By Sarah Belmont. Also, there is something almost noble about this barefoot man; his draped white cloth is immaculate, giving him an elegant appearance. The long cane on his shoulder hardly resembles a weapon, but rather a sports stick, like the ones that French aristocrats would have used in many 14th-century bowl games.
This etching on chiseled copper, a technique popular in the Rhine Valley beginning around , is attributed to Master E. The Fool and the Naked Woman with Mirror also known as Lust and the Fool features a stripped lady, whose neglected appearance and mirror symbolize lust. Next to her is a male character wearing a hood with bells, the typical outfit of a fool.
His pants are falling off and he displays a dumb smile. The parakeet on the rock, visible in other works by Master E. Here lust and madness are one. On this 16th-century towel-holder, attributed to sculptor Arnt van Tricht, a fool embraces an elegant lady with her well-rounded bare bosoms. Their faces touch as if they are about to share a kiss.
Two miniature fools stand on their shoulders—one plays the bagpipes, the other the drum. According to Dutch art historian Guido de Werd, this sculpture served as a moral warning: beware of the woman who strays from the straight and narrow, she will end up losing her mind. His microcephaly, a birth defect causing him to have a smaller head than average, did not limit him from achieving a significant literary career, both as an actor and a playwright, in an era where such conditions would be disparaged.
Either way, the artist of this portrait imbued his depiction of Triboulet with the dignity and determined look of a Roman emperor, rather than a buffoon-like representation that was typical of the period. A popular 16th-century pseudoscientific belief held that madmen could be cured, if rid of a stone embedded in their brains. Hieronymus Bosch painted various scenes of the procedure, called trepanation, either to unmask fake doctors or to point out the stupidity of their patients. Whether this work was painted by Bosch himself or by one of his successors is still uncertain.
