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Narragonia

On permanent display at the Musée du Louvre in Paris is an oil painting on wood of very modest dimensions, approximately twenty-three inches high and thirteen inches wide. A work of nervous energy that captures the tormented expressions of its characters, the painting lampoons the credulity of the masses and warns against the greed, decadence and hypocrisy of the clergy. Perhaps inspired by Sebastian Brant’s moralistic poem, Das Narrenschiff, the painting is known as La Nef des Fous or The Ship of Fools. Dense in symbolism, it is one of the 15^th century’s most inscrutable works or art.

Brant, a humanist and a contemporary of the painter, tells the story of a craft laden with fools and steered by fools sailing toward a fools’ paradise, Narragonia. The ship is a metaphor for life and Narragonia a satirical emblem for a world gone mad. Written in 1494, two years after Columbus’ first voyage to the “Indies,” the poem attacks the failings and extravagances of his age. No folly is left uncensored as it lashes unsparingly at the hydra of popery, the parasitic idleness of monasticism and the perfidy of false piety.

In his groundbreaking Madness and Civilization, French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault writes about the ancient practice of “shanghaiing” the “insane” (and other pariahs) and forcing them to serve as crew on ocean-going vessels. Penned by a noted New York psychiatrist, the late Dr. José Barchilon, the introduction to Foucault’s book relates how

“Renaissance men developed a delightful, yet horrible way of dealing with their mad denizens: they were put on a ship and entrusted to mariners because folly, water and sea, as everyone then ‘knew,’ had an affinity for each other. Thus, ‘ships of fools’ criss-crossed the seas, oceans and canals of Europe with their comic and pathetic cargo of souls. Some of them found pleasure and even a cure in the changing surroundings, in the isolation of being cast off, while others withdrew further, became worse or died alone and away from their families. The cities and villages which had thus rid themselves of their crazed and crazy could now take pleasure in watching the exciting sideshow when a ship full of foreign lunatics would dock at their harbors.”

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

“The artist, in his quest to exhume and explore the subconscious, encourages creative minds to seek intellectual independence in the pursuit of free thought. Modern surrealism has inherited, or perhaps wrenched, from him its ingenuity and irreverence. But whereas the Moderns deform or upend reality to convey abstract concepts, the author of this disquieting painting draws from Apocalypse, alchemy and the demonic realm of fiends -- real and imaginary -- to expose the iniquities of his time. Through them he expresses profound pessimism about the fate of man.

“A youthful work, the diminutive Ship of Fools is filled with secret language and nuances that invite endless interpretations. We know that the master painter served two patrons: the Church, in conventional religious iconographies; and, with palpable relish, radical adversaries who fought against the Church’s despotism and immorality. The very complexity of his haunting renderings has denied us a clear understanding of the mood, feelings and insights that fed them.”

Unanticipated circumstances would soon bring the great artist out of the fog of time and, for a brief period of friction and discord, into the glare of public scrutiny. Heretofore the subject of scholarly speculations, the remote and once two-dimensional medieval artist would reach beyond the grave, show his face and bare his soul. The chain of events that ensued would shed new light on his generation. It would also say infinitely more about the dissonance of our own age and the one-way journey to the fool’s paradises on which many are embarked.