Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter - AAAARG.ORG

ustic revels 99
In any case, Van Mander insists that Bruegel “knew how to attire these
men and women peasants very characteristically in Kempish or other
costumes.” 100 (Kempen, or “Kempelandt,” as it is spelled on at least one
sixteenth-century map, was a large region extending from northeastern
Flanders through much of Brabant.) 101 This is equally plausible: as Kavaler
has noted, Bruegel’s peasants display a much greater specificity of detail
in their costumes than are usually seen in the rustic scenes of Aertsen,
Baltens, or Maerten van Cleve. 102 This is not to say, of course, that
Bruegel painted precisely what he saw; he filtered his experiences through
conventions and compositions he had encountered in the art of his predecessors.
For the most part, however, he rejected their stereotypes, particularly
the loutish grins and other comic exaggerations that we find, for
example, in Jan Massys’s Peasants in a Tavern (see Fig. 29). 103
Bruegel’s eªects are entirely more subtle. He also endows his peasants
with a monumentality and vivacity that make the rustic celebrants of
Pieter Aertsen (see Figs. 48, 67) seem spindly and unconvincing. In the
Wedding Dance in Detroit, for example (see Fig. 41), the peasant dancers—
the entire village, it seems, has turned out—present a kaleidoscope of
shifting forms and colors. From the foolish look on the face of the male
dancer at lower right, we may suspect that he is at least a little tipsy. Notable,
too, is his distended codpiece, as well as those sported by a second
man dancing in the foreground and the bagpiper at the right, details rescued
from later overpainting only in the past century. 104 This article of
dress might seem to confirm the view of many modern scholars that
Bruegel’s peasants were meant as embodiments of lust and other vices.
However, we should not jump to conclusions, for the codpiece, first appearing
about 1450, was part of male attire among all classes, from peasants
and soldiers to kings and emperors. To judge from portraits of the
period, 105 they were made conspicuous through the use of padding, a
practice condemned by Montaigne as “that empty and useless model of a
member that we cannot even decently mention by name, which however
we show oª and parade in public.” 106 But none, I doubt, was as capacious
as the codpiece sported by Panurge in Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel,