Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter - AAAARG.ORG

130 griet and her sisters
figure 73. Detail of Fig. 70.
and swords (Fig. 73). One dauntless housewife even humiliates her victim
by tying him to a pillow. For this last detail, Bruegel once again turned
to a familiar expression. As Grauls has observed, in the famous play
Mariken van Nijmeghen, Mariken’s ill-tempered aunt, raging at her niece,
says that she is so angry that she could tie up the Devil, “or bind him to
a cushion as if he were a babe.” 22 In another Netherlandish play of the
period, a beleaguered husband complains that his quarrelsome wife must
have been one of the seven wives who bound the Devil to a pillow. 23 I
have yet to find this expression in any proverb collections of the period,
but it must have been long current. An Italian engraving of about 1460
shows a battle between women and devils, in which the latter are clearly
getting the worst of it (Fig. 74). One devil has been suspended from a
gallows, the despairing words “O bad company ” issuing from his mouth.