Encompassing a complex and varied set of methodologies, economic histories of the arts have framed compelling new questions around the activities of artists, patrons, and dealers as cultural agents that tend to locate meaning in behavior rather than visuality. The marriage of art history and economics, consummated through the study of art markets, has engendered myriad possibilities for the investigation of early modern Netherlandish art.

Performance Art/Performance Studies/Public Practice.

Museum Practice/Museum Studies/Curatorial Studies/Arts Administration.

Drawings/Prints/Work on Paper/Artistc Practice.

Digital Media/New Media/Web-Based Media.Architectural History/Urbanism/Historic Preservation.Subject, Genre, Media, Artistic Practice.Katharina Van Cauteren, art historian and chief of staff at The Phoebus Foundation. He is renowned worldwide as one of the most important art historians of our age. Larry Silver is professor of art history at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of the monograph Hieronymus Bosch. This original art book is illustrated with dozens of top-quality works by Flemish masters from worldwide collections. In this context, the fool and irony became important motifs in medieval art, especially in the Low Countries. It is for precisely this reason that Erasmus, in his In Praise of Folly writes not as himself but through the persona of Folly, a broad back behind which the wise person can hide when he denounces social problems. He holds up a mirror to the self-declared wise citizens, because ‘the fool reveals the truth through laughter’, even though it may be hidden between piss and shit, sex and snot.

In contrast to the peasant, the fool escapes the existing order. Only during Innocents Day parties or Shrove Tuesday celebrations is it permitted for urban partygoers to play the fool and to show their ‘underbelly’. The peasant is the antithesis of the cultivated urbanite, who fastidiously controls his urges – and who therefore above all must not laugh too loudly. Peasants are innocently gullible, primitive, throwing themselves into feasting, gorging, drinking and sex. In the late Middle Ages, every right-thinking town-dweller knew the difference between the peasant and the fool. That is the domain of the peasant or fool. But laughing loudly, grinning and grimacing: these are the playing field of the devil – just as pernicious as other uncontrollable urges, such as physical love or the addiction of the gambler. Humour and virtue are irreconcilable, because laughter is uncontrollable and escapes the control of reason. In praise of folly: on the fool and the jester in Flemish artĪccording to medieval theologians, faith is a deadly serious business.

Hieronymus Bosch by Larry Silver