Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter - AAAARG.ORG

108 making good cheer
scribes the six successive days when a small group of serious-minded gentlemen
gather for dinner, listen to readings from Plato, modern tragedies,
and the like as they eat, and discourse endlessly on religion, Christian,
Jewish, and pagan. 12
The philosophical banquet was thus very much a literary convention,
and it is not easy to determine how often such meals occurred in everyday
life. Many writers recommended that meals combine food for the
body and the mind, with neither food too rich but always nourishing; indeed,
Erasmus insisted that at dinner, it was best to “avoid foolish yarns
and enjoy profitable conversation.” 13 This seems to have been the practice
of Carolus Virulus, head of a gymnasium, or secondary school, in
Leuven ( Louvain), who was “not as learned as he was good,” as Vives characterizes
him. Seeking to rectify this failing, he entertained the families
of his students and other guests at dinner and encouraged them to discuss
their professions, so that “they would leave the table, the guest quite
happy, and the host wiser and better informed.” 14 The Antwerp merchant
Gillis Hooftman, a Calvinist, may have had a similar desire for mealtime
edification when in 1568 he ordered, as decorations for his dining room,
five pictures of events in the life of St. Paul from Marten de Vos, who
had been recommended by Ortelius. 15
As evidence of such temperate mealtime behavior, Sullivan also illustrates
a painting by Frans Pourbus I, depicting a company of fashionably
dressed ladies and gentlemen, generally identified as the Hoefnagel
family, within an interior setting, perhaps a dining room (Fig. 61). 16 Identifying
this scene as a wedding feast, Sullivan tells us that “[t]he expressions
of the bride, groom, and the participants are serious, their costumes
simple and dark, food and drink receive minimal attention, and the behavior
of these wedding celebrants is restrained, even solemn.” 17 Sullivan
has justly characterized the social atmosphere of this picture, but how
do we know that it is a wedding feast? Real-life weddings tended to be
more lively, to judge from some of the tafelspelen performed on such occasions
(of which more later), as well as an epithalamium, or wedding
poem, by Jan van der Noot. Composed to celebrate the nuptials in 1563