Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter - AAAARG.ORG

66 bruegel’s art of laughter
Vienna (see Figs. 42, 43). Unfortunately, scholars have mined these pictures
so industriously for whatever nuggets of profundity they supposedly
conceal beneath their vibrant surfaces that they have generally overlooked
the marvels that Bruegel presents to the naked eye. This is indeed
a pity, for it is in these works that Bruegel shows the greatest diversity of
human types, ages, social interactions, and even personality, all realized
with an astonishing fidelity to nature. It is here that Bruegel’s art of laughter
finds its culmination. This will be evident, I think, when we consider
them in the original context in which they were most likely seen and enjoyed,
a subject best approached through a forced auction that took place
in Antwerp just a few years after Bruegel’s death.