Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter - AAAARG.ORG

making good cheer 121
figure 68. Detail of Fig. 43.
during the wedding festivities; she is almost always depicted as such, for
example, when she presides at the Marriage Feast at Cana (see Fig. 65). 81
The old German expression “to sit there like a peasant bride” might have
come to mind, as well as a Netherlandish variant, to be “as quiet as a
bride.” 82 But it is precisely here that Bruegel has fashioned one of his
greatest comic figures. Perhaps it is not reading too much into this bride
to suggest that her modesty seems assumed: is she a vuile bruid, as Bruegel’s
contemporaries termed a woman made pregnant before marriage? 83
“Not all are virgins who wear long hair,” as Erasmus reminds us. 84 A vuile
bruid figures in a Peasant Wedding Dance engraved by Pieter van der Heyden
and bearing Bruegel’s name as the inventor (Fig. 69). 85 As in the Detroit
painting, it shows the bride seated at the table with her female companions;
the accompanying verses describe how the girls wiggle their behinds
and how the bride does well to sit, since she is full and sweet, that is, with
child. The tone of these observations seems hardly censorious but jocu