Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter - AAAARG.ORG

prologue: deciphering bruegel 9
Thus Bruegel was no erudite philosopher creating finespun allegorical
fantasies in the isolation of his studio. The positive results that attempts
to decipher his imagery have yielded lie precisely in the valuable
insights we have gained into the manifold relationships between his art
and the world in which he lived and worked. 40 His Seven Virtues drawings
of 1559–60 for the most part illustrate the homely, everyday aspects of
each virtue that would have appealed to anyone purchasing the prints that
Cock published after them. 41 As for his Elck (see Fig. 18), we can now appreciate
it as a witty condemnation of the greed and self-seeking that
Bruegel must have seen all too often in the mercantile Antwerp of his
time. Similarly, his Blind Leading the Blind (see Fig. 37), painted in 1568, may
well comment on the religious and political struggles that darkened the
last years of his life and ultimately erupted into the Eighty Years’ War
between the Netherlands and Spain. 42
We have also come to appreciate the many connections between
Bruegel and the Netherlandish rhetoricians of his time, and since they
help us to understand his imagery, we would do well to know them better.
Briefly, the chambers of rhetoric, or rederijker kamers, were literary societies
that sponsored private and public performances of drama and poetry;
they also participated in various civic occasions, often organizing the
allegorical floats that appeared in the annual religious processions of the
period. 43 Almost every town in the Netherlands had at least one rederijker
kamer; Antwerp, because of its size and wealth, boasted three, of which
the most famous was the Violieren (Gillyflower). The rederijkers practiced
a range of dramatic forms, from sinnespelen (now spelled zinnespelen),
or allegorical plays, descended from medieval morality plays, to kluchten,
or farces, of which more later. What is probably a zinnespel figures in
Bruegel’s Allegory of Temperance (Fig. 4); it shows a makeshift stage on which
stand two personifications, one clearly labeled Hope, both observed by a
fool from behind the curtain. Bruegel’s familiarity with rederijker drama
should come as no surprise: He belonged to Antwerp’s Guild of St. Luke,
the artists’ guild with which the Violieren had been closely associated since
the late fifteenth century, and his friend Hans Franckaert seems to have