Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter - AAAARG.ORG

notes to page 57 185
one leads so one follows him; if he does evil, one does evil too; if he does
good, one also does good.” But Aristotle was more neutral. In his Problems
( bk. 7), he asks, “Why do men generally themselves yawn when they
see others yawn?” (Aristotle 1984, 2:1369 [886a25–28]). Leonardo da
Vinci prided himself on painting a yawning man so eªectively that the
viewer was compelled to yawn in response; see Bob Scribner, “Ways of
Seeing in the Age of Dürer,” in Dürer and His Culture, ed. Dagmar Eichberger
and Charles Zika (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998), pp. 93–117, esp. 104. For the role of the yawn in traditional theories
of the passions and the four humors, see Wolter Seuntjens, “Damp,
walm en rook: Luchtige hartstochten in de literatuur van de zeventiende
eeuw,” De zeventiende eeuw 19, no. 2 (2003): 169–180. I owe this reference
to Katharine Fremantle.
87. E.g., Ertz 1988–2000, 2: 955–957; and Roberts-Jones 2002, p. 278.
88. The Head of a Lansquenet is monogrammed “PB.” For the Head of an Old Man,
Bordeaux, Musée des Beaux-Arts, see Hughes and Bianconi 1967, p. 113,
cat. no. 62, and ill. p. 92. On the basis of a recently discovered painting,
Head of a Peasant Man, bearing the signature Pieter Brueghel the Younger
and now in a German private collection, Klaus Ertz attributes these two
pictures to Pieter Brueghel the Younger, as well as the Yawning Man (which
he implausibly identifies as the head of a sick blind man). The form of
the signature on the German Peasant Man leads him to date all these paintings
after 1616, as he does a variant of the panel in Germany that appeared
at auction in London in 1981 and a second peasant head (Switzerland,
private collection). See Essen-Vienna-Antwerp 1997, pp. 364–372, cat.
nos. 116–119; and Ertz 1988–2000, 2:953–962 and cat. nos. 1376–1381.
However, diªerences in style and quality among the paintings in this
group preclude their attribution to the same hand.
89. Gaston van Camp, “Pierre Bruegel a-t-il peint une série des Sept Péchés
Capitaux?” Revue belge d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’art 23 (1954): 217–223.
90. De Vries 1989, p. 190, where he states that such tronies were not intended
as allegorical figures but simply as studies in expression. Under the term
tronie, he includes, correctly, I believe, some paintings by Brouwer that
have been traditionally interpreted as personifications of the Vices, and
several pictures by Rembrandt hitherto considered portraits. A rederijker
document of 1618 mentions a mascars tronie, that is, a mask; see Pikhaus
1988–89, 1:96. For the use of the word tronie in the seventeenth century,