Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter - AAAARG.ORG

10 prologue: deciphering bruegel
been active in the Violieren. 44 In 1561, several years before Bruegel
moved to Brussels, the Violieren played host to a great landjuweel, or literary
and dramatic competition, attended by most of the rederijker kamers
of Brabant. 45 It was inaugurated by a magnificent public procession comprising
some 23 allegorical floats, almost 1,400 rederijkers on horseback,
and still more riding in 200 wagons, all brilliantly costumed. Prizes were
awarded for the best poems, plays, and pageants, and even the best costumes.
Bruegel must have been among the crowds that watched the proceedings;
we can speculate on his participation in creating some of the
floats for the Violieren. Conversely, Bruegel’s Elck print of about 1558 may
well have inspired a series of floats that appeared in a procession celebrating
the Feast of the Assumption in August 1563. The floats castigated
the self-seeking and other shortcomings of Everyman, and one tableau
showed an operation for the stone of folly whose details recall Bruegel’s
design on the same theme, called the Witch of Mallegem, published as a print
in 1559. 46
Thus, in the years since Ortelius’s epitaph was first published, we have
come to know much more about Bruegel and his times. But in the reevaluation
of the artist resulting from these eªorts, no less than in the industrious
search for his hidden messages, Van Mander’s “humorous” Bruegel
has generally been ignored or even dismissed out of hand as the rhetorical
eªort of a writer removed from the artist by almost a generation
and thus lacking a true understanding of his art. 47 Van Mander, however,
may not have been so very wrong after all. He records an incident in
Bruegel’s lifetime in which viewers responded to Bruegel’s art much as
he describes. This incident appears in Van Mander’s account of Hans Vredeman
de Vries, the famous architectural scene designer of Bruegel’s day.
Vredeman once painted for a wealthy patron (the Brussels government
o‹cial Aert Molckeman) a mural showing a summerhouse in perspective,
perhaps resembling one of the elaborate open-air pavilions that Vredeman
included in several of his drawings of idealized Renaissance
palaces, later issued as engravings by Hieronymus Cock (Fig. 5). 48 More
to the point, we are told that Bruegel, as a joke, added to the mural the