Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter - AAAARG.ORG

2 prologue: deciphering bruegel
cealed, moreover, so that they were accessible only to the more astute
viewer able to penetrate the surface realism of his art.
This view of Bruegel has been influenced to a great extent by a persistent
misreading of a Latin epitaph on the artist that the Antwerp cartographer
Abraham Ortelius added to his Album amicorum (friendship album).
Long unknown, it was discovered by A. E. Popham, who published
it, in part, in 1931. Ortelius, apparently composing his text in several stages
beginning in 1574, some five years after Bruegel’s death, claimed that the
artist had “depicted many things that cannot be painted, . . . in all his works
he often gives something beneath what he paints.” 5 As some scholars have
cogently pointed out in recent years, Ortelius specifically relates this remark
to Apelles and Timanthes, two Greek artists of antiquity discussed
by Pliny the Elder. 6 Pliny praised Apelles because “he painted the unpaintable,
thunder, for example, lightning and thunderbolts,” 7 and acclaimed
Timanthes for his ingenuity, citing several examples. One is the
painting of the Sacrifice of Iphigeneia: having depicted the bystanders
in various attitudes of grief, Timanthes conveyed the greatest grief of all,
that of Iphigeneia’s father, by veiling his face. 8 In another painting,
Timanthes evoked the enormous size of a sleeping Cyclops by showing
some satyrs measuring his thumb with a staª. 9
Ortelius thus was celebrating, not Bruegel’s “hidden” meanings, but
his realism and his remarkable inventiveness. In fact, to compare these
particular artists from antiquity with Bruegel was very perceptive on his
part. Popham himself suggested that Ortelius, with the phrase “Bruegel
here painted many things that cannot be painted,” may well have had in
mind a painting by Bruegel in his own possession, the Death of the Virgin
(Fig. 1). 10 Indeed, with its crowd of mourners, some veiling their faces,
it brings to mind Timanthes’ Sacrifice of Iphigeneia. Similarly, Bruegel’s two
versions of the Tower of Babel (Fig. 2) rival, even surpass, Timanthes’ depiction
of the sleeping Cyclops measured by satyrs. In Bruegel’s works,
the multitude of antlike figures swarming over the surface of the tower
and the vast and minutely detailed landscape that sprawls in its shadow
convey its monstrous dimensions. 11 Finally, Bruegel, in the Gloomy Day in