Bosch's Image of Poverty

Abstract

The ragged man harried by a dog in two of Bosch's paintings, the exterior of the Haywain triptych and the Rotterdam tondo, is identified as a personification of Poverty. This identification is based on comparisons with figures of Poverty in 14th-century Italian Virtue cycles. Contemporary Franciscan texts may be their source. The Haywain exterior relates to the Franciscan concept of voluntary poverty, protection against the sin of avarice illustrated inside the triptych. The Rotterdam tondo includes details that suggest a second, contrasting, notion of poverty: deprivation, as one of the wages of sin.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 22 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.