergence between verbal expression and visual
language may be seen to define the inherent codes of the visual
expressions. It is precisely the gap between literary sources and
visualization, the very moment when visual vocabulary crystallizes,
and image departs from word creating its own autonomous expression
and language, that attracts our attention.
The range and diversity of visual material related to the fools'
journey topos, addresses a wide spectrum of audiences. This study
also takes into consideration the strategies of communicating
meanings and values to various publics. Addressing the wider urban
public that was not necessarily lettered, notably women,
illustrated-books and images were envisaged first of all as
didactic tools. In accordance, the painters-engravers attended
their public with rather simple visual elaborations that could be
easily deciphered. Paintings, drawings, and prints intended for
highly cultivated elite circles of urban society, among them works
by Albrecht Dürer and Hieronymus Bosch, demanded greater
intellectual involvement on the part of the beholder, challenging
the sophisticated viewer to re-create a meaningful ensemble out of
the various scenes and motifs presented within complex
compositions.