Folly

Image 1: The Ship of Fools, 1494.Viewed from a modern perspective, the alchemist's quest to transmute base metals into gold and to create a universal medicine might seem the height of folly.  Nowhere is this judgment expressed more directly than in this woodcut, created by the young Albrecht Dürer in 1494, in which an alchemical oven is manned by a figure in a fool’s cap – with ass’s ears, bells and a cockscomb. Triangular crucibles and a retort litter the floor along with a basket – in a manner reminiscent of the later woocut by Hans Weiditz. 

Yet the alchemist is not alone in enduring this ridicule: this image is taken from one of the 112 illustrated satires directed at all manner of vices and weaknesses in in Sebastian Brant’s famous Ship of Fools(Original German: Daß Narrenschyff ad Narragoniam, 1494; Latin translation: Stultifera Navis, 1487; English translation: The Ship of Folys, 1509).

A high-resolution digital facsimile of the 1498 Basel edition can be found on archive.org and on Goolge Books. A fresh translation by William Gilles was published with the original woodcuts in London by the Folio Society in 1971.

Image 2: An Alchemist, 1661. Yet the image of the alchemist as fool was an abiding one. It is difficult to disagree with the description of this painting in the National Gallery, London, as combining 'a minutely observed interior with a direct satire on human folly. The old belief that alchemists could turn base metals into silver and gold survived until the 18th century, and other Dutch paintings of the 17th century satirised the same theme. Here, the paper beside the stool bears an inscription from the treatise 'De Re Metallica' by Agricola (1556): 'oleum et operam perdis' ('oil and work is wasted'). Prominence is given to the still life of varied utensils in the foreground, while the alchemist's family - a mother wiping her baby's bottom [a common detail within this pictorial genre] - is relegated to the background. The cavernous setting of the disorderly interior may well refer to the fact that alchemists were often accused of losing all their material belongings in their futile search of the philospher's stone.'

Commentary. Howard Hotson (April 2019)