An etching depicting the tree of folly: four rows of events or activities divided by a tree in centre with Daphne at the top. Each event or activity represents madness of foolishness in different forms. The sheets ends with the stoning of a fool, at bottom left, a summary of all that has gone before and a warning that those who consider themselves wise are just as foolish. Each folly is self-sufficient; the tree is a convenient frame around which to organise the scenes. This print is a copy in reverse of another published in Venice by Ferdinando Bertelli in 1568, which accounts for the fact that the final stoning scene occurs at the left and not at the right, where the scene would end more logically. The plate was also published by Carlo Losi in Rome in 1773. The presence of this and similar prints in the Dutch Drolls album, and the fact that other erudite individuals are known to have bought and collected them, is evidence that they were regarded as more than ephemera.
This print is lettered throughout; at the upper centre: "LARBORO DELLA PAZZIA"; in the cartouche at the lower centre: "Alla' dolce ombra de laltiera pianta / che da torto al ocaso i rami estende / Ciaschuno che qua giu uiuer saunta / o uoglia, o, no' per tempo, otardi sense / Chionque trauaglia burla ride, o canta / Desta radice rami, o frutti prende / Chi le fronde chi all'ombra star desia / che par a tutti dolce la pazzia".

This print is inlaid in folio 41 of the Dutch Drolls album (RCIN 970362). This album originally contained 99 prints on 72 folios, with the prints numbered 1-99 in pencil in a nineteenth-century hand on the mount sheet above each print. A number of other prints were added later, mostly on the versos of the existing sheets and on two additional folios at the end of the album (fols 73-74), probably during the nineteenth century.

 

For more information see Mark McDonald, The Print Collection of Cassiano dal Pozzo. I: Ceremonies, Costumes, Portraits and Genre, 3 vols, Royal Collection Trust 2017, part of The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo: A Catalogue Raisonné, cat. no. 415.