Cutting the Stone is the name of one of the pieces of Dutch early renaissance master Hieronymus Bosch, it portrays a rather odd scene in which a folly man undergoes some kind of trepanation procedure carried on by a medicine man who wears a funnel for a hat. From the head of the folly the man extracts the bulb of a flower, this bulb is the stone of madness; the cause of the patients mental illness.

 

In medieval times a person could be treated as crazy for having a behavior that escaped from the norm, usually due to one of these reasons: having severe psychiatric problems, being a buffoon or for being madly in love being carried away by sexual desire and lust.

I can interpret this medieval theme in two different ways; one, the extraction of the stone of madness is a medical procedure intending to cure or cause wellness to a patient that suffers from a type of mental illness and two, that the extraction of the stone is the reinstatement to society of a person  who has been prey of love and lust depriving him from his sexual desire, even by means of castration.

From this last one I’ve written a piece, incarnating the voice of Lubbert Das, the fool, the folly.