Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter - AAAARG.ORG

griet and her sisters 127
kluchten, where she is called, among other things, Griet Sourmouth and
Cross-eyed Griet, ladies evidently not very amiable in character. 6 Significantly,
Griet was also a popular name for large cannons, probably as
a tribute to their noisiness. In the fifteenth century, the great gun at Edinburgh
Castle was called Mons Meg ( because it had been cast at Mons,
Flanders), as well as Muckle [Great] Meg and Roaring Meg, while Dulle
Griet was precisely the name given to the giant cannon placed in the Friday
Market at Ghent in 1578. 7 Grauls further observed that the word dulle
should not be translated as “mad” or “crazy,” as had been customary, but
as “wrathful,” “angry,” or “hot-tempered.” Finally, Van Mander’s account
of Dulle Griet’s activity refers to an old Flemish proverb: “He could plunder
in front of Hell and return unscathed.” Grauls found variants of this
expression in three proverb collections published in the Netherlands between
1549 and 1568, as well as in a political song of the period. 8 In fact,
it seems to have been so common that Joos Lambrecht included it in his
Naembouck, not a proverb collection this time, but a Flemish-French dictionary
(unknown to Grauls) that was published in a second edition at
Ghent in 1562. 9 Finally, as Grauls noted, the anonymous compiler of the
Kampen proverb collection renders the expression as “She could plunder
in front of Hell and return unscathed.” 10
Although there have since been many attempts to explain this picture, 11
Grauls’s interpretation remains the most convincing chiefly because he
situates its subject matter firmly within the popular culture of Bruegel’s
time. His identification of the main figure, moreover, is confirmed by a
factie presented in the Antwerp landjuweel of 1561, in which one of the
disreputable women summoned to the marketplace is none other than
“Griet die den roof haelt voorde helle,” that is, “Griet who robs in front of
Hell.” 12 Nevertheless, Grauls did not exhaust the full significance of the
work, for we can clarify the folkloric themes to which Bruegel responded.
To begin with, a clue to the broader meaning of his painting can be
found in the variant of the proverb “She could plunder in front of Hell
and return unscathed.” Although seldom noted, the context in which this
expression occurs in the Kampen collection is significant, for it appears