Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter - AAAARG.ORG

notes to pages 33–35 177
11. Joubert-Rocher 1980, pp. 20–23, cites various incongruities as objects
of laughter.
12. See Ruth Mortimer, Harvard College, Department of Printing and Graphic Arts,
Catalogue of Books and Manuscripts, Part 1, French 16th Century Books, 2 vols.
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), 2:612–613, no. 499,
citing P. D. Plan, Bibliographie rabelaisienne (Paris, 1904).
13. De Tolnay 1952, p. 19. For the series, see Rotterdam–New York 2001,
pp. 144–160, cat. nos. 42–54.
14. See Stoett 1943, 1:540, no. 1347. Cf. Pikhaus, 1988–89, 1:116, where the
worthless bolster (cushion, pillow), filled with straw and thus symbolic of
the worldly life of sin, appears in a Netherlandish tafelspel of the period
as a gift that must be destroyed.
15. A. J. J. Delen, Oude Vlaamsche graphiek (Antwerp: Het Kompas, 1943),
p. 133. These items occur in a list of prints sent by Plantin to Martin le
Jeune at Paris in 1558. The artists are unidentified, but Delen identifies
a number of items as prints after Bruegel. There are two sets of 7 peches
mortalz, but as one is valued at 5 shillings (ibid., p. 132), the other at 2, it
is uncertain if the same series is meant. The five-shilling set may have
been hand-colored, but this is not indicated.
16. For these two prints, see Rotterdam–New York 2001, pp. 137–139, cat.
no. 37; and pp. 161–162, cat. no. 53 respectively.
17. The demonic aspects of drolerie is noted by Serebrennikov 1993, p. 165.
In sixteenth-century Netherlandish, the word drol was used to designate
a type of demon or giant (cf. the English cognate troll); see Woordenboek
1882–1998, s.v., “drol.” For the various meanings of drolatiquiment, drolle, and
related terms in the sixteenth century, see Edmund Huguet, Dictionnaire
de la langue français du seizième siècle, 7 vols. (Paris: Didier, etc., 1925–65), 3:279.
18. Vasari 1878, 5:439; quoted in Serebrennikov 1993, pp. 164–165. See also
Getscher 2003, p. 217.
19. Dominicus Lampsonius, Pictorum aliquot celebrium Germaniae inferioris e‹gies
(Antwerp, 1572); see Lampsonius-Puraye 1956, nos. 3 and 19. Van Mander
characterizes Jan Mandijn’s paintings in the manner of Bosch as
“specters and drolleries [ ghespoock en drollerije]” and elsewhere as “burlesques
[drollicheden]”; see Van Mander-Miedema, 1994–99, 1: fols. 205r and
268v respectively ( pp. 78–79, 332–333). See also Silver 1999, pp. 37, 44.
20. Van Mander-Miedema 1994–99, 1: fol. 233 ( p. 190). For a useful sur