Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter - AAAARG.ORG

notes to page 15 163
of manners that held that laughter had to be contained”; see also n. 68 below.
However, at least one sixteenth-century writer would probably have agreed
that Molckeman was no gentleman. In his commentary on Vitruvius concerning
the proper subjects to paint in the rooms of private houses (The
Ten Books on Architecture, 7:5), Gualtherus Rivius asks, “Who can receive pleasure
from a picture of a truly drunken peasant, who shits and vomits behind
a fence? Such repulsiveness gives pleasure to someone who is improper,
has the sense of a peasant, and who can inappropriately be called human.
To the shame of painting, there are so many nowadays who draw and paint
such inhuman things that ought to horrify a reasonable person.” See
Gualtherus Hermanius Rivius [Walther Hermannus Ryª ], Vitruvius Teutsch
(Nuremberg, 1548), fol. ccxxxi (verso); I am greatly indebted for this quotation
to a study in progress by Alison Stewart, and to Philips Salman for
a photocopy of the original text. Similar complaints, I suspect, have been
aired in every age; in his De groote schilderboek (1st ed., 1707), Gerard de
Lairesse tells us that there is hardly a fine interior that is unadorned by “pictures
of beggars, bordellos, taverns, . . . dirty children on their pots and other
things more filthy and worse” (quoted in Gibson 2000, p. 148).
3. Burke 1978, esp. pp. 271–272; Muchembled 1985; and Elias 2000.
4. Elias 2000, pp. 61, 71, 110–111; cf. Burke 1978, p. 270, who tell us that “[i]n
1500 popular culture was everyone’s culture, a second culture for the educated,
and the only culture for everyone else. By 1800, however, in most
parts of Europe, the clergy, the nobility, the merchants, the professional
men—and their wives—had abandoned popular culture to the lower classes
from whom they were now separated as never before.”
5. Aristotle, De partibus animalium 3.10 (Aristotle 1984, 1:1049). For the concepts
of laughter from antiquity to the Renaissance, see Screech and
Calder 1992; Bowen 1998, pp. 19–20; and Gilhus 1997, pp. 14–101. For
Erasmus, who claimed that not laughter but speech was the unique property
of man, see Screech and Calder 1992, p. 170.
6. Screech and Calder 1992, p. 170.
7. Quoted from his Geschichtklitterung (1575), in Bowen 1998, p. 21.
8. Van Stipriaan 1996, pp. 22–23; Dekker 1997, pp. 15–17; and Verberckmoes
1998, pp. 250–254. Similarly, the “Letter of Lentulus,” supposedly written
during Christ’s lifetime and popular in the later Middle Ages, asserts that
although Christ wept at times, he never laughed; see Constable 1995, p. 235.
Peter of Luxembourg claimed that while the Gospels tell us that Christ