Das Narrenshiff [Ship of Fools]

People in olden dress trying to use different forms of technology on a boat in the middle of a polluted ocean.
Group of men talking and singing. They are overfilling a rowboat, and there is a their ship lookout has leaves on it like a tree.
Woodcut of a boat full of sickly people.

David Avery
Graphic Arts Workshop, publisher
2018
Etching on paper
14/35
Fairchild Endowment Fund purchase
2019.25.1

Inspired by Hieronymus Bosch, The Ship of Fools, ca. 1490-1500
Musée du Louvre, Paris
Image sources: Bosch; Dürer 

David Avery draws inspiration from Old Master artists such as Bosch, Dürer and Rembrandt to create fascinating and intricate etchings filled with symbolism and anachronistic detail. His Ship of Fools is based on a Bosch oil painting that once formed the left panel of a triptych. Its subject is linked with a contemporaneous work of literary satire of the same title by the humanist theologian Sebastian Brandt, published in Basel, Switzerland in 1494. The book consists of 112 short satires in verse accompanied by 103 woodcuts, mostly by Albrecht Dürer. The woodcut on the book’s frontispiece may have been a visual source for Bosch’s painting. 

In Avery’s 21st century interpretation of the medieval literary trope, a small boat is precariously filled with individuals absorbed in their cell phones, screens, and selfie-sticks. They seem oblivious to one another and unaware of the strange fish below formed of discarded trash and extraneous pieces of machinery. The Twitter logo adorns the flag on the mast and the Freemason’s symbol of the pyramid with a floating eye looks down from above.