Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter - AAAARG.ORG

uegel’s art of laughter 39
figure 16. Attributed to Jan Verbeeck, Grotesque Banquet. Bilbao, Museo
de Bellas Artes.
sixteenth century most likely had a moralizing significance (Fig. 16 ). They
show a crowned bridal figure at a banquet table presiding over a curiously
motley company, and, as I have suggested elsewhere, these scenes may
well have been inspired by the saying “to sit by the bride,” referring to
those who suªer the consequences of their own folly. 30 Nevertheless, even
as beholders pondered this lesson, they must also have chuckled over the
grotesque, often semidemonic creatures capering through these pictures.
The same can be said, I suspect, of a great many works of the period
that we now study with such learned solemnity, including Sebastian
Brant’s Narrenschiff. This book was reprinted so many times and translated
into Latin, Netherlandish, and other languages not only for its moral
messages but for the very medium in which these messages were delivered,
filled with what a twentieth-century translator of the work called