Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter - AAAARG.ORG

126 griet and her sisters
figure 71. Detail of Fig. 70.
believed (evidently he was not sure) that it was one of the pictures in the
palace of the emperor (that is, Rudolf II). The subject, Van Mander tells
us, is “Dulle Griet die een roof voor de Helle doet” (Dulle Griet who
loots in front of Hell). 2 His cryptic statement was carefully investigated
in the past century by Jan Grauls, the eminent Belgian philologist and folklorist.
3 According to Grauls, the name Griet was by Bruegel’s day a disparaging
term for any ill-tempered, scolding woman, and he cites the saying
“Where two Griets are in one house, no barking dog is needed.” 4
Although Grauls could find no citation of this proverb earlier than the
seventeenth century, it already occurs in Goedthals’s proverb collection
of 1568. 5 Griet also appears as a character in several Netherlandish