Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter - AAAARG.ORG

a bankrupt and his bruegels 73
his friends would have appreciated Bruegel’s rustic revels as commentaries
on the shortcomings of their own countrymen. 24
Sullivan gives us a valuable account of Antwerp’s intelligentsia during
Bruegel’s lifetime, 25 and her deciphering of the details of Bruegel’s two
pictures is buttressed at every point by a wealth of texts and quite often
with relevant images. But we are never quite certain if Sullivan understands
this interpretation to have been deliberately contrived by the artist
or if it existed only in the minds of his learned audience. 26 If the former,
then Bruegel would presumably have been “a highbrow urban intellectual,”
as Herman Roodenburg puts it, 27 as well versed in classical literature
as Ortelius and his colleagues. Conversely, he could have received
detailed instructions from one of his patrons while he was executing these
two paintings. Our confusion on this point is further complicated by Sullivan’s
suggestion that Bruegel infused the values of his learned associates
even into paintings intended for patrons outside Ortelius’s immediate
circle, a suggestion that defies corroboration. 28 But Sullivan’s thesis
raises more serious problems. It fails to take into su‹cient account not
only what we know of Bruegel’s actual patrons but also what we know of
how people, including Ortelius, as we shall see, actually encountered the
peasantry on festive occasions. Sullivan’s picture of mealtime philosophizing,
finally, is not the only, or perhaps not even the most common,
way in which people conducted themselves on such occasions.
Let us begin with the question of patronage. Except for Ortelius, we
do not know if anyone in Antwerp’s scholarly circles actually owned any
of Bruegel’s paintings. This is true even of Hieronymus Cock, who published
so many of his drawings, and Hans Franckaert, merchant and
member of the Antwerp Violieren, who, according to Van Mander, was
Bruegel’s great friend. Franckaert seems to have been a merchant, possibly
a dealer in small German wares, but we otherwise know little about
him. 29 Bruegel’s known patrons, on the contrary, seem to have been
wealthy men who were prominent in public life. They included Cardinal
Granvelle, archbishop of Malines and first councillor of Margaret of
Parma, regent and half sister of Philip II. Granvelle possessed the Flight