Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter - AAAARG.ORG

150 taking laughter seriously
Borcht and other Antwerp artists. This development of peasant satire in
the visual arts of Germany and the Netherlands has been studied in depth
by Hans-Joachim Raupp, who correctly sees it as an autonomous artistic
tradition that generally had little to do with what people might have
thought about actual peasants. 10
But Raupp further insists that even if Bruegel actually mingled with
the peasants on their festive occasions, as Van Mander tells us he did, he
still could not have broken from the conventions of traditional peasant
satire. 11 This claim, however, does scant justice to Bruegel’s repeatedly
demonstrated ability to transform the pictorial types developed by his
predecessors. He reinvigorated the Flemish world landscape tradition,
creating landscapes whose evocation of vast scale and even vaster distances
dwarf the creations of Joachim Patinir and Bles. 12 He brought to the “absurdities”
of Bosch’s followers a sparkling wit and inventiveness generally
lacking in the works of Jan Mandijn and Pieter Huys. In the same
manner, Bruegel reworked the old and often hackneyed tradition of peasant
celebrations to create a new and compelling vision of rustic life. This
transformation begins already in his designs for the Hoboken Kermis and
St. Joris Kermis. While he drew freely on the peasant celebrations of the
Beham brothers and their Netherlandish followers, these two kermises—
and despite the derogatory inscription added by the printmaker to the
Hoboken Kermis—are celebrated with noticeably greater restraint than
the raucous country festivals of Bruegel’s predecessors. 13 And while in the
Detroit and Vienna paintings, he similarly turned to earlier artists for
inspiration, especially for figure poses, his peasants for the most part are
no longer stereotypes but robust individuals endowed with the same monumental
presence that other artists gave to the heroes of religious and
secular history.
In interpreting any phenomenon of the past, we must strive to put
aside our own values and prejudices. Nevertheless, I find it di‹cult to
believe that Bruegel’s sturdy countryfolk were mere zinnekens, allegorical
puppets manipulated by their creator to warn us against gluttony, lust,
and the other unhappy manifestations of our fallen human nature. Nor