Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter - AAAARG.ORG

uegel’s art of laughter 49
figure 24. Jan Sanders van Hemessen, Mocking of Christ,
1544. Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte
Pinakothek.
whose first edition appeared in 1523, and Johannes Indagine’s Chiromantia,
first published in Latin in 1522, and in a number of later translations.
A Netherlandish edition of the Chiromantia was published at Antwerp in
1554 by Jan Roelants, who treated the same subject more briefly in the
first chapter of his Nieu complexie boeck, an astrological booklet first issued
in the same year. 65 With their often copious woodcut illustrations, such
books oªered a gallery of diªerent human faces, but to what extent artists
availed themselves of such sources remains to be determined. 66 Nevertheless,
in their very existence, the physiognomy manuals bear witness