Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter - AAAARG.ORG

making good cheer 109
figure 61. Frans Pourbus I, The Hoefnagel Family. Brussels, Musées Royaux
des Beaux-Arts de Belgique.
of an Italian gentleman and a Brabantine lady, the poem describes the
festivities following the marriage ceremony: they included a banquet and
speeches, after which the guests danced until after midnight, only to indulge
in more festivity the following day. 18 Even more to the point, can
we assume that Pourbus’s painting documents to any degree the actual
behavior of people in this period? After all, it is most likely a family portrait,
and however much ladies and gentlemen may have laughed in real
life, and we have seen that they surely did, when it came to being recorded
for posterity, they generally eschewed emotion of any kind. This restraint
was probably an inheritance from the traditional devotional portraits that
appear in the context of altarpieces and other religious images of the
period, in which mortals comport themselves with proper, even anxious,