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Cutting the Stone, also called The Extraction of the Stone of Madness or The Cure of Folly, is an oil-on-panel painting completed c.1494 or later by the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. It is now in the Museo del Prado in Madrid.
The painting depicts a surgeon, wearing a funnel hat, removing the stone of madness from a patient's head by trepanation. An assistant, a monk bearing a tankard, stands nearby. Playing on the double-meaning of the word (stone or bulb), the stone appears as a flower bulb, while another flower rests on the table. A woman with a book balanced on her head looks on.
The inscription in gold-coloured Gothic script reads:
Lubbert Das was a comical (foolish) character in Dutch literature.
Interpretations It is possible that the flower hints that the doctor is a charlatan as does the funnel hat. The woman balancing a book on her head is thought by Skemer to be a satire of the Flemish custom of wearing amulets made out of books and scripture, a pictogram for the word phylactery.Skemer 2006:24. Otherwise, she is thought to depict folly.
See also List of paintings by Hieronymus Bosch
References
Further reading
(book on head) Binding Words Textual Amulets in the Middle Ages. Skemer, Don C. PA: Penn State University Press, 2006. p. 24, 136n. .
"Extracting the Stone of Madness in perspective: the cultural and historical development of an enigmatic visual motif from Hieronymus Bosch: a critical status quaestionis at academia.edu
"A Stone Never Cut for: A New Interpretation of The Cure of Folly by Jheronimus Bosch" in Urologia Internationalis