Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter - AAAARG.ORG

8 prologue: deciphering bruegel
doned by Christ, as an allegory of misused generosity (in this case the
bride personifying Generosity herself ), and as an image of the Last Judgment,
in which the two bagpipers evoke the angels sounding the trump
of doom. 32 (“Hoe geleerde, hoe verkeerde,” as a current Netherlandish
proverb has it; that is, The more learned, the more wrong!) 33 No wonder
David Freedberg was moved to exclaim, with reference to the
influence exerted by Ortelius’s epitaph: “What havoc the adoption of this
viewpoint has wrought amongst the interpreters of Bruegel’s art! It is as
if it has provided the license for those critics who always insist on finding
more in Bruegel’s painting than even Ortelius can have dreamed.” 34
Indeed, those who have sought to “penetrate the secret thought of the
artist,” as De Tolnay put it, 35 have often done so with a zeal unchecked
by common sense or historical plausibility, sustained chiefly by the conviction
that Bruegel’s profundity matched their own and that he addressed
an audience su‹ciently erudite, not to say patient, to decipher his pictorial
conundrums. 36
I would not deny that multiple layers of often complex meaning can
legitimately be discerned in Bruegel’s imagery. An outstanding example
is his Elck, or Everyman, a drawing of 1558, published shortly thereafter as
a print by Hieronymus Cock (see Fig. 18), but even in this case, the message
was not hermetic, accessible only to an elite circle. Bruegel’s contemporaries
would have been familiar with its various details, and anyone who
examined it closely could easily fathom its ultimate meaning. 37 Moreover,
Bruegel had no need to juggle the various details in his Peasant and the Nest
Robber to create a visual sermon whose contortions of meaning would have
defeated the most perceptive contemporary viewer: the artist had access,
after all, to a visual tradition that presented death and earthly transience
much more eªectively, a tradition, in fact, that he had drawn on some
years earlier in his Triumph of Death (Madrid, Museo del Prado). 38 As the
Belgian scholar R. H. Marijnissen wisely cautions us, “Before inventing
scholarly explanations of subjects which today suggest a rebus or code
message, we should ask whether the solution is not actually much simpler
than we think.” 39