Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter - AAAARG.ORG

162 notes to pages 11–15
dans les édifices privés de Belgique,” Revue belge d’archéologie et d’histoire de
l’art 47 (1978): 57–75, esp. 70–71 and fig. 70.
49. Van Mander-Miedema 1994–99, 1: fols. 266r–v (pp. 322–325). The shirt
is presumably befouled through the peasant’s defecation. Van Mander says
that the peasant had a beseghelt shirt; beseghelt (now spelled bezegeld ), means
“sealed,” and modern Netherlandish translations of this passage generally
leave the original word in quotation marks. However, a clue to the
meaning of the word may be found in a woodcut by Pieter Flöttner of
ca. 1535, in which an impoverished artisan raises a banner bearing the image
of a large wine jar and a turd; in the accompanying poem, he tells us
that the banner has been “sealed with a turd [versigelt mit eym dreck]”; see
Geisberg-Strauss 1974, 3:793, G.828, for which I am greatly indebted to
Alison Stewart. In a similar manner, perhaps, the shirt may be thought
of as “sealed” or stained with the eªorts of defecation, much as a piece
of paper might be stained with drops of sealing wax, but this must remain
conjecture.
50. Van Mander-Miedema 1994–99, 1: fol. 266v ( pp. 324–325). Miedema
tends to dismiss the story as one of Van Mander’s own invention (5:55).
51. See Monballieu 1969.
52. For similar observations on Bruegel’s art, see Muylle 1984; as B. A. M.
Ramakers has aptly put it, there was room in Bruegel’s art for the smile
and the guªaw, as well as for serious thoughts (Ramakers 1997, p. 102).
chapter 1
Epigraphs: Ozment 1986, p. 161; and Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages:
A Study of the Forms of Life, Thought and Art in France and the Netherlands in the XIVth and
XVth Centuries (New York: St. Martin’s Press, n.d.), p. 206. This standard English
edition was taken from an earlier German translation that had been approved
by Huizinga. He expressed the same idea in a more diluted manner in
his original Netherlandish text, which has been recently translated into English:
Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich
Mammitzsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996 ), p. 268.
1. Miedema 1977, p. 211.
2. See Verberckmoes 1998, p. 41, who refutes the common notion that
burghers did not laugh. It should be noted that Miedema 1981 qualified
his remarks on laughter among the burghers; see esp. 208: “People did
laugh, of course, but they nonetheless had to remain aware of the code