STONES IN THE HEAD. 



5 1 7 



making for the door. These scenes of pain make no impression 

 upon the monks, one of them prostrate and exhausted and carried 

 by a good rustic who salutes the company with his fur cap, while 

 another is exhibiting his affliction and asking for deliverance 

 from it. 



Another design, likewise by Brueghel le Vieux, is still more 

 suggestive. It is a bald caricature, directly aimed against the 

 quacks. The scene is not laid in a shop, but in the open air, with 

 a staging put upon barrels, on which the operator (alone this time) 

 exercises his wonderful talent. The crowd is gathering around 

 him, presenting a curious series of types ; some gaping with aston- 

 ishment, some frightened, and others rejoicing as if at the ap- 

 proach of deliverance. One unfortunate has just passed through 

 the hands of the operator ; an assistant is applying a restorative 

 liniment to the open wound, while the victim is gazing sadly at 

 the pebble which is supposed to have been taken from his head. 

 Another one is about to be placed in the fatal chair ; the surgeon 

 with his lantern carefully examines the offensive body. The pa- 

 tient howls, but a matron holds his head firmly. Another one is 

 being brought up with a tumor larger than an orange on his head. 

 Hidden under a stool 

 is a confederate with a 

 basket full of stones, 

 ready to be passed at 

 the proper moment, as 

 the ball is passed to 

 the juggler and he is 

 a confederate who can 

 be relied upon, for his 

 lips are closed by a 

 padlock to secure his 

 silence. The satirical 

 intention of this curi- 

 ous picture has been 

 marked by the painter 

 himself in the little 

 sketch outside of its 

 lines on which he has 

 placed his signature. 

 It is a large egg con- 

 taining an operator 



and his victim, with stones raining from the patient's head and 

 falling out of the shell. 



A like satirical intent may be found in Jan Steen's picture 

 (Fig. 2), although the scene is treated less fancifully. The oper- 

 ator may have been a well-known man ; he does not operate in a 



FIG. 3. " STONES IN THE HEAD." Picture by van Achen 

 (van Bosch). Amsterdam Museum. (Dutch school of 

 the sixteenth century.) 



