(7) São Tomé maps

Sources of the maps on the anonymus artists page:

The map in the postcard is from Robert Garfield, A history of São Tomé Island, 1470-1655: the key to Guinea (Mellen Research University Press, c. 1992).

The Hondius map is from the University of Florida

Hondius, Jodocus, 1563-1612. Gvinea. London : Samual Purchas, 1625.
Description: 1 map. : col. ; 14.5 x 18.5 cm.
Notes: English version of 1621 map done for Atlas Minor. Mercator-Hondius. Norwich #316a.
This printing is on page 1558 of Purchas his Pilgrimes with text and title outside of map border "Hondivs his Map of Guinea." Has inset of IS. THOMAE.
Early Map ALW1665

The modern map is from : www.sao-tome.com/english.html

(6) clarification re the postcard

The discussion of Martin Luther's commentary on Jonah isn't posted yet, but it will be an important key to the interpretation of The Garden of Delights/El Jardín de las Delicias. More on nahui tochtli is also still to come, but for the moment the el bosco blog is still stuck in 1520.

(5) haywain wheels; Leonardo da Vinci

The haywain seems to either go nowhere or crush people. The Haywain triptychs also include a murder scene from Leonardo's lost (or perhaps only hidden) Battle of Anghiari. The same scene was transformed into a picture of a doctor saving a patient in The Garden of Delights/El Jardín de las Delicias center panel (which includes no wheels).

(4) Yates, Carruthers, Harry Bosch

The most useful books on medieval commentaries on the Rhetorica Ad Herennium and later memory systems are Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966) and Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Mary Carruthers has also written The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400-1200 (Cambridge, UC: Cambridge University Press, 1998)and, with Jan M. Ziolkowski, edited The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). Her books were recommended to me by Larry Silver, whose book Hieronymus Bosch will be published later this year. Another interesting book on memory, which focuses on a later time period and on exporting memory to a non-European setting, is Jonathan D. Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (New York, NY: Viking Penguin, 1984). Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch novels are widely available new, in mass market paperbacks, translated into several languages, and on tape.

(3) Prudence

Prudence is the knowledge of what is good, what is bad and what is neither good nor bad. Its parts are memory, intelligence, foresight (memoria, intelligentia, providentia). Memory is the faculty by which the mind recalls what has happened. Intelligence is the faculty by which it ascertains what is. Foresight is the faculty by which it is seen that something is going to occur before it occurs. Cicero, De inventione, II, liii, 160 (trans. H. M. Hubbell in the Loeb edition), cited by Frances Yates in The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), p. 20.

SI PRVDENS ESSE CVPIS, IN FVTVRVM PROSPECTVM OSTENDE, ET QUAE POSSVNT CONTINGERE, ANIMO TVO CUNCTA PROPONE. If you wish to be prudent, think of the future, and put your mind to all possible contingencies. The print is no. 136 in René van Bastelaer, The Prints of Pieter Bruegel The Elder, Catalogue Raisonné (San Francisco: Alan Wofsy Fine Arts, 1992), p. 182; the translation is by Kay Cashman.

(2) The Alchemist

The Alchemist (nos. 8 and 9 in the el bosco miscellanea blog) is no. 197 in René van Bastelaer, The Prints of Pieter Bruegel The Elder, Catalogue Raisonné, translated and revised by me (San Francisco: Alan Wofsy Fine Arts, 1992), and the following is excerpted from a computer backup copy. Bastelaer attributed the engraving to Philip Galle. The first state, published by Hieronymus Cock, had a vague and obscure Latin legend:

DEBENT IGNARI RES FERRE ET POST OPERARI
IVS LAPIDIS CARI VILIS SED DENIQUE RARI
VNICA RES CERTA VILIS SED VBIQUE REPERTA

QVATUOR INSERTA NATURIS IN NVBE REFERTA
NVLLA MINERALIS RES EST VBI PRINCIPALIS
SED TALIS QUVALIS REPERITVR VBIQUE LOCALIS

Cock apparently published a revised state with lospital added to identify the hospital, and a lament by the amateur alchemist in French, printed on a separate strip of paper and pasted underneath the Latin verses:

L’art Alchemiste ha son nom bien à plain,
Le bien d’autruy & le nostre s’y pert,
De faim mourons, n’ayant pitance ou pain
Tous dessires allons comme il appert
Malheureux est qui à tel art s’assert.

Voyez en hault comme bien cont receuz
Par Madame la bonne hospitalliere
Tous ceulx qui sont par cest art cy deceuz
Comme la chose est bien coustumiere,
Hereulx sont ceulx qui s’en tirent arriere.

Ceste fois cy encoir’veulx je esprouuer
De cherchcr l’art, cest tout mon pensement
Si à coup je ne le puis truuer
Ie brusleray mes livres, puis vrayement
A l’hospital men yray briefuement.

I’enraige au vif voyant que nostre bien
Par ce sot cy en la cendre demeure
Crediet perdons, en bourse n’auons rien
En la fumee est tout fondu pour l’heure
A l’hospital irons, cest chose seure.

On a third state, Hieronymus Cock's name was erased. The fourth and fifth states, published by T. Galle and I. Galle, still have the Latin (at least in the T. Galle version illustrated on p. 265) but also have have even simpler bilingual French and Dutch captions that call the alchemist a fool:

Voy comme ce folastre en ses fioles distille
Le sang de ses enfans, ses tresors et ses sens;
Voy comme il cherche apres la recherche inutile
Du mercure son pain aueque ses enfants.

Den Alcomist “seer veel verquist” aen goet en tyt
Ghelt, goet en schat “heeft hy ghehat” maer is nu quyt
Hy vint int vier “gans niet een sier” dat syn bederuen
In d’eynde dan “moet hy erm man” int gasthuys steruen.

(1) books on Hieronymus Bosch