Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter - AAAARG.ORG

56 bruegel’s art of laughter
young men by example how base it is to be seen drunk. 81 That one must
learn to recognize vice in order to avoid it and strive after virtue was an
idea circulated among the ancient authors, including Aristotle and Cato,
and was repeated by St. Jerome, the Venerable Bede, and scores of writers
thereafter. 82 Both Coluccio Salutati and Jacob Landsberger insisted
that the salacious stories found in the pagan poets, and even in the Bible,
would repel Christian readers and encourage them to live virtuously. 83
Similarly, plays featuring morally reprehensible characters and actions
were condoned on the same basis. Sixteenth-century editors of Terence’s
comedies routinely stressed their didactic value: in a prologue to Stephanus
Riccius’s edition of Terence (1566 ), for example, we read that “comedy
is...a mirror of life. Just as we may discern in a mirror the beauty of a
face and also its blemishes, so may we likewise perceive in comedy what
ought to be imitated, what ought to be shunned, what is appropriate to
an honorable life.” 84 But if the low-life scenes of Brouwer, Adriaen van
Ostade, Steen, and others were intended by their makers to function
chiefly as “mirrors of morals,” then the very numbers in which they were
produced and acquired might suggest to more literal minds that the
Dutch people were in perennial need of reminders of proper conduct.
While this is possible, I cannot help thinking that such pictures were
widely collected, and cherished by successive generations, not so much
for their edifying messages as for the astonishing virtuosity displayed by
their creators in rendering the human form convincingly and vividly in
the throes of often violent emotion. 85
The comic scenes of Brouwer, Steen, and their colleagues have their
roots ultimately in the art of their sixteenth-century predecessors, including
Pieter Bruegel. Bruegel’s abiding interest in human physiognomy
is evident not only in The Alchemist but in such studies as the head of
a gaping peasant woman now in Munich (Fig. 31). We also have the superb
little head of a man (Fig. 32) whose prodigious yawn would cause
any viewer to respond in kind: “If one yawns, so yawns the other,” according
to a proverb current in Bruegel’s day. 86 This latter picture has
often been attributed to Bruegel himself, although, for reasons not evi-