Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter - AAAARG.ORG

prologue: deciphering bruegel 11
figure 4. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Allegory of Temperance, drawing, 1560.
Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen.
figure of “a peasant in a befouled shirt occupied with a peasant woman.” 49
This embellishment of Vredeman de Vries’s presumably elegant wall
painting with rutting peasants caused much laughter, and Molckeman was
so enchanted with it that he refused to have it painted out. 50 Van Mander
places this episode sometime in the 1570s, and because this was after
Bruegel’s death (1569), the veracity of his account has been doubted.
Yet Van Mander most likely knew Vredeman de Vries personally and may
have heard the story from him when Vredeman visited Amsterdam in
1603. Adolph Monballieu has plausibly suggested that Vredeman de Vries
painted the mural for Molckeman sometime in the 1560s when Bruegel
was living in Brussels, where Vredeman de Vries, although based in Antwerp,
had many artistic contacts. 51 This brief anecdote suggests that
Bruegel’s contemporaries reacted to at least some of his art with amusement
and outright laughter. 52
In fact, we can understand a significant part of Bruegel’s art and his