UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI

Date:______

I, ______, hereby submit this work as part of the requirements for the degree of: in:

It is entitled:

This work and its defense approved by:

Chair: ______

Making Them Laugh: Elements of the Comic in the Peasant Revel Scenes

of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1550-1580

A thesis submitted to the

Graduate School

of the University of Cincinnati

In partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

In the Department of Art History

of the School of Art

of the College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning

May 2008

by

Daniela Langusi

BA, Academy of Economic Studies Bucharest, Romania, 1993

Committee Chair: Dr. Diane Mankin

Abstract

The peasant scenes of Pieter Bruegel the Elder have triggered a scholarly debate that relies on two different approaches. One view attaches to these images a primary moralizing message, while the other places them within the cultural context of the contemporary art of laughter. In my thesis I will argue that the peasant revel scenes are primarily comic in nature, without diminishing the moralizing message. My argument relies on two main theories developed by Henri Bergson and Mikhail Bakhtin, as well as on the similarity between the visual elements employed by Pieter Bruegel and the comic practices and techniques employed in the theatrical art of commedia dell’arte. I discuss the role of the peasant as a comic type and the use of grotesque realism in the visual representation of the body and the lower material bodily stratum as indicators that artists chose their visual vocabulary with a comic intent.

iii

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful for the encouragement and support of the Art History faculty and staff throughout my studies at the University of Cincinnati. I would like to thank Professor Diane

Mankin for her support and help in the process of developing my ideas for this thesis. I also thank Professor Kimberly Paice and Professor Teresa Pac for serving on my thesis committee.

v

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 12

The Scholarly Debate on the Meaning and Interpretation of Sixteenth-

Century Flemish Paintings and Prints of Peasant Scenes

Chapter 2 19

A Theoretical Approach to the Comic in the Visual Arts in Relationship to

the Peasant Scenes of Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Chapter 3 38

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the Culture of Laughter in Sixteenth-Century

Flanders, and Comic Practices in Commedia Dell’Arte

Chapter 4 51

Comic Strategies in the Peasant Revel Paintings and Prints of Pieter

Bruegel the Elder

Conclusion 69

Bibliography 73

Illustrations 78

vi List of Illustrations

Fig. 1. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Wedding Dance, 1566, oil on panel, 119.4 x 157.5 cm, The Detroit Institute of Arts

Fig. 1a. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Details of The Wedding Dance, 1566, oil on panel, 119.4 x 157.5 cm, The Detroit Institute of Arts

Fig. 2. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Peasant Wedding Banquet, c. 1567, oil on panel, 114 x 164 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Fig. 2a. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Details of The Peasant Wedding Banquet, c. 1567, oil on panel, 114 x 164 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Fig. 3. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Peasant Dance, c. 1567, oil on panel, 114 x 164 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Fig. 3a. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Details of Peasant Dance, c. 1567, oil on panel, 114 x 164 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Fig. 4. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Netherlandish Proverbs, 1559, oil on panel, 117.5 x 163.5 cm, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäaldegalerie

Fig. 5. Anonymous, after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Wild Man, 1566, woodcut, 27.2 x 41 cm

Fig. 6. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Death of the Virgin, c. 1564, grisaille, oil on panel, 36 x 55 cm, National Trust, Upton House, Banbury

Fig. 7. Philips Galle, after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Christ on the Road to Emmaus, 1571, posthumous engraving, 24.8 x 19.3 cm

Fig. 8a. Hans Sebald Beham, Large Kermis, 1535, woodcut, left side

Fig. 8b. Hans Sebald Beham, Large Kermis, 1535, woodcut, right side

Fig. 9. Hans Sebald Beham, Nose Dance, 1535, woodcut, right side

Fig. 10. Pieter van der Heyden, after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Witch of Mallegem, 1559, engraving, 35.3 x 47.3 cm

Fig. 10a. Pieter van der Heyden, after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Detail of The Witch of Mallegem, 1559, engraving, 35.3 x 47.3 cm

vii Fig. 11. Hieronymus Bosch, The Extraction of the Stone of Folly, c. 1494, oil on panel, 48 x 35 cm, Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado

Fig. 12. Pieter Quast, “The Triumph of Folly,” a Scene from the Play “Tarquinius and Brutus” in the Amsterdam Municipal Theatre, 1643, canvas, 69.5 x 99 cm, Theater Museum, Amsterdam

Fig. 13. Anonymous, Emblem, Antwerp, 1631

Fig. 14. Pieter Baltens, Peasant Kermis with the “Clucht van plaijerwater,” after 1540, oil on panel, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum

Fig. 14a. Pieter Baltens, Detail of Peasant Kermis with the “Clucht van plaijerwater,” after 1540, oil on panel, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum

Fig. 15. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Battle Between Carnival and Lent, 1559, oil on panel, 118 x 164.5 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Fig. 16. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Land of Cockaigne, 1567, oil on panel, 52 x 78 cm, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek, Munich

Fig. 17. Harlequin, Zan Corneto and Pantalone making music, Recueil Fossard, 16th century

Fig. 18. Harlequin and a milkmaid break eggs and glasses during a dance, Recueil Fossard, 16th century

Fig. 19. Jacques Callot, Balli di Sfessania, 1622, Frontispiece

Fig. 20. Jacques Callot, Balli di Sfessania, 1622

Fig. 21. Jacques Callot, Balli di Sfessania, 1622

Fig. 22. Jacques Callot, Balli di Sfessania, 1622

Fig. 23. Pieter van der Heyden, after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Festival of Fools, after 1570, posthumous print, engraving, 32.5 x 43.7 cm

Fig. 23a. Pieter van der Heyden, after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Detail of The Festival of Fools, after 1570, posthumous print, engraving, 32.5 x 43.7 cm

Fig. 24. Hans Sebald Beham, A Dancing Fool, 1549, drawing

Fig. 25. Pieter van der Heyden, after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Wedding of Mopsus and Nisa (“The Dirty Bride”), engraving, c. 1570, 26.4 x 41.6 cm

viii Fig. 26. Claude Gillot, Harlequin as a glutton, drawing, 17th century

Fig. 27. Harlequin banqueting, Recueil Fossard, 16th century

Fig. 28. Harlequin and Philipin banqueting, Recueil Fossard, 16th century

Fig. 29. Harlequin and Franceschina caught by Pantalone, Recueil Fossard, 16th century

Fig. 30. Zan Zacagni in a tavern, Recueil Fossard, 16th century

Fig. 31. Arlequin vole un baiser à la Dona Cornelia, Recueil Fossard, 16th century

Fig. 32. Frans Hogenberg, after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Kermis at Hoboken, c. 1559, etching and engraving, 29.8 x 40.8 cm

Fig. 32a. Frans Hogenberg, after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Details of Kermis at Hoboken, c. 1559, etching and engraving, 29.8 x 40.8 cm

Fig. 33. Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Wedding Dance in a Barn, oil on panel, 86 x 102 cm, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin

Fig. 33a. Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Detail of Wedding Dance in a Barn, oil on panel, 86 x 102 cm, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin

Fig. 34. Pieter van der Heyden, after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Peasant Wedding Dance, after 1570, posthumous print, engraving, 37.5 x 42.3 cm

Fig. 34a. Pieter van der Heyden, after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Details of Peasant Wedding Dance, after 1570, posthumous print, engraving, 37.5 x 42.3 cm

Fig. 35. Die Augsburger Monatsbilder, 1520-1525, Mural, Augsburg, Germany, Detail

Fig. 36. The Mad Mother Flag, c. 15th–16th centuries, Dijon, France

Fig. 37. Joannes and Lucas van Doetecum, after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Saint George’s Kermis, c. 1559, engraving, 33.2 x 52.3 cm

Fig. 37a. Joannes and Lucas van Doetecum, after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Details of Saint George’s Kermis, c. 1559, engraving, 33.2 x 52.3 cm

Fig. 38. Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Kermesse of Saint George, 1628, oil on panel, 116.8 x 175.5 cm, private collection

Fig. 38a. Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Details of Kermesse of Saint George, 1628, oil on panel, 116.8 x 175.5 cm, private collection

ix Fig. 39. Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Peasants Making Merry Outside a Tavern ‘The Swan,’ c. 1630, oil on panel, 55 x 69 cm, private collection

Fig. 40. Jan Bruegel the Elder, Wedding Dance, c. 1597, oil on wood, 37.4 x 55.2 cm, private collection

Fig. 41. Frans Huys, after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Ice Skating before the Gate of St. George, c. 1558, engraving, 23.1 x 29.3 cm

Fig. 41a. Frans Huys, after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Details of Ice Skating before the Gate of St. George, c. 1558, engraving, 23.1 x 29.3 cm

x

Introduction

The Dutch and Flemish peasant revel scenes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are commonly considered a specific Northern European artistic phenomenon, a tradition started

by Peter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525-1569) that carries an intrinsic moral message warning

against contemptible behavior. Nonetheless, their interpretation, meaning, social function, and

reception have triggered an intense debate in Northern art scholarship, with art historians arguing

mainly in two opposing directions. One view attaches to these images a moralizing content and

message, considering a priori that artists expressed the contemporary elite’s general negative

attitude towards the unrestrained festive behavior of the lower classes.1 The other view places

these images within a larger cultural context that allows for their interpretation as manifestations

of the contemporary art of laughter.2

The scholarly debate triggered in the early 1970s by the articles of Svetlana Alpers and

Hessel Miedema focuses on the interpretation of Pieter Bruegel’s peasant scenes, bestowing on

them two apparently contradictory meanings, one comic, the other moralizing. It is not easy to

find definitive arguments in order to answer the problem raised by this discussion, in one

direction or another. I consider that there are several layers of interpretation embedded in these

images. The first layer is a descriptive one. The peasant scenes show people’s activities and

forms of entertainment during feasts and celebrations, and therefore may serve as documentary

historical evidence for the period of time when they were created. A second layer concerns the

1 Hessel Miedema, "Realism and Comic Mode: The Peasant," Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 9, no. 4 (1977): 205-219. 2 Svetlana Alpers, “Bruegel’s Festive Peasants," Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 6, no. 3/4 (1972): 163-176 and Walter S. Gibson, Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

1 means of expression used in such images and raises the question of whether or not they are

indeed realistic depictions, or snapshot-like slices of life, as they would have taken place in the

Flemish villages of the sixteenth century. The third layer concerns the meaning of the images,

involving factors such as the intention of the artist and the reception of the audience which,

owing to the scarcity of historical records, cannot be established beyond any doubt.

My study will focus on expanding the existing discussion by supporting the association

of the peasant scenes with comedy and laughter, but without diminishing the importance of the

multiple possibilities of interpretation, including the moralizing intent that is present in these

images. The main group of images that will be considered are Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s peasant

paintings and prints, but other images, either similar compositions by his contemporaries, or

works by Bruegel in which visual comic elements are present, will be added as well. Svetlana

Alpers’s argument introduces the notion of comic nature in relationship with Bruegel’s peasant

scenes but does not elaborate on the elements that determine their comic nature. What is comic

in these images and how can one assert that certain visual and stylistic choices made by the artist

indicate their association with the comic? In this study I intend to answer this question and

attempt to identify those ingredients that belong to the realm of the comic by focusing on the

vocabulary of visual forms used by Pieter Bruegel the Elder and by some of his contemporaries who depicted similar scenes. I will focus on the visual elements rather than on various other options of interpretation of meaning, hidden or not, and I will argue that the use of certain visual elements and techniques associated with the representation of the human body is further evidence supporting the view that these images were first and foremost comic in nature.

Moreover, I will argue that these elements were reckoned as comic in the cultural environment of the sixteenth century. The techniques that can be identified in the artworks were related to those

2 employed in other contemporary arts, such as literature (François Rabelais, Miguel de

Cervantes), dramatic and comedic plays (William Shakespeare) or refined performance arts

(commedia dell’arte). For the scope of my argument I will discuss the ways in which the human

body, with its attributes, poses, postures, and functions served as a visual expression of comedy

and laughter by comparing them with the practice and techniques of comedy in the theatrical arts in the sixteenth century. In order to support further my argument I will discuss the use of grotesque and satirical elements in these images as means of artistic expression belonging to the realm of comic.

The category of paintings usually referred to in literature as genre scenes, or scenes of everyday life, represents an important segment within the visual arts of the Low Countries during the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. The Northern painters of the late Renaissance and early modern periods have made interesting choices regarding the subjects they deemed worthy of representing in their works. Besides the religious, historical and mythological themes usually

depicted for public and private patrons in the art of the Low Countries, we witness a special

affinity for subjects taken from the daily life of common people, those who are not royal,

members of the nobility, clergy or of the rich merchant class.

Survey textbooks of the Dutch and Flemish art from this period dedicate separate

chapters to this group of paintings, under labels such as “genre paintings,”3 or “figure

paintings.”4 The array of subjects that are included in this category is vast. Anything that does

not fall under the headings of “history” painting (historical, religious or mythological), or Dutch

specialized painting, such as landscapes, architectural painting, or still life, is labeled as genre.

Under the broad umbrella of genre several subgroups of thematic paintings are usually identified,

3 Hans Vlieghe, Flemish Art and Architecture, 1585-1700 (Yale University Press Pelican History of Art, 1998) and Seymour Slive, Dutch Painting 1600-1800 (Yale University Press Pelican History of Art, 1995). 4 Bob Haak, The Golden Age: Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1984), 85.

3 such as scenes of domestic life, everyday life scenes with moralizing message, merrymaking pieces, certain allegorical representations, and high life and low life scenes. The genre subjects not only address the intimate home environment of every day common people, but also record their rapport with the street and the marketplace, capturing the ways in which they relate to the community to which they belong.

A relatively large subgroup of Northern genre paintings are called “peasant scenes” or, if they date from the seventeenth century, as “low-life genre scenes.” Within this category is a further subset of representations depicting common people engaged in festive activities and celebrations. The actual subjects of these paintings might include peasant weddings, family or community feasts, merry companies, and kermises. Nonetheless, what such scenes have in common is an element of play and liveliness, which sets them apart from other painting subjects of the same time period, and seems to engage even the twenty-first-century viewer into a special, direct relationship, which Svetlana Alpers identifies as being an invitation for the audience to join in.5 The opposing interpretation, the one which sees these images as moral sermons, suggests that this apparent lightheartedness and lack of seriousness is associated with a sly grin on the face of the artist, who condemns the behavior of his fellow countrymen engaged in sinful activities.6

To date, there is no comprehensive study of this particular group of Northern paintings depicting kermises and community feasts that would offer a cohesive interpretation in terms of iconography, meaning, social function, audience, and reception. The arguments in existing scholarship have coalesced in fact into an ongoing debate featuring more disagreement than agreement on some aspects such as moral content versus comic nature. This proves that there is

5 Alpers, “Bruegel’s Festive Peasants,” 176. 6 Miedema, 205-219.

4 not enough surviving historical evidence to support one view or another beyond the possibility of doubt. In such a case, it is the art historian who, based on relevant findings concerning the contemporary social and cultural phenomena, is called to provide a comprehensive and cohesive set of arguments in support of the proposed interpretive solutions. One example of conflicting views that have dominated the field at different points in time concerns precisely the personality of Pieter Bruegel the Elder who, for a long time, was labeled “the peasant Bruegel” based on the subjects he chose to depict. More recent research revealed the humanist affiliation of the painter and his elevated intellectual status, which raised questions about his reasons for choosing to depict peasant scenes.

Popular feasts played a significant role in medieval and Renaissance Europe. They represented an important part of the popular culture deep-rooted in the medieval traditions.

During the Renaissance, and later in the early modern period, elements of popular culture have been distilled by the high culture, into literature, formal plays, and performing arts, such as the commedia dell’arte. One literary example is the book Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532) by

François Rabelais (1494-1553). The refined performing arts used elements of popular culture in

defining the characters and the basic scripts of the commedia dell’arte. In the seventeenth

century, such elements were used in Don Quixote (1605, 1615) by Miguel de Cervantes (1547-

1616) and in several of William Shakespeare’s (1564-1616) plays, as in A Midsummer’s Night

Dream, The Tempest, and The Twelfth Night. The questions of if and how such elements of

popular culture have been used by the visual arts did not receive an extensive treatment in the

existing scholarship.

The fundamental assumption of my argument is that the representations of popular feasts

in Northern visual arts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are in fact sublimated and

5 distilled elements of comic popular culture expressed visually in the high arts of painting and

printmaking. I consider using the terms “peasant” and “low-life” in defining this group of

images as antithetical to the “high-life” to be a serious limitation for the interpretation and

analysis of these works. Such terms tend to steer the interpretive efforts mainly toward class

distinction and social differences between peasants, on one hand, and the higher classes, on the other hand, and thus define the types of activities and behaviors by class also. Karel van Mander

(1548–1606), in his presentation of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, speaks of some of the latter’s paintings as “peasant scenes.”7 The authority of such a primary source, nearly contemporary

with the artist, could be considered powerful enough to justify the use of the term “peasant” in

relation to such imagery. However, I would argue that the sense in which Karel van Mander and his contemporaries used the word “peasant” was different from what we perceive today when using this term as a label. I consider the term as more indicative of an archetype for human behavior directly related to popular culture and its forms of manifestation, and not an indication of class differences only. For instance, the commedia dell’arte character of Arlecchino is known

to have been modeled after a “peasant from Bergamo.” Some of the carnival plays of

Nuremberg8 have peasants as their main characters, too. Sancho Panza, the servant of Don

Quixote, or Bottom, the leader of the group of comedians in Shakespeare‘s A Midsummer’s

Night Dream, are also peasants.

However, their function in these theatrical and literary works is not to embody the

peasant as a representative of a social class first and foremost. They are borrowed from among

the common people as embodiments of archetypes representing human frailties, as vehicles

through which popular culture finds its way within the more refined versions of the high culture.

7 Karel van Mander, Dutch and Flemish Painters [Schilderboek] (New York: Arno Press, 1969). 8 Edelgard E. DuBruck, Aspects of Fifteenth-Century Society in the German Carnival Comedies: Speculum Hominis (Studies in German Language and Literature. Vol. 8. Lewiston: E. Mellen Press, 1993).

6 We do not witness necessarily two social classes with incompatible behaviors presented in antithesis, but rather high culture borrowed the “peasant” as archetype, absorbing elements of popular culture and presenting them in its own refined forms of expression. Moreover, there are also Netherlandish paintings and etchings in Dutch and Flemish art of the sixteenth and seventeenth century that portray peasants within their home environment saying prayers or grace before the meals, or working in the fields. The current discussion does not include this category of images in an attempt to determine which ones represent true, realistic depictions of the peasant class in the Northern society. It appears that artists chose, selected, and defined activities that, even when combined with all other traditional images of common people, still do not begin to convey the totality of everyday life activities of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century

Netherlanders.

In order to support the idea that the peasant revel and feast scenes are essentially comic in nature I will also analyze the visual representation of the human body in these images and show that the bodily characteristics, poses, postures, and situations indicate a clear relationship with the principles of comedy and laughter that would have been commonly known to all social strata in the cultural context of the sixteenth century. I would argue that artists used popular culture found in jokes, comic books, or carnival plays and farces as a source for their art, and that they translated these elements of popular culture into a specific pictorial language. The main expressive characteristics in their imagery concern the body, body parts, and bodily functions, representing the visual counterpart of the body concept advanced by Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-

1975) in his book Rabelais and His World (1965). The aesthetic category that can best describe these images, a concept proposed and defined by Bakhtin, is grotesque realism. The concept of grotesque realism is not currently used for describing the stylistic characteristics of the category

7 of images that I propose for analysis. I will show that some visual elements employed by

painters and printmakers justify the use of this concept, since realism alone cannot fully explain

the visual idiom employed by artists in creating these scenes.

At the end of the sixteenth century and continuing into the early seventeenth century civic

and religious authorities targeted popular feasts, mainly in the Protestant world, in an attempt to

curb the overindulgent and licentious behaviors associated with them.9 However, despite a shift

towards trying to curb sinful activities, one can still discern elements of the same visual language

in late sixteenth century and seventeenth century art that was developed earlier in the sixteenth

century for the representations of popular feasts. This is evident with both Dutch and Flemish

painters who sometimes included a moralizing message, while others did not, and they made use

of the same pictorial strategies and devices in representing the human body, deep-rooted in the

medieval and Renaissance popular culture.

In the first chapter I present the status quo of relevant art historical scholarship

concerning the representations of peasant revel and feast scenes in the art of Pieter Bruegel the

Elder. There are important contributions to this subject from scholars such as Svetlana Alpers,

Hessel Miedema, Margaret Sullivan, and Walter S. Gibson, who argue for two opposing views on the interpretation, meaning, social function and reception of these images. In this first chapter

I will map out the most important ideas about the paintings depicting peasant feasts that shape the current scholarship on the subject and introduce the underlying assumption of my study, based on these existing views.

In the second chapter I discuss first the theoretical concepts of comedy, satire, grotesque, laughter, and popular culture, and how they relate to the analysis of this particular group of images. I will continue the discussion by proposing a theoretical and cultural investigation of

9 Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: New York University Press, 1978).

8 laughter based on Henri Bergson’s (1859-1941) book Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the

Comic (1901) and on Mikhail Bakhtin’s book Rabelais and His World. Bergson states that the human body is one of the most important sources for generating comedy and laughter.

Deformities, the inelasticity and rigidity of the body, facial features, and the puppet-like appearance of the human body are some of the elements discussed by Bergson in his book. I will identify these elements in paintings relevant for the category of images proposed for analysis and argue that since Northern artists do employ such devices it is highly likely that they do so in order to provoke laughter or a reaction of amusement in their audience. Such elements are important because it will help us differentiate between the comic mechanisms used in written texts and the comic mechanisms employed by visual artists that do not rely at all, or rely only partially on words, such as visual and theatrical arts. Mikhail Bakhtin defines concepts such as

“grotesque realism,” “universal laughter,” and the “bodily principle” with reference to the carnivalesque spirit and popular feasts during the Renaissance, as he finds it manifested in the work of François Rabelais (1494-1553). By relating these concepts to their counterparts in visual representation, I examine some of the criteria by which they can be identified and interpreted in painted images. The concept of the body and the bodily functions holds a central place in Bakhtin’s analysis of the carnivalesque. I will show that the presence of these elements related to the human body in paintings indicates that the artists found specific pictorial means in order to represent visually the carnivalesque spirit of laughter that permeated their world.

In the third chapter I will discuss the role of laughter in the life of Pieter Bruegel the

Elder as it can be grasped from contemporary records, as well as the role of laughter and comedy in Flemish society during the sixteenth-century, in order to offer a sketch of the cultural and historical context in which the festive peasant scenes were created. Since theatrical arts are the

9 most closely related to visual arts to the extent that both speech and visual elements are used by performers in order to transmit messages to the audience, I will present some of the comic techniques and practices that were encountered in the commedia dell’arte, the main form of refined theatrical art during the sixteenth century, and which bear resemblance to what was represented in the visual arts.

In the fourth chapter I will discuss several visual strategies used in Pieter Bruegel’s peasant scenes that I consider closely related to comic strategies and practices used in other forms of art. These strategies emerge from the comic practices found in popular culture, from the acknowledged sources of laughter in the Flemish society, as well as from similarity with comic practices used mainly in the contemporary theatrical arts. These strategies will be formulated based on the theoretical considerations outlined in the second and third chapters concerning comedy and laughter. For each of these strategies I will show that there are reasons to consider that they were employed with the purpose of creating comic effects and provoking laughter in the audience or viewer. Although not all these strategies can be identified in each and every peasant scene in the sixteenth-century Northern art, the presence of at least one such strategy may be suggestive of an original comic intention.

The peasant revel and feast scenes of Northern European art of the sixteenth century represent an important category of images, usually included within the larger category of genre paintings and at the same time a specific phenomenon of the visual art of the North. To date, there is no agreement on their interpretation, meaning, social function, and reception among art historians. Indeed, the debate generated two opposing views that cast them either as a category of moralizing, didactic imagery or as a category of images essentially comic in nature. In this study I expand the discussion supporting their inclusion within the category of comic images by

10 analyzing the visual idiom employed by artists for representing these scenes. My discussion of

visual elements related to representations of the human body does not diminish or deny the

importance of the content interpretation of these images, nor does it argue in favor or against

their moralizing or entertaining function. Comedy and laughter and their specific means of expression combine both aspects without excluding one in favor of the other.

11 Chapter 1

The Scholarly Debate on the Meaning and Interpretation of Sixteenth-Century Flemish

Paintings and Prints of Peasant Scenes

The category of images depicting peasant feasts and festivals in the Northern art of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries has triggered a variety of arguments that have been put forward by art historians in an attempt to answer the questions related to their iconographical interpretation, their meaning, function and relationship with their contemporary audience. There are not many surviving historical sources that could document the contemporary interpretations, purpose, and function of these images, nor can one be sure of exactly who the patrons or audience were. Art historians have turned to philosophical writings, literary sources or emblem books contemporaneous with the artworks in order to identify the possible keys to the interpretation of these images. Mainly the paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder have been subjected to analysis, and it is generally considered that the similar scenes present in the art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries art draw on a tradition established by him. The peasant or low-life scenes of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries have not been extensively studied as a distinct category. However, the subject and the particular visual language employed by artists for depicting these scenes have fueled an ongoing scholarly debate which explores multiple directions of study with openly contradictory arguments.

In an article published in 1973,10 not long after Mikhail Bakhtin’s book was translated into English, Svetlana Alpers raised the issue of the meaning and interpretation of Pieter

Bruegel’s peasant paintings, especially the Wedding Dance (1566) (Fig. 1) and the Peasant

Wedding Banquet (c. 1567) (Fig. 2). Alpers does not try to undermine previous interpretations

10 Alpers, “Bruegel's Festive Peasants," 163-176.

12 that saw in Bruegel’s peasant images moral sermons and hidden meanings and symbols, but she

puts forward the question of whether modern viewers may attempt to see more in these images

than the artist intended. She questions not only the propensity of the modern art historians

towards a certain solemnity in approaching all works of art, but also the underlying assumptions

of the discipline that provides the context for interpreting such images. The common association

of the moral meaning of these images with warnings about the Seven Deadly Sins such as

gluttony and lust may provide a rationale for why they may have been painted, but Alpers goes

on to explore other possible contexts that could have prompted the artist to depict these scenes.

She argues that the sixteenth century fostered a real increase in the interest towards peasants and

their customs and mores, which could provide yet one more contextual explanation for the

production of these images.

Another dimension that Alpers introduces in this article concerns the particular artistic

mode employed in these images, namely comedy. The author defines the comic mode as the

intertwining of two strains of sixteenth-century comedy, the humanist wit as exemplified in

Erasmus’s work and the medieval folk carnival tradition that could be found in farces or

songbooks. Both these strains, she argues, found their way into the high arts, such as in the

works of Rabelais or Shakespeare. Bruegel’s art is the visual equivalent of this high literature.

Without exhausting all interpretive implications of her considerations that could bear on

Bruegel’s peasant paintings, Svetlana Alpers concludes by suggesting that peasant festivities in

visual arts are a form of comedy, and that the comic is their essential nature rather than having a purely didactic and moralistic intent.

13 In response to another article11 by Svetlana Alpers in which she discussed the realism of

the seventeenth-century Dutch art as a comic mode, Hessel Miedema argues in favor of the view

that realism and comic mode are two different means of artistic expression and that they do not

support the argument that the peasant festive images of the Northern art have been produced to

warn the audience against indulging in such activities rather than provoking them to laughter.12

On the contrary, he argues, most surviving written evidence from that time points to the fact that the peasant behavior was not approved of and that the images were meant to show discontent and a moralizing attitude. The shift in imagery that takes place around the middle of the seventeenth century that shows peasants behaving in a more orderly fashion may seem to indicate, he argues, a shift in the attitude towards this social class. He identifies the source of the misdirected analysis of Svetlana Alpers in the nineteenth-century view of art history that emphasized the value of the emotional experience that the work of art ignites in the viewer. The art of the beginning of seventeenth century, Miedema claims, was geared more toward the expression of ideas, and toward the intellectual comprehension of the subjects depicted.

Almost two decades later the subject has been taken up again by Margaret Sullivan in her book entitled Bruegel’s Peasants: Art and Audience in the Northern Renaissance.13 Focusing on

two of Bruegel’s paintings now in the Vienna Museum of Fine Art, the Peasant Dance (c. 1567)

(Fig. 3) and the Peasant Wedding Banquet, the author builds her argument around the idea that

the Northern Renaissance owed as much to ancient classical culture as did the Italian

Renaissance. From the ancient culture she singles out the satire as a literary form that shaped the

views and attitudes of the cultivated elite. Since Bruegel himself belonged to such an elite

11 Svetlana Alpers, "Realism as a Comic Mode: Low-Life Painting seen through Bredero's Eyes," Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 8, no. 3 (1975): 115-144. 12 Miedema, 205-219. 13 Margaret A. Sullivan, Bruegel's Peasants: Art and Audience in the Northern Renaissance (Cambridge, England and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

14 group, which represented his main audience too, the author places the interpretation of the two

peasant scenes within the realm of an audience conditioned by the knowledge of the ancient

world. From this point of view, the circle of close friends and acquaintances of Bruegel, with

their cultural breadth, provide the most reliable key for understanding the painter’s intentions.

The author views these paintings as both social satires and moral allegories, since their function

would have been related directly to the interests of the audience.

In 2006 Walter S. Gibson proposed a different way of interpreting Bruegel’s peasant

scenes, by placing them within the context of humor that evoked laughter in the sixteenth century.14 Therefore, they would have been designed to amuse the viewer rather than to trigger a

moralizing response, and they can be considered as examples of Bruegel’s art of laughter.

Gibson links Bruegel with the rederijkers kamers of Antwerp and their performance art, who

were one of the suppliers of laughter as a commodity in the sixteenth century. He observes

correctly that the modern difficulty in appreciating the real meaning of these images “lies in our

failure to distinguish between the old peasant stereotypes and the actual peasants that Bruegel

and his contemporaries must have encountered in real life.”15 In his view, these stereotypes

stemmed from caricatural representations of the peasants in medieval fabliaux, which were early

French verse tales, often humorous and burlesque in character,16 in German carnival plays or in

rederijkers farces, where they are shown as boisterous, quarrelsome, coarse, dull-witted, and

indulging in bodily pleasures. But while these stereotypes could be encountered in peasant

scenes of his predecessors, Bruegel endows his peasants with “the same monumental presence

14 Walter S. Gibson, Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 15 Ibid., 149. 16 "fabliau" The Oxford Dictionary of English (revised edition). Ed. Catherine Soanes and Angus Stevenson. Oxford University Press, 2005. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. University of Cincinnati (accessed May 10, 2008).

15 that other artists gave to the heroes of religious and secular history.”17 The conclusion of his

study echoes the ideas put forward by Svetlana Alpers and points to the fact that Bruegel’s

paintings show peasants in a favorable light, illustrating a more positive relationship between

town and country, and belonging to the contemporary culture of laughter.

The fact that Svetlana Alpers mentions the work of Mikhail Bakhtin at the beginning of

her study of 1972 is relevant for the argument of this discussion. The view of Bakhtin on

popular feasts and on the carnivalesque spirit of the Renaissance brought to the fore a newly

found interest for popular culture and its forms of manifestation. In my thesis I would like to

contribute to this discussion by bringing up a few issues that may be subjected to further

analysis. It is my underlying assumption that the low-life festive scenes featuring peasants,

depicted in Northern art both in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, draw on elements

of popular culture in the same way as the literature, plays, and refined performing arts

(commedia dell’arte) of that time did. In this view, the peasant as a representative of a social class is not the main subject of such paintings. Instead, the artists use the “peasant” as a figure type and transmitter of various messages and meanings that the viewers would have been able to

decode and understand by making the necessary connections with elements of popular culture,

with which all members of the society would have been familiar.

Popular culture includes many layers and segments that pertain to it, but for this

discussion I refer to those elements associated with laughter and comedy, such as farces, soties,

which were satirical plays of medieval France,18 and popular carnival plays. One of the

fundamental characteristics of popular culture is that it is transmitted orally and it is not pinned

down in a refined written or durable form. On the other hand, unlike high, erudite culture, it

17 Ibid., 18 "Sotie" The Concise Oxford Companion to the Theatre. Ed. Phyllis Hartnoll and Peter Found. Oxford University Press, 1996. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. University of Cincinnati (accessed May 10, 2008).

16 permeates all social strata. While the lower classes, which are the main depository of popular

culture, may not have ready access to the erudite culture, the higher classes knew about popular

trends. Therefore, the high arts would have been transmitting messages using elements of

popular culture that all social strata were able to decode and make the connections between the

various signs and meanings according to certain patterns of associations.

I agree with Svetlana Alpers’s view that we have to think of these images as having an

essentially comic nature, but I do not think that what necessarily follows is a merry approach on

the part of both the painter and of his audience. I do not agree with Hessel Miedema’s view that

the surviving texts associated with peasant feasts point to a disapproving attitude which, in turn,

may support the view that the images carry a strong moralizing, warning content. The texts may contain sardonic or disapproving messages, but the words may not necessarily tell us the same thing as the images do. Therefore one should not rely only on texts to pin the images down to one and only interpretation.

I consider that an image, first and foremost, tells a story to the viewer on its own, using its own specific means of visual expression. At another level, an image can also be associated

with a moralizing message that is informed by the viewer’s cultural background. Unlike the

previous scholars, I will focus on examining the visual elements present in these images and

interpret what we actually see rather than what can be conjured from adjacent written and

historical sources. I will show that the various depictions of the human body, its attributes, and

its functions support the argument that these images are essentially comic in nature, and that a

grotesque realist key, and not just realism, contributes to the articulation of this particular comic

mode. Because of the close relationship between visual arts and theatre arts, I will use examples

from commedia dell’arte masks and characters to further support the idea that painters used the

17 same principles of comedy and laughter based on the use of the human body and tried to define them in a visual artistic language. Comedy and laughter are not exclusively festive and celebratory, since using their principles may convey both a disapproving, and a moralizing attitude within a merrymaking atmosphere. I will argue that the visual language employed by such images is associated with the principles of comedy, while their interpretation, owing also to the scarcity of surviving historical documents, remains open.

18 Chapter 2

A Theoretical Approach to the Comic in the Visual Arts in Relationship to the

Peasant Scenes of Pieter Bruegel the Elder

In order to address the question of whether Pieter Bruegel’s peasant scenes are comical in nature or not and to discuss some of the problems raised by the approaches of the various scholars, I will start the discussion by attempting to clarify some of the concepts and ideas

involved, such as comedy, satire, grotesque, laughter, and popular culture, and the problems

associated with their definition and use in visual arts. Subsequently, I will introduce the essay

On Laughter of Henri Bergson and the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin on carnivalesque comedy and

laughter and on grotesque realism as they are presented in his book Rabelais and His World.

The main idea in Bergson’s essay that is relevant for my argument concerns the mechanization

of the body as a source of laughter. The main ideas in Bakhtin’s work concern the carnivalesque

comedy and laughter and grotesque realism in depicting the human body. The theoretical

framework will help place Pieter Bruegel’s artworks within the realm of the comic in the visual

arts and the theoretical approaches of Henri Bergson and Mikhail Bakhtin will help identify

some stylistic and iconographic choices that can be associated with comic strategies and

mechanisms.

The Theoretical Concepts of Comedy, Satire, Grotesque, Laughter, and Popular Culture and their Relationship with the Peasant Scenes of Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Although widely used in academic and everyday contexts, the concept of comic, or

comedy, eludes a precise definition. Rather, it is considered an “umbrella term that gathers

together a disturbing ensemble of diverse and not completely homogeneous phenomena, such as

19 humor, comedy, grotesque, parody, satire, wit, and so on.”19 The comic is, however, a

fundamental characteristic of the human species, one that triggers emotions as powerful as the

tragic, though expressed by laughter rather than tears. And although we all laugh, and are more

or less aware of the reasons of our laughter when this happens, pinning down the causes of

laughter from a conceptual point of view is not easy.

Some of the dictionary entries define comedy as:

a play (or other literary composition) written chiefly to amuse its audience by appealing to a sense of superiority over the characters depicted. A comedy will normally be closer to the representation of everyday life than a tragedy, and will explore common human failings rather than tragedy's disastrous crimes.20

Or as:

Narratives or performances that emphasize the ridiculous and the absurd in human life, or that expose pretensions and hypocrisy, causing laughter and delight. Comedy tends to get a bad press compared to the loftier and nobler genre of tragedy, but arguably contains as much or more wisdom, substituting the earthy facts of existence for the inflated ideals of tragedy.21

In both these definitions there is a direct relationship with the theatrical arts, both as playwriting and performance, a perception of the amusement as the main effect of such literary narratives or performances. The compelling pairing of tragedy and comedy was one of the main subjects of Aristotle’s (384 BC-322 BC) writings, as literary genres and theatrical arts.

Unfortunately for our cultural heritage, Aristotle’s book on comedy was lost and only his definition of tragedy survives.

Umberto Eco has attempted to speculate on a possible treatment of comedy by Aristotle in a comparative exercise based on the ideas included in the first book of Poetics and on

19 Umberto Eco, Carnival! (Approaches to Semiotics. Vol. 64. Berlin; New York: Mouton Publishers, 1984), 1. 20 "Comedy" The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Christopher Baldick. Oxford University Press, 1996. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. University of Cincinnati (accessed March 29, 2008). 21 "Comedy" The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. Simon Blackburn. Oxford University Press, 1996. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. University of Cincinnati (accessed March 29, 2008).

20 Tractatus Coislinianus, a tenth-century anonymous treatise on laughter which is thought to be either a version of the lost original or a continuation of the same philosophical tradition.22 He identifies six rules, or conditions for the comic effect to be realized. First, an existing rule, preferably a minor one, has to be violated. Second, the character who violates the rule is not a sympathetic one because “he is an ignoble, inferior, and repulsive (animal-like) character.”23

Third, the audience feels superior to his bad behavior. Fourth, the audience is not upset by this behavior, mainly because they perceive it as a rebellion against the status quo, without the risk of committing the violation of rule themselves. Fifth, the pleasure derived from witnessing such behavior is a combination between enjoying the breaking of rules and enjoying the disgrace of the other. Sixth, the audience does not attempt to defend the rule or express compassion for those who break it.

This definition of comic proposed by Eco is based on a crucial assumption. It assumes the existence of two parties, someone who is looked at and someone who looks on, separated by an imaginary barrier derived from Aristotle’s treatment of tragedy and comedy as theatrical forms, which distinguish between performers and audience. At the same time, it does not imply a clear didactic function for comedy, an aspect that has been emphasized by other authors throughout time, such as in the Poetica of Gian Giorgio Trissino (1478-1550), a Renaissance scholar who wrote this treatise in the 1530s in which he stated that “comedy teaches by deriding things that are vile.”24

Very often, the most straightforward associations that we make today are with comedy performed in stand-up, improvisation, theatre, and film. The narratives of jokes and of the practical farces, which belong to popular culture and to everyday social relations, follow closely.

22 Encyclopedia Britannica Online, s.v. “Comedy,” University of Cincinnati (accessed March 29, 2008). 23 Eco, Carnival!, 2. 24 Encyclopedia Britannica Online, s.v. “Comedy,” University of Cincinnati (accessed April 19, 2008).

21 The comic in the visual arts represented by caricature, comic illustrations, and comic strips

became a familiar form of entertainment associated with modern culture.

My approach regarding the comic means of expression used by visual artists in the

sixteenth century is based on the assumption that the comic image stands out on its own as a

form of comic entertainment. The same idea has been articulated by Agnes Heller, who states

that comic images “are not illustrations of comic novels or plays (although they can be); they

need to present and represent the visual kind of the comic in their own right, independently of

associations with other comic genres,”25 and she calls visual comedy “the ‘sublimated’ kind of

the comic image.”26 I argue further that artists, in order to create such comic images, employ a specific vocabulary of visual forms, whose characteristics can be identified, defined, and placed within the cultural context of their life time.

As mentioned above, satire is a sub-species of comedy. The Oxford Dictionary of

English defines satire as “the use of humour, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.”27 The word satire derives from the Latin satura, meaning medley, 28 and was developed as a literary genre by the ancient Romans, although elements of satire can be traced back to Greek comedy. The most representative satirical Roman authors were Horace (65-8 BC) and Juvenal (active late AD 1stc.-early 2ndc.). Saturae are described by Livy (59 BC-AD 17) as

early dramatic performances, which evolved in later forms of comedy and in a “semi-dramatic,

25 Agnes Heller, Immortal Comedy: The Comic Phenomenon in Art, Literature, and Life (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005), 159. 26 Ibid., 159. 27 "satire" The Oxford Dictionary of English (revised edition). Ed. Catherine Soanes and Angus Stevenson. Oxford University Press, 2005. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. University of Cincinnati (accessed April 19, 2008). 28 "satire" The Concise Oxford Companion to Classical Literature. Ed. M.C. Howatson and Ian Chilvers. Oxford University Press, 1996. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. University of Cincinnati (accessed April 19, 2008).

22 mixed literary form of ‘satire’, a commentary from a personal viewpoint, good-humoured, biting,

or moralizing, on current topics, social life, literature, and the faults of individuals.”29 While

comedy does not necessarily have to be satirical, satire is sometimes an element of comical

literary works. Among the literary works of the early modern period considered to be satirical are the plays of Ben Jonson (1572-1637) and Molière (1622-1673) or the prose of François

Rabelais and Voltaire (1694-1778).30

Visual satire also existed since ancient times. During the Middle Ages, satirical images

were related to the religious view of the world, especially concerning sin, condemning human

overindulgence in “greed, avarice, gluttony, lust, sloth, and other failings.”31 Hieronymus Bosch

(1450-1516) is considered one of the first artists to express his attitude against the hypocrisy of

the clergy, or against the seven deadly sins. His artistic style influenced the Flemish artists of the

sixteenth century, especially Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who is credited with being the most

significant Netherlandish satirical artist.32 However, visual satire in its own right flourished

during the eighteenth century, when artists such as William Hogarth (1697–1764) and Thomas

Rowlandson (1756–1827) established social satire as a distinct genre.33

I discuss the concept of satire in the context of the group of artworks which are the focus

of my argument mainly because satire belongs to the comic genre. Although the more recent art

historical writings do acknowledge Bruegel’s peasant scenes as satires, such as Margaret

Sullivan’s and Walter S. Gibson’s books, in the earlier articles by Svetlana Alpers and Hessel

Miedema this identification is lacking. However, at the beginning of the twentieth century,

29 Ibid. 30 "satire" The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Christopher Baldick. Oxford University Press, 1996. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. University of Cincinnati (accessed April 19, 2008). 31 Paul von Blum: "Satire" Grove Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed April 19, 2008, http://www.groveart.com/ 32 Ibid. 33 James Grantham Turner "Satire" The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature. David Scott Kastan. Oxford University Press 2005. University of Cincinnati (accessed April 19, 2008).

23 Louis Maeterlinck had already written a book about the satirical genre in Flemish art in which he

praised Pieter Bruegel the Elder for his satirical compositions.34 It appears that the book of

Hans-Joachim Raupp, Bauernsatiren: Entstehung und Entwicklung des bäuerlichen genres in

der deutschen und niederländischen Kunst ca. 1470-1570, published in 1986 in German, was

influential in establishing the interpretation of these images as peasant satires. On the other

hand, non-art historian authors, such as Agnes Heller and Umberto Eco refer to these paintings

and prints as social satires,35 or associate them with the literary satires on the villeins,36 a

category of serfs in the Middle Ages, in their studies of comedy and of ugliness in art, respectively. If these artworks would be unanimously accepted as social or peasant satires, then they would doubtlessly carry a moralizing message and the comic, as an element of satire, would implicitly follow and be considered a component of the interpretive effort. However, since in my argument I consider the peasant more a stock-character and a comic device rather than the representative of a social class, I will not expand the discussion on whether it can be established beyond any doubt that these artworks are social satires. For the scope of my argument I will consider them a form of visual satire, which implies that their creation requires the use of certain visual means of expression that belong to the comic.

The term “grotesque” was derived from the Italian word “grotto,” meaning cave, at the end of fifteenth century with the occasion of the archaeological discovery of the underground interiors of the Domus Aurea in Rome. Those who visited the ancient ruins called these underground locations grotte, or caves. Subsequently, the artistic motifs inspired by the mural decorations discovered on the walls of the Roman building were called grotesque and consisted

34 Louis Materlinck, Le Genre Satirique Dans La Peinture Flamande (2. éd., Bruxelles: G. van Oest & cie, 1907). 35 Heller, 165. 36 Umberto Eco, On Ugliness (1st ed. New York: Rizzoli, 2007), p. 148.

24 of “fantastic birds and animals, fruit and foliage, scrollwork and abstract ornament.”37

Pinturicchio was commissioned in 1502 by Cardinal Piccolomini to decorate the ceiling of Siena

Cathedral “with such fantastic forms, colors, and arrangements as are now called grotesque.”38

The term evolved after its original use in the fifteenth century and the range of meanings associated with it became wider. During the Renaissance it was associated not only with the playful and the fantastic, but also with the ominous and sinister, such as the often distorted world of dreams. Both the term and the artistic style were adopted by other European countries and started to designate “the monstrous fusion of human and non-human elements.”39 A French

dictionary entry from 1694 defined grotesque as “bizarre, fantastic, extravagant, capricious,” and

it was often closely associated with the comic and ridiculous.40 The current definition of the

term “grotesque” as given by the Oxford Dictionary of English states that grotesque is a “style of

decorative painting or sculpture consisting of the interweaving of human and animal forms with

flowers and foliage, or a very ugly or comically distorted figure or image.”41 As an adjective, it

can refer to something “comically or repulsively ugly or distorted, or incongruous or

inappropriate to a shocking degree.”42 The sense in which the term grotesque is used today

suggests “the ridiculous, absurd, monstrous, or abnormal.”43

In his book The Grotesque in Art and Literature, Wolfgang Kayser introduces the

German poet and writer Christoph Martin Wieland (1733-1813). Wieland wrote about caricature

37 Monique Riccardi-Cubitt: “Grotesque,” Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press, accessed April 19, 2008, http://www.groveart.com/ 38 Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), 20. 39 Ibid., 24. 40 Ibid., 26. 41 "grotesque" The Oxford Dictionary of English (revised edition). Ed. Catherine Soanes and Angus Stevenson. Oxford University Press, 2005. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. University of Cincinnati (accessed April 20, 2008). 42 Ibid. 43 "grotesque" The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists. Ed. Ian Chilvers. Oxford University Press, 1996. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. University of Cincinnati (accessed April 20, 2008).

25 in the eighteenth-century and distinguished among three different types. He mentioned the style

called Hell Bruegel, which refers to images associated with the Bruegelian way of depicting

things in Hell, in relation to one type of caricature that he called fantastic or grotesque.44 The other two types identified by Wieland were the true caricature and the exaggerated caricature. In the case of the true and exaggerated caricatures he considers that the artist either reproduces natural distortions or emphasizes the monstrosity by retaining the basic features of the model, while in the case of the in the fantastic caricature the painter ignores verisimilitude with the aim of provoking laughter, disgust and surprise.45 The style name, Hell Bruegel, is associated today

with Pieter Brueghel the Younger (1564-1636), but Wolfgang Kayser suggests that in the

eighteenth century it would have encompassed the work of his father, Pieter Bruegel the Elder,

too. This is a likely consideration, given the large number of often now lost compositions that

Pieter Brueghel the Younger took over from his father. In his definition Wieland associates the

grotesque only with the realm of the fantastic and of the imagination of the painter and most

likely refers to Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s scenes associated with the fantastic creatures of Hell,

such as the series of the Seven Deadly Sins or Dulle Griet.

One of the first instances in which the notion of grotesque was used in connection with

Pieter Bruegel the Elder occurred at the end of the seventeenth-century, in the book Cabinet des

singularitez d’architecture, peinture, sculpture et graveure (1699-1700) published by Florent Le

Comte in Paris. Le Comte states that “Bruegel distinguished himself in the paintings of the grotesques,” bequeathing “these comical and pleasing conceptions” on Jacques Callot, and “if

Bruegel was the Callot of his time, Callot was the Pieter Bruegel of his.”46 Jacques Callot

44 Kayser, 30. 45 Ibid., p. 30. 46 H.-W. von Löhneysen, Die ältere niederländische Malerei: Künstler und Kritiker (1956), 148. Quoted in Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), 194.

26 (1592-1635) was a French printmaker who resided in Italy for more than a decade at the

beginning of the seventeenth century. Amongst his most famous works there is a series of forty-

six engravings known as Balli di Sfessania (1622), which are usually thought to depict commedia

dell’arte characters executing grotesque dances and movements.47 Given the reference to the

work of Jacques Callot (1592-1635), it appears that Le Comte, unlike Christoph Wieland who

associated the grotesque with the demonical creatures present in Bruegel’s compositions, refers

mainly to the genre paintings of the artist.

From this brief presentation it can be suggested that, although there are theoretical differences between grotesque, caricature, and satire, the grotesque is present both in caricatural and satirical contexts.48 The concept of grotesque viewed from this perspective becomes

relevant for my argument as a form of expression of the comic, caricature, and satire. The

concept of grotesque becomes more relevant for the works of art in discussion in relationship to

the notion of grotesque realism defined by Mikhail Bakhtin and which will be discussed later in

this chapter.

As an outward expression of human emotions, laughter is defined as the “indication, by

sound or action, of amusement.”49 By laughter we also commonly understand “the expected

response of an audience to a comic moment or scene and evidence that the comedy has been

successful.”50 The notion of laughter can be approached as a physiological function of the

human body, in terms of the sources that can trigger or provoke laughter, and in terms of cultural

attitudes towards laughter. For the scope of my argument I will focus on laughter in terms of its

sources, namely the visual elements whose sight cause laughter as a response. The attitude

47 Donald Posner, "Jacques Callot and the Dances Called Sfessania," The Art Bulletin vol. 59, no. 2 (1977): 203-216. 48 Kayser, 37. 49 Susan Bennett "laughter," The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance. Ed. Dennis Kennedy. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press, 2003. University of Cincinnati (accessed March 29, 2008). 50 Ibid.

27 towards laughter, although important, is very often the cultural expression of the upper-classes’

views on the matter. The few surviving historical records appear to decry laughter during the century of Pieter Bruegel.51 However, it is very likely that they do not offer a complete picture

of the role and place of laughter in the society, and that they cannot be trusted as a basis for

formulating definitive judgments about how both upper and lower classes laughed and what they considered laughable.

The concept of popular culture, both in its definition and use, is complex and prone to

controversy. For the scope of my argument I will rely on the definition used by Peter Burke in

his study on popular culture in early modern Europe. Culture is defined as a “system of shared

meanings, attitudes and values, and the symbolic forms (performances, artifacts) in which they

are expressed or embodied,” and popular culture as “unofficial culture, the culture of the non-

elite,” which, in the case of early modern Europe, is represented by the social groups of the

craftsmen and peasants, or ordinary people.52 Burke uses also the cultural model developed by

the American anthropologist Robert Redfield (1897-1958) of cultural stratification of society

based on what one can identify a “great tradition,” which corresponds to the classical tradition

accessible to the educated few, and a “little tradition,” which includes folksongs and folktales,

devotional images, mystery plays and farces, festivals and feasts. The model has its

shortcomings, the most obvious problems being related to the participation of the upper classes

in popular culture and the exclusion of the common people from the great tradition. Moreover,

the two cultural traditions were transmitted in different ways. The great tradition was

transmitted institutionally, through schools and universities, and the little tradition was

51 Gibson, Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter, 17. 52 Burke, 1.

28 transmitted informally through the different social strata. Thus, it can be inferred that popular culture was in fact a second culture for the elite.53

The elements of popular culture that we are able to identify and interpret are important

for the visual arts and, in a larger sense, significant for the cultural make-up of both upper and

lower social classes. In some studies these elements, precisely due to the scarcity of sources and

to the oral nature of this type of culture in the early modern age, are difficult for researchers to

document, and are thus not taken into account. For example, Margaret Sullivan, in outlining the

assumptions for her study on the experiences, assumptions and knowledge of Bruegel’s

audience, dismisses proverbs as irrelevant “unless they were known before 1570 and available in

literature to which this audience had access.”54 I would argue that it may not be possible for us

to determine the precise moment when a certain proverb became part of the cultural heritage of a society and, moreover, its presence or not in printed literature is not in itself an indication as to whether it was known before to the public. Therefore, it may not always be possible to identify the elements of popular culture that may have influenced visual artists. However, this influence

may be inferred or assumed if the same elements can be found in other contemporary forms of

art.

The relevance of popular culture for my argument is twofold. On one hand, themes and

subjects from the popular culture of feasting and celebration can often be identified in Pieter

Bruegel’s paintings and prints, indicating that the artist was familiar with its symbolic forms,

especially with the comic as a major component of popular culture, and with its sources. Two

such examples are the Netherlandish Proverbs (1559) (Fig. 4) and an engraving of The Wildman

(1566) (Fig. 5), who was a popular character of the carnival plays and whose image has been

53 Burke, 23-29. 54 Sullivan, 8.

29 included in illuminated manuscripts. On the other hand Pieter Bruegel, as a creator belonging to

the “great tradition” through the specificity of his art, can be considered a sophisticated mediator

between the two cultural traditions, in the same way that contemporary writers were inspired by

both. For instance, the literary work of Renaissance writers such as François Rabelais and

François Villon (1431-1463) is sometimes studied as a source of popular culture.55 Although

owing to popular culture and to oral traditions, these authors can be considered an example of

“sophisticated mediators between the two traditions,” and often it is not easy for a modern reader to distinguish between these traditions, to identify when the author is using one of them, or when

he is mixing the two.56

The Human Body as a Source of the Comic – A Philosophical and a Cultural Approach – Henri Bergson and Mikhail Bakhtin

The French philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson (1859-1941) is best known for his works on two main theories, those of duration and of the élan vital, or creative evolution. Although the

subject of laughter and comedy was approached by many authors throughout time, Bergson’s

book on Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1900) is considered the first attempt

to elaborate a general theory of laughter.57 He analyzes the comic elements in forms, gestures,

and movements, and concludes that the human body is laughable to the extent that it reminds us

of a machine, introducing the concept of mechanization of the body. This analysis extends to the

comedy of situations, words, and character, but I will focus for the scope of my argument on the

forms, gestures, and movements, as they bear a more important influence on visual comedy.

55 Burke, 68. 56 Ibid., 68-69. 57 Heller, 17.

30 Although published in1900, the laws and principles identified by Bergson are relevant for the

creation of the comic and comedy in the arts, including during the sixteenth century.

Bergson places comedy and laughter in the realm of that which is strictly human58 and

states that laughter is endowed with social signification.59 The leitmotiv of his approach

considers “a certain rigidity of body, mind, and character that society would still like to get rid of

in order to obtain from its members the greatest possible degree of elasticity and sociability” as

being comic, and from this point of view laughter serves the function of a social corrective.60

For Bergson “comic partakes rather of the unsprightly than of the unsightly, of rigidness rather than of ugliness.”61

According to him, we laugh at something that we perceive as mechanical and automatic

that translates into a form of rigidity that becomes incongruous with what we consider normal.

The most famous example used by the author refers to the rigidity, or inelasticity of the

movements of the human body in certain circumstances, such as the man who, running along the

street stumbles and falls eliciting instantaneous laughter form the onlookers.62 But Bergson

extends the concept of rigidity from the human body to the more abstract realm of morality,

stating that certain vices may have the same relationship to character that mechanical rigidity has

to the body. “Whether as a moral kink,” he argues, “or a crooked twist given to the will, vice has often the appearance of a curvature of the soul.”63 From this point of view, vice could become a

central character, with its own, independent existence, which plays on the human subjects of the

comic story, “as on an instrument or when one pulls the strings as though they were puppets.”64

58 Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (New York: Macmillan, 1928), 3. 59 Ibid., p. 7-8. 60 Ibid., p. 21. 61 Ibid., p. 29. 62 Ibid., p. 8-10. 63 Ibid., p. 14. 64 Ibid., p. 16.

31 This theory has implications for the perception of and the creation of the comic in arts.

For instance, since we react to a kind of automatism that can be associated with

absentmindedness, “a comic character is generally comic in proportion to his ignorance of

himself.”65 “The attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body elicit laughter in exact

proportions to how the body appears to us as a mere machine.66 It follows that gestures or

movements, to the extent that they are considered mechanical or automatic, become laughable

when imitated by another individual, who may be the actor.67 Another instance when the human

body can provoke laughter that Bergson uses as an example of a ridiculous situation happens

when we suddenly witness people dancing without hearing the sound of the music.68 Comedy, in general, differs from tragedy through its emphasis on the physical and material in a person, since a tragic hero is almost never depicted while drinking, eating or doing any activities that has something to do with the earthly needs and manifestations of the human body. When the body is called into question, we almost instantly experience the comic.69 As far as the visual arts are

concerned, Bergson states that “drawing is generally comic in proportion to the clearness, as well as the subtleness, with which it enables us to see a man as a jointed puppet.”70

Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) was a Russian literary theorist and philosopher and one of

the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. His work on literary criticism includes a

few celebrated writings such as the Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929, 1963) and Rabelais

and His World (1965). Bakhtin developed his methodology following the semiotic approach

launched at the turn of the twentieth century by linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) and

65 Ibid., 16. 66 Ibid., 29. 67 Ibid., 32. 68 Ibid., 5. 69 Ibid., 51-52. 70 Ibid., 30-31.

32 under the influence of the Russian Formalist School, which attempted to develop a literary

theory based on the analysis of literary language as a specific category of language.71 However,

Bakhtin focused on the analysis of literary phenomena based on the structure of dialogue and the

function of the word in a discourse.72

Mikhail Bakhtin’s analysis of the novel of François Rabelais was initially submitted as a

dissertation in 1940 but it was not accepted due to the controversial ideas developed by the

author. The book was not published until 1965 as a revised version under the title The Work of

François Rabelais and Popular Culture during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, known in

the translated version as Rabelais and His World. By examining the content, images and context

of Rabelais’s novel, Bakhtin undertakes a thorough analysis of the carnival as a cultural event

and institution of the Renaissance world, and of carnivalesque as a cultural construct that could

help identify and explain various cultural and artistic forms.73 The second concept introduced by

Bakhtin is grotesque realism as a literary mode, which is manifested by the material bodily

principle, or the body and its materiality of the flesh and physiological functions.

The work and ideas of Bakhtin have been subjected to various criticisms since the

publication of his book. I find the ideas of carnivalesque and grotesque realism as defined and

discussed by Mikhail Bakhtin to be relevant for the analysis of sixteenth-century feast scenes and

for my argument insofar as they derive from and are intimately related to the concept of comedy

and laughter. Bakhtin’s analysis belongs mainly to the literary imagery where the emphasis is on

the relationship between the bodily stratum and the universal and regenerating principles of

71 "Russian Formalism" The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Chris Baldick. Oxford University Press, 2008. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. University of Cincinnati (accessed May 28, 2008). 72 Krystyna Pomorska, Foreword to Rabelais and His World, by Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, Mass: M.I.T. Press, 1968), vi. 73 Anthony Wall and, Clive Thomson "Rabelais and His World" Encyclopedia of Semiotics. Ed. Paul Bouissac. Oxford University Press, 2008. University of Cincinnati (accessed April 30, 2008).

33 metamorphosis, death and birth, growth and becoming.74 Nevertheless, I would argue that the

cultural framework of interpretation proposed by Bakhtin can help us understand, to a certain

extent, some characteristics of the visual artworks produced at the same time as Rabelais wrote

his novel, namely the popular culture of humor in which artistic products such as novels,

paintings, and prints are rooted75 and the relevance of the material human body as a source of comic and laughter.

In Bakhtin’s argument, the banquet images are closely related to the time of carnival and

feasting, and “organically combined with all other popular-festive forms, folk merriment and the

comic, and closely interwoven with those of the grotesque body.”76 These banquets, he argues,

as popular-festive forms, project an ambivalent image in the sense that they can serve a satirical

goal and retain, at the same time, a positive, renewing force.77 Eating and drinking become one

of the most significant manifestations of the grotesque body and the festive imagery combines

the positive idea of the satisfied man with gluttony and cupidity.78

I would argue that using Mikhail Bakhtin’s approach can help us read the peasant images

of Pieter Bruegel in a grotesque key which, given its association with the type of comedy of

François Rabelais, could place these scenes in the realm of the grotesque comic. The fact that

Bruegel uses a certain style in his treatment of the peasant revel scenes is supported through a

comparative approach with other works in which the viewer, accustomed mainly to the peasant

scenes, may not even acknowledge that they are made by the same artist. Such compositions

executed in a different style are The Death of the Virgin (c. 1564) (Fig. 6) and Christ on the Road

to Emmaus (posthumous engraving, 1571) (Fig. 7). The features of the figures composing the

74 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Cambridge, Mass: M.I.T. Press, 1968), 24 and 299. 75 Bakhtin, 3. 76 Ibid., 279. 77 Ibid., 290. 78 Ibid., 292.

34 crowd around Mary on her deathbed are detailed and carefully rendered, suggesting in a realistic

manner the age, physical appearance, and mood of each person. None of the details commonly

encountered in the peasant scenes, such as gaping mouths, goggling eyes, proportionally

awkward limbs and gestures, are used in this composition. Likewise, the two travelers

accompanying Christ on the road to Emmaus appear to wear pieces of clothing that can be found

in the peasant scenes too, however, the details of their facial features and gestures are

reminiscent of religious and historical painting rather than the common people represented in the

peasant scenes.

The style used by Bruegel in his peasant revel scenes is not a realistic treatment of the

subject matter. The human figures are not likenesses and the situations depicted do not appear to

be accurate depictions of slices of life. The figures that populate his compositions look rather

like masks, or types embodying human emotions and psychological features, and the scenes look

more like stages set for the human comedy enacted by its protagonists. Truthful depictions of

the realities of life can deviate either toward idealized beauty, such as in history and religious paintings, or in the opposite direction, toward rendering them inharmoniously. In The Death of the Virgin and in Christ on the Road to Emmaus Bruegel uses detailed and proportional facial features, harmoniously proportional bodies and restrained gestures. Some of the younger faces

represented around the deathbed of Mary remind one of the angelic features encountered in early

Netherlandish religious painting. In contrast, the participants in the Peasant Dance (Fig. 3) not

only display awkwardly proportioned limbs, which gives them a inharmonious appearance, but

Bruegel also depicts their facial features emphasizing one aspect or another, such as the gaping

mouth, grinning teeth, swollen cheeks, or red noses. Another striking feature of such peasant

scenes is that the participants hardly seem to connect with one another, which makes the whole

35 scene somehow unarticulated from the point of view of the unity and harmony between its

participants, an aspect which, on the contrary, is present in the two religious works mentioned

above. One way in which the loss of harmony can be achieved visually is by using the

grotesque, and I would argue that this is the point in which Bakhtin’s concept of grotesque

realism and the concept of grotesque in visual arts converge.

Umberto Eco uses both the approach of Henri Bergson and of Mikhail Bakhtin in his discussion about the medieval satires on the peasantry and the Renaissance use of popular culture

through the work of François Rabelais. He identifies three main forms of art that can express

lost harmony. The sublime and the tragic possess harmony, and hence the beautiful and the fair,

while the lost and failed harmony “brings us to the comic as the loss and diminution, or also as

the mechanization of normal behavior patterns.”79 Using once more the two religious works by

Bruegel as an example, The Death of the Virgin and Christ on the Road to Emmaus, the viewer notices first the communion created between those present at the two events, the way in which they take part and share the feelings induced by the event that they are witnessing. On the other hand, in a peasant revel scene, such as the Peasant Dance, or the Wedding Dance, loss and diminution, in the sense of loss of harmony, proportion, and normality, are present in the mask- like rendition of facial features, which obviously are not real life, or normal features, in the deformed and awkwardly proportioned body parts, such as joints, limbs, bellies, or in the inharmonious dance movements The comic as a result of deformation can pair with the obscene, both when laughter is directed at someone who is held in contempt and when laughter is used as

a cathartic tool against oppression. Eco argues that medieval laughter was not indulgent,

especially when it was used in satires against peasantry. This changed during the Renaissance,

when laughter became liberating and cathartic and redirected the satire against the whole world,

79 Umberto Eco, On Ugliness, 135.

36 which is the equivalent of the “universal laughter” concept of Mikhail Bakhtin. As a contemporary of Rabelais, Pieter Bruegel’s “portrayal of the peasantry was certainly not ferocious and derisive like that of the medieval satires.”80

In this chapter I discussed the theoretical concepts that apply when analyzing the comical nature of a certain group of images and how they are related to the comic in the visual arts and especially to the peasant scenes of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. It appears that as early as the seventeenth century and after Bruegel’s genre scenes were associated with the comic vein of the grotesque and satire, as sub-species of comedy. The notions of mechanization and grotesque realism, derived from the works of Henri Bergson and Mikhail Bakhtin in relationship to the comic in visual arts, provide a framework for the analysis of the visual vocabulary employed by

Pieter Bruegel the Elder in his art and for the formulation of the comic strategies that will be discussed in the fourth chapter.

80 Ibid., 148.

37 Chapter 3

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the Culture of Laughter in Sixteenth-Century Flanders,

and Comic Practices in Commedia Dell’Arte

Most of the scholarly books and articles which offer different views and interpretations concerning the depictions of the sixteenth-century peasant scenes focused on Pieter Bruegel the

Elder’s works, particularly three paintings that depict a Wedding Dance (Fig. 1), a Peasant

Wedding Banquet (Fig. 2) and a Peasant Dance (Fig. 3). Ironically, these three paintings secured “Bruegel’s unshakeable reputation as a painter of ribald scenes of peasant life.”81 By themselves, are these three paintings relevant enough for us to draw definitive conclusions about the painter’s intentions, his audience’s reception, or the didactic or comic nature of the works?

Bruegel’s paintings and prints of peasant revel scenes belong in fact to a tradition that emerged first in Nuremberg around 1524 with Hans Sebald Beham’s (1500-1550) kermis prints82 (Fig. 8,

Fig. 8a, and Fig. 9) and subsequently developed in the art across Northern Europe throughout the sixteenth century. The legacy extended well into seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish genre paintings and prints.

In order to reach a more in-depth understanding of the iconic nature of peasant revels, they have to be studied in relation to the cultural context in which they were created, namely the culture of laughter and humor in the Flemish society of the sixteenth century. If these compositions display an intrinsic comic character, then their component elements have to be in some kind of relationship with other elements of comedy and laughter present in the society and

81 Manfred Sellink, Bruegel: The Complete Paintings, Drawings, and Prints. Catalogue. Classical Art Series, (Ghent, Belgium; New York: Ludion; Distributed in North America by H.N. Abrams, 2007), 151. 82 Alison Stewart, "Paper Festivals and Popular Entertainment. The Kermis Woodcuts of Sebald Beham in Reformation Nuremberg," Sixteenth Century Journal 24, no. 2 (Summer, 1993): 301-350.

38 in other arts. Since in painting the determinant characteristic concerns the visual, the comic

elements should be directly related to what the audience sees and perceives as triggers for

laughter. Such visual elements can be found in popular entertainment that makes use of

situations, actions, gestures, in the presence of which laughter occurs, and in the theatrical arts,

where the visual puns have equal or greater weight than the verbal ones. The comic character of

peasant scenes can also be analyzed in comparison to similar images created by other Northern

painters, Bruegel’s contemporaries. If patterns can be identified in the works of art of various artists, which in turn belong to larger categories related to comedy and laughter, then this will

support the idea that such imagery has a common source and therefore bears a strong relationship

to the comic vein that can be found outside the visual arts. So as to address some of these issues,

I will bring up several aspects related to the reported personality of the painter and the culture of laughter of his contemporary society. In the second section, I will focus on the analysis of the visual comic strategies and practices of two forms of theatre, the Italian commedia dell’arte and

the Flemish rederijkers kamers, or the Chambers of Rhetoric, that practiced comedy on stage and

used means of expression most closely related to the visual arts.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder and the Culture of Laughter in the Low Countries in the Sixteenth Century

In the words of Karel van Mander, “nature was wonderfully felicitous in her choice

when, in an obscure village in Brabant, she selected the gifted and witty Pieter Brueghel to paint

her and her peasants, and to contribute to the everlasting fame of painting in the Netherlands.”83

Because he painted many weird scenes and drolleries in the manner of Hieronymus Bosch, Karel van Mander tells us that Bruegel was called Pier den Droll. According to anecdotes passed on to

83 Karel Van Mander, Dutch and Flemish Painters, 153.

39 van Mander, together with merchant Hans Franckert, they would dress like peasants and mingle

with them, taking part in their weddings and fairs. What we see in Bruegel’s paintings,

according to van Mander’s account, is based on his observing the peasants’ manners “in eating,

drinking, dancing, jumping, making love, and engaging in various drolleries,” which he knew

how to copy comically. Also, many of his copper engravings display his “strange compositions

and comical subjects.”84

Concerning Bruegel’s personality, van Mander states that he did not talk much but was

jovial in company, and that “he loved to frighten people, often his own pupils, with all kinds of

ghostly sounds and pranks that he played.”85 His propensity for jokes is supported by another

story that van Mander included in his book in the section dedicated to painter Hans Fredeman de

Vries. Vries had been commissioned by Aert Molckeman, treasurer of the town, to paint a view

of a summer house, which the artist depicted including an open door in the composition. During

a visit in the artist’s absence, Pieter Bruegel added in that doorway “a peasant with a soiled shirt,

in intimate relation with a peasant woman.”86 This caused laughter among people and the

commissioner did not want the painting altered after that.

Modern scholarship does not fully trust the truth of such stories included in the

contemporary biographical accounts of painters’ and artists’ lives, such as those included in

Karel van Mander’s Schilderboeck (1603) or Arnold Houbraken’s (1660-1719) Groote

Schouburgh (1718). However, despite the fact that they cannot be checked against historical documents, and that it may well be that the respective authors were misinformed or invented such accounts themselves, I would argue that there may be a trace of truth in them and that

84 Ibid., 156. 85 Ibid., p. 155. 86 Karel Van Mander, Dutch and Flemish Painters, 300. Quoted in Walter S. Gibson, Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter, 10-11.

40 probably they are true at least in spirit. The above-mentioned stories about Pieter Bruegel give

us at least an indication that, as a person, he was inclined towards the merry aspects of life, he

liked jokes and he knew what made people laugh and also knew how to provoke laughter. At

least one similar example can be found in his extant works. In the lower-right corner of The

Witch of Mallegem print (1559) (Fig. 10) one character is undergoing the famous “stone operation” known from The Extraction of the Stone of Folly (c. 1494) (Fig. 11) by Hieronymus

Bosch. Bruegel takes the story one step further and we see a cascade of stones coming out from the head of the man (Fig. 10a). Even today one cannot but laugh at the sight of the endless

stream of stones that had been nested within the head of the poor ignorant fool. In fact, Bruegel

uses a technique recognized today as a comic device, namely repetition. He refers to a story that

would have been known to his contemporaries, uses the established signs – the man, the surgeon,

the knife, the stone – and by multiplying the stones he creates a comic effect that would have

been, obviously, intended.

Pieter Bruegel’s contemporaries were not oblivious to merrymaking, joking, and laughing

either. Lodovico Guicciardini (1521-1581), in his sixteenth-century account about the

inhabitants of the Low Countries tells us that “they are naturally inclined to pleasures, feasts, and

entertainments.”87 Flemish tradition apparently preserved the memory of a merry Burgundian lifestyle that lasted well into the sixteenth century and during which laughing, feasting, dancing, eating, and drinking represented favorite pastimes in the society.88 On a more general note,

Laurent Joubert (1529-1582), the French physician who wrote a Treatise on Laughter (1560),

87 Lodovico Guicciardini, Description de tout de le Pais-Bas (1567). Quoted in Walter S. Gibson, Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter, 113. Gibson translates by “entertainment” the word esbatement in the original text, which in fact, meant a play or a form of performance that provoked laughter. The rederijkers played such performances as a category of comic plays. Guicciardini may have used the term originally in order to indicate people’s inclination towards laughter and amusement through comedy. 88 Johan Verberckmoes, Laughter, Jestbooks and Society in the Spanish Netherlands (Early Modern History: Society and Culture. New York, N.Y.: St. Martin's Press, 1999), 1.

41 states that “we are so naturally drawn to delight that all our designs have it as object, as a sovereign good.”89

The various instances in which the culture of laughter of the early modern period has

been referred to in connection with art historical studies usually focus more on contemporary

testimonies concerning the attitude towards laughter. Without denying their importance for a

better understanding of the place and extent of laughter in society, for the scope of my argument,

I will not expand the discussion on the various sources that appear to offer a negative view

towards laughter and those who laugh. As Walter S. Gibson observed, these accounts appear to

play the role of rules of social conduct and proper behavior, more as manuals of etiquette rather

than truthful opinions reflecting how society as a whole regarded laughter and the things that

caused laughter.90 In order to support my argument that there was quite a strong interest in the sixteenth century for cultural products that belonged to the realm of the comic and comedy, I will provide a brief account of what was available as comic material and source of laughter, and what

Walter S. Gibson calls the commodity of laughter,91 or something that is sold and bought, and

therefore something that is on demand in society. This may help prove that despite the accounts

which condemned laughter, people of all social strata did in fact laugh in the sixteenth century,

as even Hessel Miedema acknowledged in his study.92

Perhaps the book most entitled to open the list of sixteenth-century comic literature is

Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais, first published in France in 1532. The 1570

Antwerp index issued by the Catholic Church listed Rabelais’s novel amongst the prohibited

books, indicating that his work was already popular in the Netherlands by the middle of the

89 Laurent Joubert, Treatise on Laughter [Traité du ris, 1579] (University: University of Alabama Press, 1980), 16. 90 Walter S. Gibson, Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter, 17. 91 Ibid., p. 12. 92 Miedema, 211.

42 century.93 It is also known that the first Rabelaisian text to be printed in Dutch in 1554 was

based on the Pantagrueline Prognostication (1532), which allowed access to Rabelais’s texts to

those who did not know French.94 Another comic tale, which recounted the adventures of the

German comic hero Thiel Ulenspieghel, was translated into Dutch and published in Antwerp

during the second decade of the sixteenth century.95 Thiel Ulenspieghel belonged to the lower

social class and his derisive laughter is derived from the fabliaux and farces of the streets and

marketplaces.96 Antwerp was also the most important cultural center where vernacular

literature, including jestbooks, or collections of anecdotes, was published starting from the end of

the fifteenth century. The first important jestbook entitled Een nyeuwe clucht boeck (A New

Book of Anecdotes) was published in Antwerp in 1554 and reprinted several times during the

sixteenth century.97 Another jestbook, a translation of German anecdotes entitled Het leven en

bedrijf van Klaas Nar (The Life and Activities of Klaas the Jester), was published in 1572.98

These examples indicate that the Northern society was active at least in the field of producing and making available publications that dealt in the realm of the comic and comedy. In the following section, I will focus more on how comedy was realized in a different field, namely in the theatrical arts, which, unlike the written texts, made use of additional means of expression and communication of the comic message.

93 Verberckmoes, 129. 94 Ibid., 130. 95 Ibid., 13. 96 Ibid., 16. 97 Ibid., 27. 98 Rudolf Dekker, Humour in Dutch Culture of the Golden Age (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave, 2001), 22.

43 Visual Comic Strategies in the Theatrical Arts of the Sixteenth Century – Commedia dell’arte and the Rederijkers Kamers – What Was Comic On Stage and How It Was Enacted

Commedia dell’arte is a form of professional theatre that was first documented in a

surviving contract towards the middle of the sixteenth century in Italy, although little is known about its precise origins. During the second half of the sixteenth century it spread rapidly across

Europe through the traveling Italian companies, reaching as far as Moscow.99 It dominated the theatrical world of Europe for about two hundred years and influenced the work of some of the most important playwrights of the modern era such as William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Lope de Vega (1562-1635), and Molière (1622-1673), before succumbing to the reforms introduced by the Italian playwright Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793) during the eighteenth century. The spirit and mood of the commedia dell’arte did not survive after its decline, though some of its characters and artistic principles found their way into more modern forms of performing arts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as burlesque vaudeville shows, silent movie, pantomime, or circus.

In this section I will discuss some of the characteristics of the commedia dell’arte, as a performing art based on the combination of both speech and gesture, in which the appearance and the movement of the body is as important in transmitting comic messages as is the speech.

The theatrical arts can serve as a term of comparison for the comic in the visual arts due to the fact that an important part of the decoding process relies on what we see happening on stage.

The main characteristics of commedia dell’arte were the existence of a plot, or scenario that served as a basis for the actors’ improvisation, the use of stock characters, the so-called tipo fisso

(fixed type), or masks, and the use of masks that cover the upper part of the actors’ faces during the performance to identify each character. There were four basic masks: two old men (Vecchi),

99 Allardyce Nicoll, The World of Harlequin: A Critical Study of the Commedia Dell'Arte (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 4.

44 known as Pantalone and Dottore, and two servants (Zanni), usually an astute and a foolish one, among which the most famous are Arlecchino, Pulcinella, Brighella, and Truffaldino. To these were added the Lovers (Innamorati), the coward Capitano, and female servants, usually called

Colombina or Franceschina.100 The characters always displayed the same attributes and characteristics, irrespective of the plots performed, and the audience could always be sure of their identity, “not only from costume and mask but also, more importantly, from their bodily attitudes.”101

The masks, or commedia dell’arte characters, were chosen and modeled after real life models. Pantalone was based on a merchant from Venice, Dottore was a doctor from Bologna, and Arlecchino a peasant from Bergamo. The zanni initially represented two peasants from

Bergamo, ignorant and poor, who were still using the rustic dialect and wore the peasant costume of the region, usually cast in the comic roles of the servants.102 In the seventeenth-century editions of the Vocabolario della Crusca, a dictionary published for the first time in 1612 by the

Accademia della Crusca (Academy of the Chaff), an Italian literary academy founded in

Florence in 1582, zanni were defined as “peasants from Bergamo, included in comedies as buffoons and vile characters.”103 Although these social and class-related associations may seem to indicate an underlying vein of social satire in commedia dell’arte, this view is not unanimously agreed upon. Allardyce Nicoll states that “of social satire the true commedia dell’arte shows not the slightest trace,” and that “the characters were selected for their comic potentialities and not with any social-political objective.”104

100 Richard Andrews "commedia dell'arte" The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance. Ed. Dennis Kennedy. Oxford University Press, 2003. University of Cincinnati (accessed April 21, 2008). 101 Nicoll, 3. 102 Fausto Nicolini, Vita Di Arlecchino (Milano: R. Ricciardi, 1958), 9. 103 Ibid., 9. 104 Nicoll, 150-151.

45 Commedia dell’arte was in essence a theatre of laughter.105 As early as 1646, in Della

Christiana moderatione del teatro, Domenico Ottonelli was mentioning that “zanni seek to

extract laughter from the obscene,”106 and it is acknowledged that the writers of scenarios were

vulgarly frank.107 Later in the seventeenth century, Andrea Perrucci (1651-1704) was warning

the actors against the vulgar and the obscene on stage in his Dell’arte rappresentativa,

premeditata ed all’improviso (A Treatise on Acting, from Memory and by Improvisation, 1699),

which indicates a possible change in attitude towards obscenities on stage, which very likely

existed earlier in the sixteenth century. Although written more than one hundred and fifty years

after the first known documentation of the commedia dell’arte, Perrucci’s Treatise is one of the

very few written accounts that recorded the practice and codes of this established form of theatre,

which displayed little change during the two centuries between its beginnings and its decline,

and can offer interesting insights into the comic practice of commedia dell’arte.

Perrucci writes that “the aim of acting is to please and to instruct.”108 In his characterization of the zanni he states that “servants may be cunning, shrewd, fraudulent, full of intrigues, biting and diligent; or silly, simple, ignorant, cowardly, timid, and lazy.”109 Laughter

can be provoked by means of “the vices of the soul - skewering the vainglorious, the greedy and

the parasites - or the vices of the body, as when grotesque and drunken servants are brought on

stage.” Another way is to imitate a hunchback, a lame person, or some defect of voice or body, of which people make fun. The third way is to impersonate, by mimicking a Frenchman, a

German, a Turk, or a Spaniard, or imitating madmen or drunkards. A fourth way is “through

105 Ibid., 144. 106 Ibid., 148. 107 Ibid., 149. 108 Andrea Perrucci, A Treatise on Acting, from Memory and by Improvisation (1699) Dell'Arte Rappresentativa, Premeditata Ed all'Improviso, trans. Francesco Cotticelli, Anne Goodrich Heck, and Thomas F. Heck, Bilingual in English and Italian ed. (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2008), 26. 109 Perrucci, 82.

46 contempt, by twisting one’s mouth, opening it wide in a grimace, sticking out one’s tongue,

laughing foolishly, cavorting, hissing, and weeping to excess or rudely.” Other methods to

provoke laughter are by using indecent and offensive words, appropriate only for servants,

buffoons, and parasites, or by using the language of rustics and servants.110 During the

performance, he states, “we speak also with the gestures of the entire body,” and “humor can

arise from gestures with or without words.”111 Among the elements associated with the

humorous and the ridiculous he identifies excesses or deformities of nature such as misshapen

faces, big noses, pointed foreheads, baldness, long ears, crippled legs, or dressing the zanni from

Bergamo in multicolored costumes, and Pulcinella in burlap, like a peasant. “Humor, says

Perrucci, “is born when performing foolish and disproportionate actions.”112

Last I will discuss the realistic or non-realistic nature of commedia dell’arte. Allardyce

Nicoll argues that this form of theatre does not belong to realism in the modern sense of the term,

which bestows on the artistic product a high degree of verisimilitude and truth to nature, or naturalness. “The comic business,” he says, “derives not from naturalistically conceived situations but from the creation of stylized actions.”113 Although apparently the plots and masks

weave their stage existence out of real life fabric, the artificiality, the caricatural, and the

grotesqueness of their deeds, speech, and actions belong to a different world, construed with the

specific means of art. Commedia dell’arte was referred to as grotesque as early as the eighteenth

century, when the German social theorist Justus Möser (1720-1794) published a pamphlet

entitled Harlequin or the Defense of the Grotesquely Comic in 1761,114 in which the border

between grotesque and comic is blurred and the two concepts overlap. This idea is a

110 Ibid., 164. 111 Ibid., 180. 112 Ibid., 180-181. 113 Nicoll, 147. 114 Kayser, 37.

47 continuation of the same association between the comic and grotesque in commedia dell’arte that had been previously mentioned in 1699 in the book of Florent Le Comte, who discussed the artworks of Pieter Bruegel and Jacques Callot in terms of the grotesque as well.

The extent to which commedia dell’arte had penetrated the Northern society of the Low

Countries in the second half of the sixteenth century cannot be evaluated based on documentary evidence, although it is very likely that itinerant troupes have reached as far as the United

Provinces in the north. The masked comedy was present in Northern Europe and this is proved at least by one seventeenth-century image depicting a theatre stage, “The Triumph of Folly,” a

Scene from the Play “Tarquinius and Brutus” in the Amsterdam Municipal Theatre (1643) (Fig.

12) by Pieter Quast, in which a few masked characters can be identified, and by an engraving of an emblem image (1631) in which comedians display masks and costumes similar to commedia dell’arte (Fig. 13). Theatrical performance in the Low Countries is associated mainly with the

rederijkers. The Chambers of Rhetoric, or rederijkers kamers, were literary societies which emerged in the Low Countries in the first half of the fifteenth century and by the mid-sixteenth century they had become the most important composers and performers of vernacular drama.115

The people who belonged to these chambers were artists, artisans and merchants, and the establishment of these literary societies had been prompted by their interest in literature and drama and by their wish to provide a cultural service to the community.116 They were charged

with organizing national festivals, and they participated at carnivals by providing contests of

poetry and drama, performances, and acting as jesters. Unlike commedia dell’arte, the

rederijkers performed a wide genre of plays, comedy being only one of them. The categories of

plays performed were the allegorical, or spellen van sinne, with a serious undertone based on

115 Gary K. Waite, Reformers on Stage: Popular Drama and Religious Propaganda in the Low Countries of Charles V, 1515-1556 (Toronto; Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 3. 116 Waite, xv.

48 classical or religious subjects, the farcical, or kluchten, which were amusing farces inspired by

the life of villagers, and the humorous comedies, or facties, with a satirical and moralizing

content.117 Within a list of eighty-four known plays composed by chambers of rhetoric between

1515 and 1556, there are only about ten comedies and two farces with a comical subject.118

Nevertheless, entertaining played a major part in the function of the chambers and it is very likely that, although the comic plays attempted to convey didactic and moral lessons, the way they were performed provoked laughter in the audience. Unfortunately, unlike the documentation for the commedia dell’arte, there is no surviving evidence concerning the acting,

“the ad lib asides, bodily actions, or facial expressions”119 of the performers of the rederijkers, but one may assume that these performances may have been as entertaining and comic as the

Italian commedia.

A Peasant Kermis with the “Clucht van plaijerwater” (after 1550) (Fig. 14) by Pieter

Baltens probably depicts such a theatrical performance. The play called “Clucht van plaijerwater” was probably written for the Violieren Chamber of Rhetoric in Antwerp at the beginning of the sixteenth century.120 A wife pretends to be ill and sends her husband on a quest

for miraculous water so that she can meet with her priest-lover. The husband finds out about the

plot from a poultry seller. The latter returns to the woman’s house carrying a large basket in

which he hides the cuckolded husband.121 Pieter Baltens apparently has depicted the precise

moment when one actor enters on stage carrying a large basket and encounters the two lovers

carousing at a table. Baltens was the teacher of Pieter Bruegel for a short period of time between

117 Walter S. Gibson, “Artists and Rederijkers in the Age of Bruegel," The Art Bulletin 63, no. 3 (Sep., 1981): 426- 446. 118 Waite, 209-215. 119 Waite, xvii. 120 Gibson, Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter, 25. 121 Iibid., 26.

49 1550 and 1551.122 It is very likely that scenes like the one depicted by Baltens would have been

a common occurrence in the cities and villages of Flanders, and Pieter Bruegel himself would have witnessed them in person. If we could not say for sure what books he read and what philosophical ideas inspired his art, it is almost sure that he knew what was going on in the streets and marketplaces of the cities and villages of Flanders, and that he was aware of common people’s customs, habits, and beliefs as it is testified by several of his compositions such as The

Battle Between Carnival and Lent (1559) (Fig. 15) and The Land of Cockaigne (1567) (Fig. 16).

This awareness would have included knowledge about what made people laugh, what people laughed at and also of how to make people laugh.

In this chapter I discussed briefly some biographical details from contemporary documents that reveal the humorous side of Bruegel’s personality and several aspects of laughter as commodity in sixteenth-century Flanders. Pieter Bruegel’s propensity for laughter and for comic contemporary popular culture is the premise for the assumption of a comic intent and a comic treatment of his revel scenes. The visual comic elements that can be identified in contemporary theatrical performances, such as the Italian commedia dell’arte and the theater of the rederijkers kamers in the Low Countries, suggest what some of the sources of laughter were and how artists approached their creative process with the scope of provoking laughter in their audience.

122 Ross Frank, "An Interpretation of Land of Cockaigne (1567) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder," Sixteenth Century Journal 22, no. 2 (Summer, 1991): 305.

50 Chapter 4

Comic Strategies in the Peasant Revel Paintings and Prints of Pieter Bruegel the

Elder

Based on the theoretical approach to comedy and comic means of expression and on the culture of laughter that prevailed in the Flemish society during the sixteenth century outlined in the previous chapters, I will attempt to identify several comic strategies that painters employed in their depictions of peasant revels. For the scope of this argument I will consider as peasant revel scenes only depictions of kermises, village dances, and wedding feasts. Our interpretation of images of the past should be based not only on their iconography, or on what is represented, but also on the visual strategies or means of expression, or on how these elements are represented.

The use of one or more of these strategies in the works of Pieter Bruegel the Elder will address the how in the process of interpretation. Since these means of expression are related to the cultural codes of laughter appropriated by the society that inspired the artists’ images, one can conclude that these images belong to the category of the comic. However, this is only one layer of the manifold interpretations, and it does not exclude the possible moralizing and the negative connotation of such images. This analysis will serve to provide further evidence and to strengthen the argument put forward by some scholars concerning the comic nature of peasant revel scenes in Flemish art. The comic strategies that will be analyzed in this chapter are the peasant as the main character of revel scenes; the use of grotesque realism in physiognomies and body appearance; the use of deformity, ugliness, and rigidity of the body; employing a narrative sequence in the composition; excessive eating and drinking; overt sexual behavior; and exposure of lower body parts and bodily excretions. For each of these strategies I will use examples from

51 paintings and prints of peasant revel scenes by Bruegel, some of his contemporaries, and his

sons, Pieter Brueghel the Younger and Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625).

An auction that took place in Antwerp in 1572 and which included the household goods

of a certain Jean Noirot, listed among his possessions five pictures by Pieter Bruegel the Elder; a

winter landscape, two paintings of peasant weddings, and two peasant kermis scenes.123 There are no historical documents that offer information on the patrons of Pieter Bruegel or on those who owned his peasant scenes, but the fact the Jean Noirot of Antwerp owned four pictures with this subject matter indicate that more peasant revel images existed than the three extant paintings of today. Moreover, Karel van Mander tells us that Pieter Brueghel the Younger “copies and imitates the works of his father,”124 and it is very likely that at least some of the peasant revels

that are attributed to his sons are in fact copies of lost compositions by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Based on these considerations, I will include some of the peasant scenes by Bruegel’s two sons in my analysis.

a) The Choice of the Peasant as Main Character of Revel Scenes

Peasants are the protagonists of the peasant revel scenes of Pieter Bruegel the Elder and

his contemporaries. The problem that I will discuss in this section concerns the choice of this

particular subject matter in terms of the peasant as a representative of a social class or as a comic

type or character because they are the natural choice for a subject matter belonging to the realm

of comic. The scholars who undertook analyses of these paintings and prints have also addressed

the peasant as main subject of these images from these two points of view, favoring one or the

other.

123 Gibson, Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter, 67-68. 124 Karel Van Mander, Dutch and Flemish Painters, 431.

52 Svetlana Alpers believes there was an increased interest in peasants, as well as in their customs and costumes during the sixteenth century125 and identifies in Bruegel’s peasant paintings details of costume, season, or wedding-related customs that belong more to an ethnographical approach rather than to a moralizing one.126 She also tries to find an explanation of this type of subject matter in art in light of the strained economic and social conditions of the peasant class in the sixteenth century. She also posits that a more positive, though ambiguous, relationship between city-dwellers and peasants existed at the time.127 Alpers introduces also the question of understanding the peasant depicted in these images as a real character or as a comic device of what she calls the “comedy as an artistic mode,”128 but does not answer the question or discuss these issues in more depth, though she considers the images as belonging to the comic mode. Besides the interplay between the ethnographic and iconographic dimensions of

Bruegel’s peasant scenes, she identifies the “comic mode,” defined as a combination of two strains of sixteenth-century comedy, namely the humanist wit, derived from Erasmus’s work, and the medieval folk carnival tradition.129 This particular comic mode diminishes the moralistic dimension of the artworks, since, in this tradition, folly is not something to punish or to scourge, but it is accepted as part of the human condition.130 The implication of this interpretation proposed by Svetlana Alpers is that the artist adopts a sympathetic view toward the peasant festivities and behaviors, which in turn leads both creator and viewer to wanting to take part in these activities and to join the peasants in their laughter. Her approach appears to favor the

“laughing with” attitude, underscored by an artistic treatment in the comic mode. Alpers took

125 Alpers, “Bruegel’s Festive Peasants,” 165. 126 Ibid., 166. 127 Ibid., 169. 128 Ibid., 173. 129 Ibid., 174. 130 Ibid., 174.

53 further her arguments in a second article, “Realism as Comic Mode: Low-Life Painting Seen

through Bredero’s Eyes,” in which she discusses the Dutch seventeenth-century low-life genre

paintings in relationship to the writings of G. A. Bredero (1585-1618), a Dutch poet and

playwright, some of whose best known poems and farcical plays were called boertige vermakelijkheid, or rustic comic amusements.131

Hessel Miedema disagrees with this view in his article “Realism and Comic Mode: the

Peasant,” written as a response to the second article by Alpers. Although this second article

discusses the low-life paintings in seventeenth-century Dutch art, and not Bruegel’s other

sixteenth-century peasant scenes, Miedema takes into account the works of art discussed by

Alpers in both articles and argues against viewing these as a form of entertainment for their

contemporary audience. He focuses especially on the texts accompanying most of the prints that were either designed as prints or reproduced actual paintings. The inscriptions all advise the

viewer against indulging in the depicted behaviors. Although acknowledging that these texts do

not testify to the artist’s intentions, he considers that these are the only documentary sources that

we have in order to assess the opinions of Bruegel’s contemporaries.132 Moreover, in his

discussion of laughter he emphasizes the sixteenth-century critical voices who do not

recommend laughter as an appropriate way of expressing one’s emotions, advising restrain, and

at the same time condemning peasants’ laughter as unacceptable behavior, because peasants

were considered “stupid, ignorant, and aggressive,”133 or “stupid, ostentatious, aggressive

gluttons and drunkards.”134 The author discusses the concepts introduced by Svetlana Alpers,

realism and the comic mode, concluding that they are just aspects of Netherlandish intellectual

131 Alpers, “Realism as Comic Mode: Low-Life Painting Seen through Bredero’s Eyes,” 116. 132 Miedema, 209. 133 Ibid., 211. 134 Ibid., 213.

54 expression and that art around 1600 was informative, didactic and moralizing.135 However, he

does not address the question of the choice of the peasant as a real member of the society or as a comic device.

Margaret Sullivan, in her book on Bruegel’s Peasants, emphasizes the negative attitudes

towards peasants and the notion of “foolish peasant” as a “commonplace term of criticism”136 in

Northern Europe during the sixteenth century. In an account of the 1561 Landjuweel festival of the Antwerp Rhetoricians, participants were encouraged to act as best fools by using “words and works in a peasant-like manner.”137 The meaning of one of the entries in the Dictionarium

Teutonicolatinum, published by Cornelis Kiliaan (1529-1607) in Antwerp in 1574, for the word

“boerdachtich,” was iocus or iocularius, which is Latin for joke.138 The author identifies the

common peasant with the homo rusticus, who was a typical character of the ancient Roman

satires. She argues that the sixteenth-century prints, which showed peasants during feasts, indulging in dancing, drinking, and lustful activities, belonged to a “long and well-developed tradition of peasant satires.”139 Sullivan discusses also the dignified image of the working peasant, who was regarded with sympathy and approved of by the society, and which she addresses separately from the image of the “Bacchic peasant,” who was closely related to the ancient homo rusticus and satyrs. Her approach, however, is based on a clear separation between social classes, and the discussion involves only the views of the elite, or the higher social class, about another social class, the peasants. Although the author’s approach acknowledges the peasant as a target for satires, it does not discuss the difference between the peasant as a member of a social class and the peasant as a comic device. However, she does use an example from the

135 Ibid., 219. 136 Sullivan, 13. 137 Ibid., 14. 138 Ibid., 15. 139 Ibid., 15.

55 sixteenth-century book Aulus by Ulrich von Hutten (1488-1523), a satire of court life in which he

describes the court members behaving precisely as the characters in peasant scenes - overeating,

drinking too much, and doing inappropriate things at the table. This document appears to

indicate that vile and inappropriate behavior was not something that only peasants were capable

of, but rather that they were chosen to illustrate this type of behavior simply because one could

not attack openly the higher classes.140

I would argue that more than a member of a social class, subjected to social criticism and

social satire, the image of the peasant in the paintings and prints of revel scenes in the sixteenth

century was used for the comic potentiality of the character type embodied by the contemporary

peasant, who could be charged with any human vice or portrayed as ignorant or stupid. My

assumption is that one cannot assign exclusively a vice, sin, ignorance, or stupidity to the members of a certain social class. These weaknesses can afflict any human being, irrespective of his class, education, profession or social status and, on the other hand, among the peasant class

there could have been people who behaved very morally. It is very likely that this would have

been as valid for the sixteenth-century society as it is for our contemporary society. Obviously, I

do not argue in favor of totally excluding the idea of the peasant portrayed as a member of a social class. However, the choice of presenting individuals engaged mainly in activities associated with feasting, drinking, and merry-making seem to indicate that the comic potentiality of the peasant in such situations prevailed in the artists’ intentions.

The same idea is sustained by some of the art historians who wrote about the peasant revel scenes of the sixteenth century, although without elaborate arguments in support of this statement. Walter S. Gibson in his discussion of the grotesque wedding scenes attributed to the workshop of the Verbeeck family, active in Mechelen during the sixteenth century, observes that

140 Ibid., 25.

56 by the time of Bruegel and the Verbeecks, the word boer, which in Dutch means peasant, “had

long been used to designate not only farmers and other country folk, but indeed anyone who was

considered uncultivated and uncouth in appearance, deportment, or speech.”141 From a linguistic

perspective, Rudolf Dekker provides an interesting account of the medieval Dutch word boert,

meaning joke, as apparently having the same root as the word for peasant, boer. By the

nineteenth century, it acquired a pejorative sense as a coarse, vulgar joke and subsequently fell into disuse as a word for more refined jokes.142 Walter S. Gibson also mentions the burlesque

wedding feasts present in the German literature in the fifteenth century in which the behavior of

the participants is so coarse that “there is no doubt that it is the peasant class that is the butt of

these satires.”143 Alison Stewart, in her discussion of Hans Sebald Beham’s kermis woodcuts,

advances the idea that the kermis scenes “appear to be more of a vehicle for humor – as was

Rabelais’s Gargantua – than one for expressing class resentment.”144 Historian Samuel Kinser,

in a study of the Nuremberg carnival plays from 1450 to 1550 identifies the peasant as one of the

four recurring elements in the carnival plays, together with the figure of the Wild Man, dancing,

and verbal and visual references to excesses in eating, drinking, and sexuality.145

The above-mentioned accounts indicate a close relationship between the peasant as a category, both social and cultural, and the realm of comedy in the early modern age. To support further this connection I would add the example of the process of absorption of this category in other arts, such as the commedia dell’arte, which I discussed in the previous chapter. The servants, who were also the main comic characters of the performances, were characterized as

141 Walter S. Gibson, "Verbeeck's Grotesque Wedding Feasts: Some Reconsiderations," Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 21, no. 1/2 (1992): 32. 142 Dekker, 3. 143 Gibson, “Verbeeck’s Grotesque Wedding Feasts: Some Reconsiderations,” 33. 144 Alison Stewart, "Large Noses and Changing Meanings in Sixteenth-Century Prints," Print Quarterly XII, no. 4 (1993): 378. 145 Samuel Kinser, "Presentation and Representation: Carnival at Nuremberg, 1450-1550," Representations no. 13 (Winter, 1986): 1.

57 peasants, with all the attributes that followed from such an association. This tradition goes back

in time, as proved by the fifteenth-century Nuremberg carnival plays that have been preserved.

The peasant was the most popular figure of these plays, which were fundamentally carnival

comedies and served an entertaining function during carnival time.146 Based on the above discussion I would argue that the choice of peasants and their feasts as subject matter for paintings and prints would have been primarily determined by its comic potential that could be exploited artistically, and not by class resentment or social criticism.

b) The Grotesque Body - Deformity, Ugliness and Mechanization of the Body

Laurent Joubert wrote in the 1560s that “what we see that is ugly, deformed, improper,

indecent, unfitting, and indecorous excites laughter in us, provided that we are not moved to compassion.”147 Andrea Perrucci, in his seventeenth-century account of the comic practices and techniques used in commedia dell’arte stated that “the physically deformed, such as hunchbacks,

cripples, the lame, or the blind, being defective by nature, are totally unfit for any serious role and can only be suited to comic roles, because they will provoke laughter without much effort.”148 Comedy is not associated only with the deformed body, but also with the

incongruous, clumsy appearance of the body, which is not in accordance to that which is deemed

to be within the limits of normality. In this section I will attempt to apply the concepts of mechanization of the body and grotesque realism, as discussed in the previous chapter, to the

visual forms encountered in the peasant scenes.

I will interpret the mechanization of the body for the purpose of my argument as a

process that renders the human body puppet-like, and makes it move and act with a certain

146 DuBruck, 5-21. 147 Joubert, 20. 148 Perrucci, 73.

58 stiffness and clumsiness not in accordance with what one would perceive as a natural,

harmonious ensemble of gestures, movements, and actions of the human body. By moving away

from an idealized concept of a harmonious body, such actions acquire not only a tinge of

ugliness, but also bring both actors and audience into the realm of the comic. This principle had

been already grasped and used in comedy by the performing arts. Andrea Perrucci states that the

theatrical mask has been introduced in theatre in order “to move people to laughter by imitating faces spoiled by nature, with a big nose, rheumy eyes, a large mouth, a narrow forehead,” and as a means to express through these physiognomies “the stupidity or the cleverness of a character.”149

As illustrated by Henri Bergson, mechanical movements of the body known to provoke

laughter, such as man who slips and falls, were also retained as comic in the sixteenth century.

For instance, an anecdote about Charles V (1500-1558) records that while aboard a ship he had fun when the servants could not retain their balance on the rocking boat and fell with the meat dishes on the deck.150 Among the causes for laughter Laurent Joubert mentioned that “seeing

someone fall in a mire, we take to laughing, the more indecorous the fall, the greater the

laughter.”151 Among those who could be subjected to such unexpected behavior he mentions

children and drunkards.

Another source of comic that was used mainly in theatrical performances was music and

dancing. Harlequin was a musician and most of the time he included dancing in his

performance. These moments were exploited comically by making the character act and move in

a ridiculous way.152 Such situations can be seen in contemporary engravings showing commedia

149 Perrucci, 21. 150 Verberckmoes, 10. 151 Joubert, 20. 152 Nicolini, 249-251.

59 dell’arte characters making music and dancing (Fig. 17). One drawing shows Harlequin trying

to flirt with a servant by inviting her to dance and in the process they succeed in destroying the milk, eggs, and glasses respectively, that each of them was carrying (Fig. 18). The grotesque drawings of commedia dell’arte characters by Jacques Callot in Balli di Sfessania (1622) show

the various zanni, capitani and female servants playing, singing and dancing (Fig. 19 and Fig.

20).

I would argue that the ways in which Pieter Bruegel depicts the human figures involved in his peasant feasts display some stylistic characteristics that seem to indicate the artist’s intention of treating them in a comic key. The sight of people dancing without the sound of music is a potentially comic situation because it triggers a series of movements that apparently are in disaccord with the normal movement pattern of the human body. The dancers shown in

Bruegel’s peasant paintings and prints appear to move in a puppet-like manner, with slightly uncoordinated movements and jumps, and with their limbs darting at unexpected angles and heights. Their movements and poses are related to those of the dancing commedia dell’arte characters of Jacques Callot (Fig. 21 and Fig. 22) and to the dancing movements of the fools depicted in The Festival of Fools (posthumous engraving, after 1570) (Fig. 23) and in Hans

Sebald Beham’s Dancing Fool (Fig. 24). Other revelers display rather obvious stiff movements, characteristic of the drunkards. Both commedia dell’arte characters and the jesters would have enacted their performances by employing ridiculous poses and movements, or by imitating the behavior of drunken persons with the scope of eliciting laughter from their audiences; therefore it is likely that Pieter Bruegel would have conceived the poses of his dancers and drunkards with a similar intent.

60 The comic potential of the above-mentioned depictions of the human body are enhanced

by grotesque attributes. According to the concept developed by Mikhail Bakhtin in relation to

the literary style of François Rabelais, the grotesque image of the body is characterized mainly

by deformed facial features, such as the gaping mouth, large nose, goggling eyes, bared teeth,

and by the excrescences of the body.153 The wide open mouth and bare teeth were the dominant

grotesque image of Rabelais’s Pantagruel.154 Bruegel’s peasants display all of these

characteristics, the gaping mouth (the seated drunk man in the Peasant Dance - Fig. 3a, some

dancers in the Wedding Dance, Fig. 1a), protruding eyes (the musician in the Peasant Wedding

Banquet, Fig. 2a), bared teeth (the forefront dancer in the Peasant Dance, Fig. 3a), protruding

bellies (some dancers in the Wedding Dance, Fig. 1a), and protruding codpieces (almost all male

dancers in the Peasant Dance – Fig. 3a, and the Wedding Dance – Fig. 1a). However, most of

these characteristics were employed by Bruegel in other compositions with a more obvious

intention of exploiting the comic potential of these attributes of the body. Therefore, the

grotesque images of the body in the revel scenes appear restrained, with only some accents that

point to stupidity, sexual prowess, or the drunkenness of the characters depicted.

The French physician Laurent Joubert writing about laughter in the sixteenth century

described as a “laughable deception” a situation when instead of a beautiful woman one is

presented with a “wrinkled old lady with one eye a runny nose, a thick and kinky beard and

underslung buttocks, dirty, smelly, drooling, toothless, flat-nosed, bandy-legged, humpy, bumpy,

stinking, twisted, filthy, knotty, full of lice, and more deformed than ugliness itself.”155 This description, grotesque in essence, seems to correspond to the image of the “Dirty Bride,” a character from the Flemish popular culture whose story was enacted by actors during carnival

153 Bakhtin, 316-318. 154 Ibid., 441. 155 Joubert, 22.

61 time. Bruegel depicted the episode in The Wedding of Mopsus and Nisa (or ‘The Dirty Bride’)

engraving (Fig. 25) and also in the Battle between Carnival and Lent (Fig. 15). Elements of

grotesque faces and bodies can be found also in the compositions of The Seven Deadly Sins, The

Witch of Mallegem, and the Battle Between Carnival and Lent. The presence of the visual

elements that can be associated with the image of the grotesque body as defined by Mikhail

Bakhtin indicate that their comic potential was used not only in literature but also in the visual

arts.

c) Reference to Excessive Eating and Drinking

A contemporary allusion to the way in which the Flemish were perceived as far as their

eating and drinking habits were concerned could be found in the French book Le voyage et navigation que fist Panurge, disciple de Pantegruel aux Isles incongnues et estranges (The

Journey of Panurge, disciple of Pantagruel, to the Unknown and Strange Islands), published in

1538 and attributed to Denis Johennot. The book made the first sixteenth-century mention of the mythical Land of Cockaigne,156 an earthly paradise where food and drink appeared everywhere

in the form of grilled fish, roast geese, and rivers of wine.157 The first thing the main character

Panurge recommends is not to show it to the Flemish, because they will eat everything.158

Excessive eating and drinking, together with sexual behavior and scatological humor have been identified as the three vehicles for comic associated with carnival activities.159 Alison

Stewart, in her discussion of Hans Sebald Beham’s kermis woodcut The Peasant Kermis (Fig. 8

156 Frank, 301. 157 Herman Pleij, Dreaming of Cockaigne: Medieval Fantasies of the Perfect Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 3. 158 Verberckmoes, 8. 159 Johannes Merkel, Form und Funktion der Komik in Nürnberger Fastnachtspiel (1971). Quoted in Alison Stewart, “Paper Festivals and Popular Entertainment: The Kermis Woodcuts of Sebald Beham in Reformation Nuremberg,” 313.

62 and Fig. 8a) advances the idea that “the emphasis on the bodily – excessive sexuality and intake

and expulsion – brings these images in close proximity with the carnival play and its comic approach.”160 Eating and drinking were also associated with the feasts and carnival, and

therefore with occasions for entertainment and laughter.

One of the central characteristics of Harlequin in commedia dell’arte is his gluttony. The

character was always portrayed as hungry and thirsty; it was quite common for Harlequin to neglect his duties in order to pursue his own bodily needs. Contemporary engravings of commedia dell’arte characters often show Harlequin having a rich meal (Fig. 26), or accompanied by one of the fellow zanni, enjoying themselves in the middle of a feast (Fig. 27 and Fig. 28). Eating and drinking would have been also naturally associated with amorous and sexual pursuits in comedies, as it can be seen in Pieter Baltens’s depiction of a rederijkers’ play

(Fig. 14) and where the amorous couple is shown sitting at a table drinking and eating. Eating

habits, food, drink, and their relationship with the bodily functions were also often comic

material for the sixteenth-century jokes.161

In Bruegel’s feasting scenes there is neither that much emphasis on showing abundant

food or drink, nor on showing people in the process of eating and drinking, with the exception of

a few men depicted while tilting their heads and bodies backwards in order to empty their jugs,

such as in the Peasant Wedding Banquet and the Wedding Dance (Fig. 2 and Fig. 3). Rather, the effects of eating and drinking are depicted as vomiting or drunkenness, which both determine clumsiness, awkward movements of the body, and distortion of facial features. These elements, as a result of festive eating and drinking, provide the comic elements that can be exploited visually in the revel images.

160 Alison Stewart, “Paper Festival and Popular Entertainment: The Kermis Woodcuts of Sebald Beham in Reformation Nuremberg,” 313. 161 Verberckmoes, 15, 31, 126, 134, 164.

63

d) Reference to Sexual Behavior

Stories about love and adultery were appreciated as a source of laughter in the sixteenth

century.162 Most jokes had as central themes the sexuality of women, who did not marry as

virgins, mens’ honor, cuckolded husbands and marital fidelity, or the unequal lovers.163 Love and sexuality was also a favorite theme for theatrical performances. One such example was depicted in Pieter Baltens’s Peasant Kermis with the “Clucht van plaijerwater” discussed previously in the third chapter. Commedia dell’arte also employed overt sexual behavior in its performances for comic effects. Surviving seventeenth-century prints depicting scenes from commedia dell’arte plays show Harlequin and Franceschina engaging in amorous carousing when discovered by Pantalone (Fig. 29), or various commedia dell’arte characters appear in kitchen scenes with erotic undertones (Fig. 30 and Fig. 31). The principle of these scenes appears to be very similar to the tavern feasts scenes that involve the same ambiguous, overtly erotic type of relationships between participants.

The peasant revel scenes of Pieter Bruegel depict the more or less lawful amorous pursuit of more or less drunken couples who mingle among the other revelers. At least one such couple is present in the paintings and prints of feasts and kermises by Pieter Bruegel the Elder and his sons Pieter Brueghel the Younger and Jan Brueghel the Elder. The courting pose of the

Harlequin and Franceschina characters (Fig. 29) is strikingly similar to the actions of a couple shown in a horse-drawn carriage in the Kermis at Hoboken (c. 1559) (Fig. 32 and Fig. 32a). The

162 Ibid., 34. 163 Ibid, 160-163.

64 same pose is used by Pieter Brueghel the Younger in Wedding Dance in a Barn (Fig. 33 and Fig.

33a) for one couple participating at the general entertainment.

I would argue that while the images of peasant kermises use the carousing couples as

comic visual accents, in the weddings scenes the main subject matter is in fact related to the

contemporary jokes about sexuality and about the less honorable condition of the brides. Even if

for today’s viewers such allusions may not be straightforward, a sixteenth-century audience would have been informed about the jokes in circulation, customs and habits related to marriage feasts and ceremonies. The long-haired bride sitting at a table under a veil of honor decorated with a crown is an unmistakable presence in all wedding scenes. The fact that probably many brides would not have fulfilled the requirement for purity before marriage was the object of many jokes.164 It is very likely that an artist such as Pieter Bruegel picked up this subject matter

for its potentiality associated with this type of comic commentary rather than as a pretext for

depicting the ways in which peasants would have enjoyed themselves at a wedding party. The

bridal wreath in the sixteenth-century was a symbol of virginity165 and its absence could suggest

that the bride was no longer a virgin.166 However, the text attached to Bruegel’s posthumous

print of The Peasant Wedding Dance (Fig. 34 and Fig. 34a) indicates that although the bride is

wearing her crown she is “full and sweet,” or pregnant.167 Such incongruence would have been

familiar to the contemporary audience, even without the explanatory text. The theme of brides

and weddings were also the subject of plays, such as a sixteenth-century tafelspel, or a table play,

a monologue of a fool describing the wedding between the son of Hertoch van Mal (Duke of

Folly) and Dwaeseg (Silly) the “gryffyn,” or a play presented by the rederijkers of Lier in 1561,

164 Ibid., 161. 165 Alison McNeil Kettering, "Rembrandt's "Flute Player:" A Unique Treatment of Pastoral," Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 9, no. 1 (1977): 36. 166 Gibson, “Verbeeck’s Grotesque Weddings: Some Reconsiderations,” 36. 167 Sellink, 263.

65 whose main character is Vrou Schaye, a “bad jewel.”168 Therefore a combination of mockery,

joking, double-entendre allusions and the comic potential of public carousing gestures could

represent as many reasons for including these themes and visual devices in paintings and prints

of revel scenes as comic vehicles.

e) Reference to Exposure of Lower Body Parts and the Material Bodily Stratum

Public exposure of lower body parts and bodily excretions were a source of comic effect

in the sixteenth century. In his Treatise on Laughter, Laurent Joubert noted in the 1560s that “if

perchance one uncovers the shameful parts which by nature or public decency we are accustomed to keeping hidden, since this is ugly yet unworthy of pity, it moves the onlooker to laughter,” and that in watching someone displaying the lower body parts “we are unable to contain our laughter.”169 Some banquet plays had scatological humor as a subject matter such as

“The Wine Can and the Piss Pot.”170 Bodily excretions were a common occurrence at feasts and

references to them were a cause for laughter.171 Jesters and fools are sometimes depicted

showing their bare bottoms to the viewers, such as the jester in the mural paintings in Augsburg,

Germany, known as Die Augsburger Monatsbilder (1520-1525) (Fig. 35), depicting the spectrum

of social classes in Augsburg and seasonal activities. Another image of the jesters using both

their lower parts of the body and bodily excretions as an entertaining device is The Flag of the

Mad Mother (c. 15th–16th centuries) (Fig. 36) from Dijon.172

In Bruegel’s peasant revel paintings and prints we can see both elements present, with the

exception of the Peasant Wedding Banquet (Fig. 2 and Fig. 2a). One character in the Peasant

168 Gibson, “Verbeeck’s Grotesque Weddings: Some Reconsiderations,” 36. 169 Joubert, 20. 170 Gibson, Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter, 114. 171 Verberckmoes, 9, 30-31, 32, 36, 134-135. 172 Eco, On Ugliness, 139.

66 Dance (Fig. 3 and Fig. 3a) and at least three characters in the Wedding Dance (Fig. 1 and Fig.

1a) are depicted in the process of relieving themselves, using for this purpose the walls of the

two wooden structures on each side of the painting and a tree. The walls of the buildings, such as the inn and the church, are used for the same purpose by some participants at the Saint

George’s Kermis (Fig. 37 and Fig. 37a), at the Kermis at Hoboken (Fig. 32 and Fig. 32a) and at

the Peasant Wedding Dance depicted in a posthumous print (Fig. 34 and Fig. 34a). The same

pictorial image appears in some peasant feasts painted by Pieter Brueghel the Younger, such as

Kermesse of Saint George (Fig. 38 and Fig. 38a), Peasants Outside a Tavern (Fig. 39) and by

Jan Brueghel the Elder, such as the Wedding Dance (1597) (Fig. 40).

The most relevant examples where Bruegel uses the bare lower body parts as a comic

device can be found in Ice Skating before the Gate of Saint George (1558) (Fig. 41 and Fig. 41a)

and in the posthumous print The Festival of Fools (after 1570) (Fig. 23 and Fig. 23a). One of the

skaters shown enjoying a slide on the frozen canals around Antwerp’s city walls has fallen and

his disheveled cloak left his bare lower body parts exposed. The event does not seem to have

attracted the attention of the other skaters except for a woman seated on the river bank who

appears to point out the event to her companion. The Fools participating in the festival taking

place in a fantastic marketplace are engaged in various activities such as dancing, playing music,

doing clowneries. One of them, placed slightly to the center left is looking outside the picture as

he turns his bare back towards the viewers; it appears that he, or the artist, is playing a practical

joke on the audience.

In this chapter I attempted to identify some visual comic strategies that are present not

only in the paintings and prints depicting peasant revel scenes, but also in other works by Pieter

Bruegel the Elder. These strategies are recognized as belonging to the comic due to their

67 association with other forms of art that used them as comic devices and due to their being acknowledged as provoking laughter in contemporary documents. Not all strategies are employed within the same work of art. However, their presence as comic vehicles indicate the intention of the artists to create images that establish a relationship with their audience that points towards a form of comic entertainment, in this case provoking laughter through an established visual vocabulary. The use of comic elements in itself does not inform us on the level of moral content and intent of the image, but it does help place such images within the larger context of the culture of laughter of their time.

68 Conclusion

The peasant revel scenes, as a subgroup of genre paintings, represent an important

tradition in the Netherlandish art of the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Pieter Bruegel the Elder is usually credited with being the inventor of this tradition, although the first depictions of feasting peasants are recorded in German art around the beginning of the sixteenth century.

The peasant scenes have received the particular attention of several researchers of Northern art,

with a special focus on Pieter Bruegel’s artworks, although the interpretation, meaning, social

function, and reception of these pictures have raised a series of problems that divides the scholar

world in two opposing schools of thought. One approach considers these images illustrated

moral sermons and warnings against the folly and sinful behavior of peasants. The other

approach acknowledges the primacy of their comic nature over the moralizing message by

placing them within the larger context of the culture of laughter in the sixteenth century.

In my thesis, I attempted to contribute to this discussion by supporting the argument that

places these images into the realm of the comic. In this approach, rather than sticking to the

main issue in the debate that concerns the interpretation and the meaning of the message

transmitted by these images, I chose to focus on the artistic style and means of expression used

by the painter. The visual artist, in the same way as a writer or an actor who create comedy in

their own arts, has to employ certain specific strategies and mechanisms that are thought to

provoke laughter in an audience. Since there are no historical documents to testify to the

creative process of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, tackling such an argument involves a certain degree

of speculation. However, in order to identify and describe some of the comic mechanisms and

strategies that Pieter Bruegel might have employed in his art, I brought in evidence from the

69 theoretical field, from the contemporary cultural aspects concerning comedy and laughter in the sixteenth century, as well as from the theatrical arts, which are most closely related to the visual arts, since they rely extensively on nonverbal communication, too.

A series of theoretical concepts such as the grotesque and satire have been used over time in relationship to the work of Pieter Bruegel. By discussing the various definitions of concepts such as comedy, satire, and grotesque, how they evolved in time, and their relevance to the art of

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, I intended to create a theoretical framework within which, at least some aspects, if not all, of his art could be discussed. The connection between satire, grotesque, and comedy, as well as the fact that these terms have been used in reference to Bruegel’s work as early as the seventeenth century indicate that there is enough theoretical ground to rely upon in placing his art into the realm of the comic.

The philosophical frame constructed by Henri Bergson for his discussion of comedy and laughter and the cultural approach of Mikhail Bakhtin offer two important points of reference for advancing my argument. Bergson attempts to identify some causes of laughter that hold even independently of a specific cultural context and his findings concerning the causes of laughter associated to the human body offer important insights into the strategies that an artist can employ in order to achieve laughter as a response from his audience. Mikhail Bakhtin offers a radiography of the culture of laughter in the society contemporary with François Rabelais, establishing that the materiality of the human body that reigned over the laughter of the streets and marketplaces of the sixteenth century found its way into distilled and refined cultural products such as Gargantua and Pantagruel wrapped into the aesthetic of grotesque realism.

These means of expression found their visual counterpart in some of the sixteenth-century

70 imagery, among which the peasant revel scenes of Pieter Bruegel the Elder represent maybe the

best example.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder himself has been described by his contemporaries, or near-

contemporaries, as having a personality with a clear propensity for laughter and comedy. The

sixteenth-century Flemish society also displayed a certain openness to various forms of

entertainment and laughter, among which the popular culture, carnival culture, comic books, jestbooks, and comic performing arts played an important role in maintaining and sustaining the

Flemish inclination for feasts, celebrations, and laughter. Two books published in the sixteenth and seventeenth century respectively, Laurent Joubert’s Treatise on Laughter and Andrea

Perrucci’s Treatise on Acting in commedia dell’arte, offer an important insight into the sources

and causes of laughter and on the main strategies and mechanisms employed by comic artists

involved in the business of eliciting laughter from an audience.

All these consideration suggested several important comic strategies which, if one cannot

be sure that they were likely employed by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, at least one can assume that

Bruegel was aware of them, since these comic mechanisms existed in the society as a whole and

were used in other arts with the scope of provoking laughter. Such strategies were the use of the

peasant as a comic type and a vehicle for transmitting comic messages rather than social and

class criticism, the use of elements of grotesque realism in the representation of the body,

reference to excessive eating and drinking, to sexual behavior and to exposure of the lower body

parts and of the lower material bodily stratum. Examples that illustrate these strategies can be

found in the peasant revel scenes, as well as in other compositions by Bruegel with comic

undertones. The use of certain means of expression and of a specific visual idiom associated

with comedy and laughter in the sixteenth century can be considered an important indicator that

71 Pieter Bruegel the Elder and other artists that depicted peasant revel scenes chose their subject matter and their visual representation primarily with a comic intent, which, however, does not exclude the moralizing message since ridendo castigat mores, or laughter punishes contemptible behavior.

72 Bibliography

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73 Grössinger, Christa. Humour and Folly in Secular and Profane Prints of Northern Europe, 1430- 1540. London: Harvey Miller, 2002. Gurevich, Aron. Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception. Cambridge Studies in Oral and Literate Culture. Vol. 14. Cambridge Cambridgeshire New York; Paris: Cambridge University Press; Maison des sciences de l'homme, 1988. Gusick, Barbara I. and Edelgard E. DuBruck. New Approaches to European Theater of the Middle Ages: An Ontology. New York: P. Lang, 2004. Haak, Bob. The Golden Age: Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1984. Heller, Agnes. Immortal Comedy: The Comic Phenomenon in Art, Literature, and Life. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005. Hobsbawm, E. J. and T. O. Ranger. The Invention of Tradition. Past and Present Publications. Cambridge Cambridgeshire; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Huizinga, Johan. The Waning of the Middle Ages; a Study of the Forms of Life, Thought, and Art in France and the Netherlands in the XIVth and XVth Centuries. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1954. Joubert, Laurent. Treatise on Laughter [Traité du ris. English. 1569]. Translated and annotated by Gregory David de Rocher. University: University of Alabama Press, 1980. Kavaler, Ethan Matt. Pieter Bruegel: Parables of Order and Enterprise. Cambridge Studies in Netherlandish Visual Culture. Cambridge, U.K.; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Kayser, Wolfgang Johannes. The Grotesque in Art and Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963. Kinser, Sam. Rabelais's Carnival: Text, Context, Metatext. New Historicism. Vol. 10. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Koldeweij, A. M., Paul Vandenbroeck, Bernard Vermet. Hieronymus Bosch: The Complete Paintings and Drawings. Amsterdam: Ludion; New York: Distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 2001. Maeterlinck, Louis. Le Genre Satirique Dans La Peinture Flamande. 2. éd., Bruxelles: G. van Oest & cie, 1907. Nicolini, Fausto. Vita Di Arlecchino. Milano: R. Ricciardi, 1958. Nicoll, Allardyce. The World of Harlequin: A Critical Study of the Commedia Dell'Arte. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.

74 Niklaus, Thelma. Harlequin; Or the Rise and Fall of a Bergamask Rogue. New York: G. Braziller, 1956. Perrucci, Andrea. A Treatise on Acting, from Memory and by Improvisation (1699) Dell'Arte Rappresentativa, Premeditata Ed all'Improviso. Translated by Francesco Cotticelli, Anne Goodrich Heck, and Thomas F. Heck. Bilingual in English and Italian ed. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2008. Piccoli-Genovese, Alberto. Il Comico, l'Umore e La Fantasia; o, Teoria Del Riso Come Introduzione all'Estetica. Piccola Biblioteca Di Scienze Moderne. Vol. 323. Torino: Fratelli Bocca, 1926. Pleij, Herman. Dreaming of Cockaigne: Medieval Fantasies of the Perfect Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Sebeok, Thomas Albert, Umberto Eco, and Viacheslav V. Ivanov. Carnaval!. ed. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1998. Sellink, Manfred. Bruegel: The Complete Paintings, Drawings, and Prints. Catalogue. Classical Art Series. Ghent, Belgium; New York: Ludion; Distributed in North America by H.N. Abrams, 2007. Silver, Larry. Peasant Scenes and Landscapes: The Rise of Pictorial Genres in the Antwerp Art Market. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986. Slive, Seymour and Jakob Rosenberg. Dutch Painting 1600-1800. Yale University Press Pelican History of Art. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995. Sullivan, Margaret A. Bruegel's Peasants: Art and Audience in the Northern Renaissance. Cambridge England: New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. van Mander, Karel. Dutch and Flemish Painters [Schilderboek.]. New York: Arno Press, 1969. Verberckmoes, Johan. Laughter, Jestbooks and Society in the Spanish Netherlands. Early Modern History: Society and Culture. New York, N.Y.: St. Martin's Press, 1999. Vlieghe, Hans. Flemish Art and Architecture, 1585-1700. Yale University Press Pelican History of Art. New Haven Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998. Waite, Gary K. Reformers on Stage: Popular Drama and Religious Propaganda in the Low Countries of Charles V, 1515-1556. Toronto; Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Williams, Robert I. Comic Practice. Comic Response. Newark, Del.; Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware Press; London; Associated University Presses, 1993.

75

Articles Alpers, Svetlana. "Taking Pictures Seriously: A Reply to Hessel Miedema." Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 10, no. 1 (1978): 46-50. ———. "Realism as a Comic Mode: Low-Life Painting seen through Bredero's Eyes." Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 8, no. 3 (1975): 115-144. ———. "Bruegel's Festive Peasants." Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 6, no. 3/4 (1972): 163-176. Frank, Ross H. "An Interpretation of Land of Cockaigne (1567) by Pieter Breugel the Elder." Sixteenth Century Journal 22, no. 2 (Summer, 1991): 299-329. Gibson, Walter S. "Verbeeck's Grotesque Wedding Feasts: Some Reconsiderations." Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 21, no. 1/2 (1992): 29-39. ———. "Artists and Rederijkers in the Age of Bruegel." The Art Bulletin 63, no. 3 (Sep., 1981): 426-446. ———. "Some Flemish Popular Prints from Hieronymus Cock and His Contemporaries." The Art Bulletin 60, no. 4 (Dec., 1978): 673-681. Gifford, D. J. "Iconographical Notes Towards a Definition of the Medieval Fool." Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 37, (1974): 336-342. Honig, Elizabeth Alice. "Country Folk and City Business: A Print Series by Jan Van De Velde." The Art Bulletin 78, no. 3 (Sep., 1996): 511-526. Jones, Malcolm. "Folklore Motifs in Late Medieval Art I: Proverbial Follies and Impossibilities." Folklore 100, no. 2 (1989): 201-217. ———. "Folklore Motifs in Late Medieval Art II: Sexist Satire and Popular Punishments." Folklore 101, no. 1 (1990): 69-87. Kinser, Samuel. "Presentation and Representation: Carnival at Nuremberg, 1450-1550." Representations no. 13 (Winter, 1986): 1-41. Kunzle, David. "Bruegel's Proverb Painting and the World Upside Down." The Art Bulletin 59, no. 2 (June, 1977): 197-202. McNeil Kettering, Alison. "Rembrandt's "Flute Player": A Unique Treatment of Pastoral." Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 9, no. 1 (1977): 19-44. Miedema, Hessel. "Realism and Comic Mode: The Peasant." Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 9, no. 4 (1977): 205-219.

76 Moxey, Keith P. F. "Pieter Bruegel and the Feast of Fools." The Art Bulletin 64, no. 4 (Dec., 1982): 640-646. ———. "Sebald Beham's Church Anniversary Holidays: Festive Peasants as Instruments of Repressive Humor." Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 12, no. 2/3 (1981): 107-130. Posner, Donald. "Jacques Callot and the Dances Called Sfessania." The Art Bulletin vol. 59, no. 2 (1977): 203-216. Stewart, Alison. "Paper Festivals and Popular Entertainment. The Kermis Woodcuts of Sebald Beham in Reformation Nuremberg." Sixteenth Century Journal 24, no. 2 (Summer, 1993): 301-350. ———. "Large Noses and Changing Meanings in Sixteenth-Century Prints." Print Quarterly XII, no. 4 (1993): 343-360. Stridbeck, C. G. "'Combat between Carnival and Lent' by Pieter Bruegel the Elder: An Allegorical Picture of the Sixteenth Century." Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 19, no. 1/2 (Jan.-June, 1956): 96-109. Sullivan, Margaret. "Bruegel's Proverbs: Art and Audience in the Northern Renaissance." The Art Bulletin 73, no. 3 (Sep., 1991): 431-466. Vandenbroeck, Paul. "Verbeeck's Peasant Weddings: A Study of Iconography and Social Function." Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 14, no. 2 (1984): 79-124.

77 Illustrations

Fig. 1. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Wedding Dance, 1566, oil on panel, 119.4 x 157.5 cm, The Detroit Institute of Arts

Fig. 1a. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Details of The Wedding Dance, 1566, oil on panel, 119.4 x 157.5 cm, The Detroit Institute of Arts

78

Fig. 2. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Peasant Wedding Banquet, c. 1567, oil on panel, 114 x 164 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Fig. 2a. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Details of The Peasant Wedding Banquet, c. 1567, oil on panel, 114 x 164 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

79

Fig. 3. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Peasant Dance, c. 1567, oil on panel, 114 x 164 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Fig. 3a. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Details of Peasant Dance, c. 1567, oil on panel, 114 x 164 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

80

Fig. 4. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Netherlandish Proverbs, 1559, oil on panel, 117.5 x 163.5 cm, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäaldegalerie

Fig. 5. Anonymous, after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Wild Man, 1566, woodcut, 27.2 x 41 cm

81

Fig. 6. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Death of the Virgin, c. 1564, grisaille, oil on panel, 36 x 55 cm, National Trust, Upton House, Banbury

Fig. 7. Philips Galle, after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Christ on the Road to Emmaus, 1571, posthumous engraving, 24.8 x 19.3 cm

82

Fig. 8a. Hans Sebald Beham, Large Kermis, 1535, woodcut, left side

Fig. 8b. Hans Sebald Beham, Large Kermis, 1535, woodcut, right side

83

Fig. 9. Hans Sebald Beham, Nose Dance, 1535, woodcut, right side

Fig. 10. Pieter van der Heyden, after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Witch of Mallegem, 1559, engraving, 35.3 x 47.3 cm

84

Fig. 10a. Pieter van der Heyden, after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Detail of The Witch of Mallegem, 1559, engraving, 35.3 x 47.3 cm

Fig. 11. Hieronymus Bosch, The Extraction of the Stone of Folly, c. 1494, oil on panel, 48 x 35 cm, Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado

85

Fig. 12. Pieter Quast, “The Triumph of Folly,” a Scene from the Play “Tarquinius and Brutus” in the Amsterdam Municipal Theatre, 1643, canvas, 69.5 x 99 cm, Theater Museum, Amsterdam

Fig. 13. Anonymous, Emblem, Antwerp, 1631

86

Fig. 14. Pieter Baltens, Peasant Kermis with the “Clucht van plaijerwater,” after 1540, oil on panel, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum

Fig. 14a. Pieter Baltens, Detail of Peasant Kermis with the “Clucht van plaijerwater,” after 1540, oil on panel, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum

87

Fig. 15. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Battle Between Carnival and Lent, 1559, oil on panel, 118 x 164.5 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Fig. 16. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Land of Cockaigne, 1567, oil on panel, 52 x 78 cm, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek, Munich

88

Fig. 17. Harlequin, Zan Corneto and Pantalone making music, Recueil Fossard, 16th century

Fig. 18. Harlequin and a milkmaid break eggs and glasses during a dance, Recueil Fossard, 16th century

89

Fig. 19. Jacques Callot, Balli di Sfessania, 1622, Frontispiece

Fig. 20. Jacques Callot, Balli di Sfessania, 1622

90

Fig. 21. Jacques Callot, Balli di Sfessania, 1622

Fig. 22. Jacques Callot, Balli di Sfessania, 1622

91

Fig. 23. Pieter van der Heyden, after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Festival of Fools, after 1570, posthumous print, engraving, 32.5 x 43.7 cm

Fig. 23a. Pieter van der Heyden, after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Detail of The Festival of Fools, after 1570, posthumous print, engraving, 32.5 x 43.7 cm

92

Fig. 24. Hans Sebald Beham, A Dancing Fool, 1549, drawing

Fig. 25. Pieter van der Heyden, after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Wedding of Mopsus and Nisa (“The Dirty Bride”), engraving, c. 1570, 26.4 x 41.6 cm

93

Fig. 26. Claude Gillot, Harlequin as a glutton, drawing, 17th century

Fig. 27. Harlequin banqueting, Recueil Fossard, 16th century

94

Fig. 28. Harlequin and Philipin banqu eting, Recueil Fossard, 16th century

Fig. 29. Harlequin and Franceschina caught by Pantalone, Recueil Fossard, 16th century

95

Fig. 30. Zan Zacagni in a tavern, Recueil Fossard, 16th century

Fig. 31. Arlequin vole un baiser à la Dona Cornelia, Recueil Fossard, 16th century

96

Fig. 32. Frans Hogenberg, after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Kermis at Hoboken, c. 1559, etching and engraving, 29.8 x 40.8 cm

Fig. 32a. Frans Hogenberg, after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Details of Kermis at Hoboken, c. 1559, etching and engraving, 29.8 x 40.8 cm

97

Fig. 33. Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Wedding Dance in a Barn, oil on panel, 86 x 102 cm, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin

Fig. 33a. Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Detail of Wedding Dance in a Barn, oil on panel, 86 x 102 cm, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin

98

Fig. 34. Pieter van der Heyden, after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Peasant Wedding Dance, after 1570, posthumous print, engraving, 37.5 x 42.3 cm

Fig. 34a. Pieter van der Heyden, after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Details of Peasant Wedding Dance, after 1570, posthumous print, engraving, 37.5 x 42.3 cm

99

Fig. 35. Die Augsburger Monatsbilder, 1520-1525, Mural, Augsburg, Germany, Detail

Fig. 36. The Mad Mother Flag, c. 15th–16th centuries, Dijon, France

100

Fig. 37. Joannes and Lucas van Doetecum, after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Saint George’s Kermis, c. 1559, engraving, 33.2 x 52.3 cm

Fig. 37a. Joannes and Lucas van Doetecum, after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Details of Saint George’s Kermis, c. 1559, engraving, 33.2 x 52.3 cm

101

Fig. 38. Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Kermesse of Saint George, 1628, oil on panel, 116.8 x 175.5 cm, private collection

Fig. 38a. Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Details of Kermesse of Saint George, 1628, oil on panel, 116.8 x 175.5 cm, private collection

102

Fig. 39. Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Peasants Making Merry Outside a Tavern ‘The Swan,’ c. 1630, oil on panel, 55 x 69 cm, private collection

Fig. 40. Jan Bruegel the Elder, Wedding Dance, c. 1597, oil on wood, 37.4 x 55.2 cm, private collection

103

Fig. 41. Frans Huys, after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Ice Skating before the Gate of St. George, c. 1558, engraving, 23.1 x 29.3 cm

Fig. 41a. Frans Huys, after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Details of Ice Skating before the Gate of St. George, c. 1558, engraving, 23.1 x 29.3 cm

104