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to appear for years afterward, so this artistic evidence supports the contention that the mania had a considerable impact—even on those who had taken no active part in it. In 1640 Chrispijn van de Passe (the same van de Passe whose Hortus Floridas had helped to establish the fashion for tulips more than twenty years earlier) engraved a famous illustration entitled “Floraes Mallewagen” (“Flora’s Fools’ Chariot”). This picture shows the goddess, drawn as a young girl in blooming health and a low-cut dress, riding a luxuriously appointed sand-yacht packed with carousing kappists dressed in jester’s caps. These allegorical figures bear labels such as “Vain hope,” “Tippler,” and “Hoard it all.” The sand-yacht itself is drawn tearing across the beach outside Haarlem and is adorned with the signs that hung outside some of the local taverns involved in the mania—the White Doublet, the Little Hen, and four or five others. An ape climbs the mast and defecates over the florists below. Flora, who is seated in state in the stern of the vessel, carries a bunch of the most sought-after tulips: Generael Bol, Admirael van Hoorn, and (of course) Semper Augustus in one hand; others, including a Gouda and a precious Viceroy, wait on the sand to be crushed beneath the sandyacht’s wheels. The contraption is heading straight for the sea, but a crowd of would-be tulip dealers run behind the yacht, desperate to join it on its short rush to destruction. They are weavers, and in their haste they are trampling underfoot all the tools of their old profession. In the four corners of his engraving, van de Passe placed small insets. One shows the bulb grower Henrik Pottebacker’s famous garden at Gouda, the others tavern-trading scenes in Haarlem and Hoorn. The central feature of his piece, the fast-moving sand-yacht, is itself a powerful metaphor for the fatal wind trade.

In the same year that van de Passe engraved his fools’ chariot, Jan Breughel the Younger painted an ambitious work titled Allegory upon the Tulip Mania. Breughel was the most influential painter of flowers to emerge during the Golden Age. Although some modern critics find his style a little stiff, his flower paintings are always vivid and enlivened by the inclusion of small details, such as insects crawling upon the leaves. Certainly the Allegory is an exceptionally lively piece, as packed with incident as any cartoon by George Cruikshank or James Gillray. Two dozen simian florists are portrayed indulging in all the rituals of the bulb trade. One points at some flowering tulips; another holds up a flower in one paw and a bag of money in the other. Behind them a group of monkeys fight over who should pay for the now-worthless bulbs, and one speculator is carried to an early grave. On the right-hand side of the picture a pair of apes share one of the florists’ traditional banquets while another is hauled before a magistrate for defaulting on his debts. In one corner a particularly disgruntled monkey urinates on a flower bed full of tulip bulbs.

These scabrous satires undoubtedly had a considerable impact. Even a hundred years later the tulip mania remained a raw and vivid scar upon the national psyche of the Dutch, and thanks in good measure to the pamphleteers and painters of the Golden Age, the very idea that bulbs could ever have been traded for colossal sums strikes many as perfectly ridiculous today. Nevertheless, the pamphlets of the mania, at least, are important not so much for what they were—ephemeral single sheets, often enough, which were illustrated with one shoddy woodcut, quickly and cheaply printed on low-quality pulp, and peddled by hawkers for a few stuivers apiece—as for the reasons they were produced. A few had been written simply to entertain; in the Dutch Republic, where literacy rates were high, pamphlets were a useful and profitable sideline for men such as Adriaen Roman, the official government printer of Haarlem. Roman, who published the three dialogues between Waermondt and Gaergoedt, could hope to sell perhaps 1,000 or 1,250 copies of a typical broadside, and