Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter - AAAARG.ORG

96 rustic revels
Brabant and Flanders but the region of Liège, Namur, and Hainault, to
the southeast.
In the seventeenth century a version of this picture was owned by
Peeter Stevens, an Antwerp businessman and art collector. In his copy
of Van Mander’s Schilder-boeck, Stevens notes the date of the painting, 1577,
and observes that the bagpiper is Valckenborch himself, with Abraham
Ortelius standing just to his right. 77 The painting exists in three replicas;
one is in the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, another in
the Museo del Prado, Madrid. The third version, which was on the art
market in 1996, bears Valckenborch’s monogram and the date 1577 and
may well have been the picture owned by Stevens. 78 The putative figure
of Ortelius bears enough resemblance to known portraits of him to suggest
that Stevens was repeating an authentic tradition. We also know that
Ortelius was on a tour of the French-speaking Netherlands in 1577,
visiting both Liège and Cologne in that year, and as Valckenborch was in
nearby Aachen, a meeting between the two men is entirely possible. 79 It
has also been suggested that the gentleman conversing with the heavyset
peasant at the left is the miniaturist Georg Hoefnagel. 80 We will probably
never know if Valckenborch’s picture depicts a specific place, if only
because the general terrain, with a plateau on the left and a steep descent
on the right toward an imposing mountainous vista, is a compositional
type that he employed in a number of his landscapes. 81 Nor shall we ever
know if this painting in some way commemorates an actual event. What
seems evident, however, is that the artist and the cartographer were not
averse to having themselves depicted in friendly conversation with representatives
of a social class that Ortelius and his circle, according to some
critics, supposedly saw as the very personifications of human folly when
they encountered them in Bruegel’s Kermis and Wedding Banquet. 82 But as
B. A.M. Ramakers has cogently observed, even if Ortelius articulated an
elevated ideal for the conduct of human life, this does not mean that he
stood aside in disgust or contempt from the festive culture of his time. 83
Ramakers’s suggestion deserves further exploration, because it helps to
explain why, for example, a peasant dance, the so-called Hoboken Dance,