Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter - AAAARG.ORG

taking laughter seriously 149
scathed” and “to tie the Devil to a cushion”). In this regard, the Dulle Griet
surpasses even the Elck in its visual sophistication.
Another aspect of Bruegel’s art of laughter was his gift for rendering
the human face as expressing the motions of the mind, first evidenced in
the Alchemist. The artist was not alone in his physiognomical interests. Beginning
with Quentin Massys, Netherlandish artists exploited the humorous
possibilities of expressive physiognomies oªered by half-length
scenes of tavern interiors and other low-life subjects. A group of physiognomical
studies, or tronies, can be assigned to Bruegel, both original
works, such as the Peasant Woman in Munich and, I am inclined to believe,
the Brussels Yawning Man, and several paintings that have survived only
in copies. Such exercises bore fruit in many of his serious subjects, including
the Christ Carrying the Cross, Massacre of the Innocents, and especially
the Blind Leading the Blind, but they also heighten the humor of his peasant
subjects, as in the snoring reaper in the Wheat Harvest and the tipsy dancer
in the Detroit Wedding Dance. But it is especially in the two late scenes of
peasant revels in Vienna that Bruegel presents us with a gamut of human
types of all ages and conditions: young and old, handsome and plain, demure
or quarrelsome, sober or drunk, people animated by the breath of
life itself.
The chief obstacle to our appreciation of these pictures for what they
are lies, I suspect, in our failure to distinguish between the old peasant
stereotypes and the actual peasants that Bruegel and his contemporaries
must have encountered in real life. Peasants had long been caricatured in
medieval fabliaux and borden, as well as in German carnival plays and rederijker
farces. They are shown as boisterous, quarrelsome boeren, clodhoppers
indulging their animal appetites; peasant men are also dull-witted,
easily duped by their adulterous wives or henpecked by ill-tempered ones.
Thus exhibiting the very opposite of what the upper classes considered
proper behavior, these rustic stereotypes carouse in the rowdy kermises
and wedding celebrations, frequently ending in drunken brawls, that were
depicted in the prints of Barthel and Sebald Beham and other German
artists of the period and, after about 1550, in the prints of Pieter van der