Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter - AAAARG.ORG

making good cheer 115
the jocularity of a farcical tafelspel. If the host and his guests exchanged
stories, a practice recommended by Erasmus himself, 55 they most likely
drew some of them from the published jest books and told others much
in the same spirit. Such collections of anecdotes had long served to enliven
the meal. Leon Battista Alberti, for example, gave his collection of
stories (written before 1434) the title Intercenales (Dinner Pieces), to indicate
that they were meant to be read over dinner; as with the Nyeuwe
clucht boeck, its contents range from serious to amusing topics. 56 The Mensa
philosophica oªers a number of jokes deemed appropriate at mealtimes. 57
In the short preface to his third book of Facetiae, published in 1512, Heinrich
Bebel tells us that some consider his stories “too lascivious and dirty,”
but he has heard them all told by “serious men at banquets,” most of them
in the presence of ladies (apud matronas). 58 The title page of the Nyeuwe
clucht boeck of 1554 promises amusement for an honorable company (eerlijc
gheselscap), although it does not specify the occasion; however, Georg Wickram
dedicated his Rollwagenbüchlein of 1555 to an innkeeper famous for the
stories with which he amused his guests at the table. 59 And while many
of these stories would have failed the Erasmian test for proper dinner
conversation, Erasmus gives us one colloquy, The Fabulous Feast, in which
the guests amuse each other with frivolous anecdotes, some lifted from
the old jest books, among them a story that would have been quite at home
among the more scurrilous tales of Een nyeuwe clucht boeck. 60
All this suggests that Bruegel’s countrymen are likely to have agreed
with the sentiments inscribed on a print by an artist working a generation
later, Evening from Jan Saenredam’s Four Times of Day, engraved sometime
before 1599 after designs by Hendrick Goltzius (Fig. 64). It shows
an elegant company eating and drinking around a table, including two
lovers kissing, and its Latin verse tells us, “Evening drives sorrow and sadness
far away, she lightens people’s spirits and banishes care.” 61 As Jan Jansz
Starter asserts in his Friesche Lust-Hof, a collection of songs published at
Amsterdam in 1621, on occasions of relaxation with food and drink, it is
a good thing that sometimes one “de geck laet springen uyt de mouwen”
( literally, lets the fool spring from the sleeves). 62 A distant echo of Ho