Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter - AAAARG.ORG

48 bruegel’s art of laughter
figure 23. Frans Floris, Judgment of Solomon. Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum
voor Schone Kunsten.
perhaps, too, by the profound pious meditations that generations of writers
had developed around the Virgin’s death. 60
Indeed, the expression of emotions in the visual arts, except sadness
or mourning, or an occasional exchange of tender glances between the
Madonna and her Child, 61 was generally restricted to the lower classes,
including those who had supporting roles in scenes of sacred history, especially
the torturers of Christ. The contrast between the calm and
dignified Savior and his voracious, beastlike tormentors had been exploited
by fifteenth-century northern artists, Bosch among them, 62 and
was further developed in various Passion scenes by Quentin Massys,
Maerten van Heemskerck, and Jan Sanders van Hemessen (Fig. 24). 63 It
is at this time that we also see the emergence of physiognomy as a “science”
that purported to determine a person’s character from his or her
facial appearance. Although Leonardo da Vinci had dismissed “physiognomics”
as a chimera, lacking “all scientific foundation,” 64 his was a minority
opinion, for a number of physiognomical manuals appeared in the
sixteenth century, among them Bartholomeaus Cocles’s Chyromantia,