Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter - AAAARG.ORG

76 a bankrupt and his bruegels
against the theologians of the University of Louvain. 43 Jonghelinck and
Noirot were probably familiar with the classics, since their collections
included mythological paintings. 44 Indeed, as Ethan Matt Kavaler has
demonstrated, the contacts between Antwerp’s artistic and intellectual
circles and the merchants and government o‹cials of the period were
frequent and often close. 45 Cock dedicated several prints and print series
to Granvelle and published a set of prints after the Labors of Hercules
series that Frans Floris had painted for Jonghelinck. 46 Plantin, for his part,
sold books to Granvelle, who in turn, after he had left the Netherlands,
financially supported some of Plantin’s enterprises and helped him publish
the Polyglot Bible. 47 Plantin’s scholars sometimes dedicated their editions
of the classics to one or another Antwerp magnate or government
o‹cial, while the wealthy and cultured Antwerp merchant Gillis Hooftman
substantially underwrote the publication of Ortelius’s Theatrum orbis
terrarum in 1570. 48
But as well educated as Granvelle, Jonghelinck, Noirot, and their colleagues
may have been, it is doubtful that they possessed the profound
knowledge of Greek and Roman literature that Sullivan ascribes, and
probably correctly, to the circle of scholars around Plantin and Ortelius.
As men of the world, Bruegel’s known patrons were undoubtedly less concerned
with the sort of philosophic life associated by Sullivan with Ortelius
and his humanist circle than with the luxurious display of their
wealth and social standing, in which the artist’s paintings would have
played an important role. 49 Thus it is the attitudes of this latter group
toward the peasants and toward country life in general that we must now
examine.