Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter - AAAARG.ORG

ustic revels 105
with the envy of the peace and freedom from care that townspeople of
every age have attributed to the country folk, colored by Virgil’s Georgics
and Eclogues, by Horace’s famous second epode (“Beatus ille”: “Happy the
man who far from business cares . . . works his ancestral acres”), and by
the countless other poems and treatises before and after Virgil and Horace
that exalted the rustic life over that at court or in the city. We will
examine this subject at greater length in the epilogue, but we can appreciate
a further dimension to this audience response only after we return
to Jean Noirot and his dining room.