Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter - AAAARG.ORG

uegel’s art of laughter 47
pressions. This was, in fact, a very important part of his art of laughter
and must have appealed greatly to his contemporaries.
Several centuries after Bruegel, Joshua Reynolds would insist that an
artist should never express the human passions, “all of which produce distortion
and deformity, more or less, in the most beautiful faces.” 55 How
widely this opinion was shared by earlier artists I do not know, but it is
my impression that until the sixteenth century, the prevailing subject matter
in Netherlandish painting oªered only limited opportunities for representing
the human face in its more animated moments. Scenes of
Christ’s Passion often contain expressive figures, especially those of the
tortured Savior or the grieving Mary and her companions, their “tears
streaming and yet maintaining [their] dignity,” to paraphrase what a
fifteenth-century Italian writer said of a painting by Rogier van der Weyden.
56 Generally, the heroes and heroines of sacred history, and often even
its villains, adopt attitudes of noble restraint appropriate to their station.
This treatment of history subjects persisted long after 1500. A striking
example occurs in a Judgment of Solomon by Frans Floris, done about 1547
(Fig. 23); the participants, including the two mothers, contemplate the
prospect of judicial infanticide with stoic indiªerence. 57 It must be
noted in passing, however, that this expressive restraint in depictions of
sacred and secular histories did not detract from their eªectiveness. Viewers
had long projected into such images the emotions that they expected
the depicted figures to experience, based on their familiarity with the stories.
58 When Ortelius, for example, commissioned from Philips Galle an
engraved copy of Bruegel’s Death of the Virgin (see Fig. 1), he appended to
the print a poem, perhaps of his own composition, describing this picture
“that shows the happy bearing of sadness on the faces of the just,”
as the apostles and other mourners both grieve for the Virgin’s passing
and rejoice at her future glorification in Heaven. And yet, the small-scale,
generalized faces in Bruegel’s picture show little of grief or joy; 59 nonetheless,
we may assume that Ortelius’s response was conditioned by his
knowledge of the event as recounted in various literary sources and