Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter - AAAARG.ORG

uegel’s art of laughter 29
figure 8. Attributed to Jan de Cock, Vision of Tundale. New York, Sotheby ’s,
11 January 1990, lot 37.
icking devils are hardly more threatening than the “bogey men and fantasies”
that swarmed around Aeneas in Erasmus’s description of the underworld.
2 In fact, they are hardly more serious than what we find in one
of Bosch’s own likely visual sources, the fantastic creatures that had long
disported themselves in the margins of medieval manuscripts. It is frequently
asserted, and I think correctly, that such decorative embellishments
were added chiefly for the amusement of readers. 3
I am encouraged in these speculations by a book of woodcuts published
in Paris in 1565 that contains a whole army of Boschian monsters—
no fewer than 120 of them (Figs. 10–12). The title page (Fig. 10) informs
us that they are the Songes drolatiques de Pantagruel, or the Droll Dreams of
Pantagruel, intended “for the recreation of witty minds.” In his preface
to this volume, the publisher Richard Breton assures us that he will leave
the deeper meanings of these images to others to decipher; for his part,