Like a wind of madness: “Lithotomy” by Hieronymus Bosch

Who is this madman, who can be seen in the painting by Hieronymus Bosch, Lithotomy, featured in the exhibition Figures of the fool. From the Middle Ages to the Romantics, which is being held until February 3 at the Louvre Museum in Paris? He is surrounded by many others, smiling, dancing, grimacing but above all looking, looking at us. One pretends not to see by hiding his face with his hand with outstretched fingers, the others put on thick glasses to blind themselves in the light of useless books. And what else are we doing, not seeing this bad wind coming, the time of the world's madness? “ Mad about himself, his eye on his image, and without even realizing that he sees a madman in his mirror ”, we can read in the Ship of Fools by Sebastien Brant, in 1494. And this is what we will no longer read quite like in thePraise of madness by Erasmus in 1511. Hieronymus Bosch painted in this uncertain meantime. So obviously it looks at us, in this big mirror.

So let's take a look, with: Michel Weemansprofessor of art history at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, specialist in Flemish art, and in particular its landscapes, the tricks and fables of which he studies. He signed the chapter on Bosch and Bruegel in the catalog Figures of the fool. By his side, Maud Pérez-Simonlecturer in medieval literature at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University, who is a specialist in the relationship between text and image. She published at Champion, with Pierre-Olivier Dittmar, a curious text from the 13th century, The monsters of men. Both are joined by François Chaignauddancer, choreographer and singer, who presents a performance entitled Little players, alongside the Louvre exhibition, until November 16 (continuous from 7:30 p.m. to 11:30 p.m.), as part of the Autumn Festival.

From the incongruous to the universal

Lithotomy by Hieronymus Bosch is an oil on oak of fairly small dimensions (48 by 34 cm), kept at the Prado Museum in Madrid. This painting was part of the collections of Philippe de Bourgogne before 1524. It is also given the title “Excision of the stone of madness”, a practice that has long been believed to be carried out by certain surgeons from the Middle Ages or the beginning of the 16th century, but this is not historically attested. Lithotomy is in reality only a visual motif to express the credulity of those who submit to the charlatanism of surgeons. As Michel Weemans explains to us, although Hieronymus Bosch was not able to witness this operation, he was nevertheless linked to rhetoricians whose plays depicted charlatans in the process of removing the stone of madness. .

In any case, it would be very difficult to read this work literally since the scene painted by Hieronymus Bosch takes place not indoors, but outdoors, unlike other later scenes which will be inspired by this painting. According to Michel Weemans, anchoring the operation in the middle of a vast landscape, with a very luminous horizon, is an incongruity which immediately leads us to understand that we should not take it seriously. The historian also believes that the landscape within which Bosch chose to place the scene is, due to its circular composition, a “world landscape”, a way of symbolizing its universality. It should also be noted that the circular shape of the work resembles a speculum or a mirror, like other paintings by Hieronymus Bosch. We are meant to recognize ourselves or our distorted reflection in this painting.

But what about the funnel placed on the doctor's head? However, this is not an ordinary attribute of madness in the Middle Ages and it is not an outfit of the jester or the court jester. For Michel Weemans, there is a correlation between this funnel and the book placed on the head of another character. These two attributes have an allegorical virtue: “ The book that is closed is knowledge, but which is not used. It is a book which is not read, which is not an object of meditation for example, as we often see with religious characters. As for the funnel, in Bosch's time, it was an alchemical symbol of the transfusion of knowledge which descends, whereas here it is placed upside down. In other words, it is the absence of knowledge. So what we can already notice is that these three characters who are each supposed to embody a form of knowledge, on the contrary, show an absence of knowledge. »

Another anomaly, and not the least: it is not a stone that is extracted from the skull of the unfortunate madman, but a flower – and more particularly, a water lily, a plant with strong sexual connotations. For the historian, the extraction of the flower means that it is the vice of lust that is being removed from the character.

Dancing on the margins, in the footsteps of the medieval madman

Dancer, choreographer, singer – but also a historian since he published a book on the political history of feminism at the beginning of the 20th century – François Chaignaud practices an art nourished by an in-depth reading of historical texts as well as by exposure to images . As evidenced by the performance entitled Little players which he presents until November 16, 2024 on the sidelines of the Louvre exhibition, in the interstices of the exposed stones, at the foundations of the medieval Louvre. In accordance with the bias of the exhibition, François Chaignaud worked on the figure of the medieval madman before the asylum, before alienation. For him, the madman of this exhibition is above all “ the crazy needed to be healthy », the one who is full of a power of subversion, of reversal of values, as the contemporary artist can be.

To prepare this performance, François Chaignaud began researching a genealogy between the dances represented in the exhibition, in particular the moresco which is a medieval dance imported by the Moors from Spain, and the revival of modern dance of the 20th century. Even more, he does not hesitate to make the link between medieval motifs a priori unrelated to art, and contemporary dances. Thus he sees a link between lithotomy and butoh dance:

« In butō dance, there is a whole exercise where you try to imagine your body as an envelope that is not airtight, that is not waterproof, into which something can infiltrate. We often speak of a small stone, or a bubble, a ball, which suddenly enters us through an orifice, either through the mouth, or through the pore. Then it is no longer the subject who dances, but it is the subject who has become porous or listening to what acts on it, to what has penetrated it, which produces a dance and forms. And often in butō as it has become ritualized, the exercise ends by formalizing the extraction of this small stone which generated the movement. » François Chaignaud

Mathieu Potte-Bonneville's Postcard: turning your head, with “The Fool on the Hill” by the Beatles

During the show, we have the joy of receiving a postcard from the philosopher and director of the Culture and Creation department of the Center Pompidou, Mathieu Potte-Bonneville. For once, today's missive is musical – because yes, songs can also be images, especially when they turn on themselves and repeat three or four times with the same motif. This is how it is The Fool on the Hill by the Beatles, dated 1967. Excerpt:

“The Fool on the Hill presents such an obvious structure that when he composed it on the piano Paul McCartney dispensed with putting it down on paper, believing he would have no difficulty in remembering it, “in his head” as they say. Precisely, he paints there, in a voice of the head, the picture of someone who does not have all his head, a picture of which we contemplate in turn the obverse and the reverse: tails, the man is seen from the outside (“they can see he's just a fool”), face, he is seen from the inside; tails, we evoke the face he has, and tails we are in his head; or rather, because it is a complicated symmetry where inside and outside stand head to tail, tails, we describe the passers-by who pass the madman without ceasing for an instant to be completely inside themselves, without seeing anything or hear or want to know anything about him; and opposite, from within, it is the outside that we see, nothing less than the cosmos, because (I quote) “the eyes in one's head see the world turning”. Thus, from the top of his hill, the madman stands up to those who see him without seeing him, without seeing that he is seer.” Mathieu Potte-Bonneville

Sounds played during the show

• Magdeleine Hours, head of the Louvre laboratory, in the program “Les secrets des chefs” in March 1962.
• “I am madness”, Then in oblivioncomposed by Guillaume de Machaut.
• “The Fool on the Hill” des Beatles, sur l’album “Magical Mystery Tour” (1967).
• Reading of Brant's Plea by Feodor Atkine (1979).
• Musical playbackPraise of madness of Erasmus by the Royal Chapel of Catalonia, under the direction of Jordi Savall.
• “The Lunatics” par The Specials (2006)