Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination 9780271084572

Citation preview

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

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Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination Stephanie Porras

The Pennsylvania State University Press  |  University Park, Pennsylvania

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Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund of the College Art Association.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Porras, Stephanie, author. Pieter Bruegel’s historical imagination / Stephanie Porras. pages cm Summary: “Explores the historical imagination of the late sixteenth-century Netherlandish painter Pieter Bruegel, focusing on the complex interplay of classical antiquity, local history, and art history”— Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-271-07089-6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Bruegel, Pieter, approximately 1525–1569 — Criticism and interpretation. 2. Painting, Netherlandish—16th century. 3. History in art. 4. Peasants in art. I. Title.

Copyright © 2016 The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in Hong Kong by Oceanic Graphics International Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802-1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48 –1992. additional credits: page ii, detail from Pieter Bruegel, The Tower of Babel, 1563 (fig. 30); pages v, 1, 21, 55, 81, 115, and 145, details from Pieter Bruegel, Peasant Dance, 1568 (fig. 56).

ND673.B73P58 2016 759.9493— dc23 2015027773

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Contents List of Illustrations  vii Acknowledgments  xi

Introduction: Peasants and Pagans  1

1 The Archaeological Peasant  21 2 Hybrid Histories  55 3 Bacchic Excess  81 4 Bruegel’s Art History  115 Conclusion: Bruegel as History  145

Notes  153 Bibliography  171 Index  189

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Illustrations

1

Pieter Bruegel, Netherlandish Proverbs, 1559. Oil on panel. Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.  3

2 Pieter Bruegel, Hunters in the Snow, from the series The Months, 1565. Oil on panel. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.  4 3

Pieter Bruegel, Children’s Games, 1560. Oil on panel. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.  5

4 Pieter van der Heyden, after Pieter Bruegel, Big Fish Eat Little Fish, 1557. Engraving. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.  6 5

Johannes Wierix, Portrait of Pieter Bruegel, in Domenicus Lampsonius and Hieronymus Cock, Pictorum aliquot celebrium Germaniae inferioris effigies, 1595 (first edition 1572). Engraving and letterpress. Davis Museum, Wellesley College.  14

6 Abraham Ortelius, Arx Britannica (Map of Brittenburg), ca. 1567– 68. Engraving. British Library, London.  22 7

Pieter Aertsen, Peasant Feast, 1550. Oil on panel. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.  23

Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London.  33 10 Frans Hogenberg, after Pieter Bruegel, The Kermis at Hoboken, 1559. Engraving. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.  34 11 Pieter van der Borcht, Peasant Kermis, 1559. Etching and engraving. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.  34 12 Joannes van Doetecum the Elder and Lucas van Doetecum, after Pieter Bruegel, The Kermis of Saint George, ca. 1559. Etching and engraving. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.  36 13 Joannes van Doetecum the Elder and Lucas van Doetecum, after Pieter Bruegel, Plaustrum Belgicum (The Belgian Wagon), from the series The Large Landscapes, ca. 1555–56. Etching and engraving. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.  38 14 Joannes van Doetecum the Elder and Lucas van Doetecum, after Pieter Bruegel, Pagus Nemorosus (Wooded Landscape), from the series The Large Landscapes, ca. 1555–56. Etching and engraving. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.  38

8 Hieronymus Cock, View of Ruins, from the Praecipua aliquot Romanae antiquitatis ruinarum, 1551. Etching and engraving. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.  24

15 Pieter van der Borcht, Vita Familiaris, in Abraham Ortelius, Aurei saeculi imago, 1596. Engraving and letterpress. Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde, Leiden.  39

9 Pieter Bruegel, The Kermis at Hoboken, 1559. Pen and ink over chalk on paper. The

16 Cornelis van Dalem, Landscape with Farm, 1564. Oil on panel. Alte Pinakothek, Munich.  41

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17 Pieter Bruegel, Peasant Wedding, 1568. Oil on panel. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.  43

30 Pieter Bruegel, The Tower of Babel, 1563. Oil on panel. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.  69

18 Pieter van der Borcht, Frugalitas & Gula, in Abraham Ortelius, Aurei saeculi imago, 1596. Engraving and letterpress. Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde, Leiden.  44

31 Maarten van Heemskerck, Self-Portrait with Colosseum, 1553. Oil on panel. Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK.  70

19 Pieter van der Borcht, Peasant Wedding, 1560. Etching. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.  45 20 Cornelis van Dalem, Landscape with the Dawn of Civilisation, ca. 1560 – 67. Oil on panel. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam.  48 21 Pieter Bruegel, The Land of Cockaigne, 1567. Oil on panel. Alte Pinakothek, Munich.  51 22 Pieter Bruegel, The Flight into Egypt, 1563. Oil on panel. The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London.  57 23 Lucas Gassel, The Flight into Egypt, ca. 1540. Oil on panel. Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht.  58 24 Pieter Bruegel, The Flight into Egypt, 1563, detail. Oil on panel. The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London.  59 25 Simon Bening, The Flight into Egypt, ca. 1525–30. Tempera colors, gold paint, gold leaf, and ink on parchment. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.  59 26 Pieter Bruegel, Haymaking, from the series The Months, 1565. Oil on panel. Lobkowicz Palace, Prague.  60 27 Philips Galle, after Pieter Bruegel, Hope (Spes), from the series The Virtues, 1559. Engraving. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.  61 28 Detail of Galle, after Bruegel, Hope (Spes), from the series The Virtues, 1559.  61

Illustrations

29 Joannes van Doetecum the Elder and Lucas van Doetecum, after Hieronymus Cock, View of Ruins, from the Operum antiquorum Romanorum, 1562. Etching and engraving. British Museum, London.  67

32 Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy, France. Photograph.  71 33 Pieter Bruegel, The Tower of Babel, 1563, detail. Oil on panel. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.  72 34 Pieter Bruegel, Christ Carrying the Cross, 1564. Oil on panel. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.  75 35 Sixteenth-century Netherlandish artist, after Jan van Eyck, Christ Carrying the Cross, ca. 1500 –1515. Oil on panel. Szépmu ´´vészeti Museum, Budapest.  76 36 Rogier van der Weyden, Crucifixion with the Virgin and Saint John the Evangelist Mourning, ca. 1460. Oil on panel. Philadelphia Museum of Art.  77 37 Jacques Jonghelinck, Bacchus, ca. 1563– 69. Bronze. Jardin de la Isla, Palace of Aranjuez, Madrid.  83 38 Sixteenth-century Netherlandish School, illustration to De Lelie (Diest) Haagspel, from Spelen van sinne (Antwerp: Willem Silvius, 1562). Woodcut. Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.  84 39 Philips Galle, after Jacques Jonghelinck, Apollo (Sol), from the Statues of Bacchus and the Seven Planets, 1586. Engraving. British Museum, London.  85 40 Philips Galle, after Jacques Jonghelinck, Bacchus, from the Statues of Bacchus and the Seven Planets, 1586. Engraving. British Museum, London.  85 41 Pieter Bruegel, The Gloomy Day, from the series The Months, 1565. Oil on panel. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.  86 42 Pieter Bruegel, The Harvesters, from the series The Months, 1565. Oil on panel.

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.  87 43 Pieter van der Heyden, after Pieter Bruegel, Summer, from the series The Seasons, 1570. Engraving. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.  89 44 Adriaen Collaert, after Maerten de Vos, Autumn, 1587. Engraving. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.  89 45 Maarten van Heemskerck, Triumph of Bacchus, 1536 –37. Oil on panel. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.  92 46 Frans Floris, Banquet of the Gods, 1550. Oil on panel. Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp.  92 47 Pieter Bruegel, The Battle Between Carnival and Lent, 1559. Oil on panel. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.  95 48 Frans Hogenberg, The Battle Between Carnival and Lent, 1558. Etching. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.  96 49 Pieter Bruegel, The Battle Between Carnival and Lent, 1559, detail. Oil on panel. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.  98 50 Philips Galle, after Pieter Bruegel, Charity (Charitas), from the series The Virtues, 1559. Engraving. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.  98 51 Sixteenth-century Netherlandish School, after Hieronymus Bosch, Singers of Bacchus, ca. 1560. Engraving. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.  100 52 Sixteenth-century Netherlandish School, after Maerten de Vos, The Egg Dance, ca. 1580. Engraving. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.  100 53 Pieter van der Heyden, after Pieter Bruegel, The Dirty Bride, 1570. Engraving. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.  102 54 Pieter Bruegel, The Wine of Saint Martin’s Day, ca. 1566. Glue-size tempera on linen. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.  104

55 Infrared photograph of a detail from Pieter Bruegel, Peasant Wedding, 1568. Oil on panel. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.  105 56 Pieter Bruegel, Peasant Dance, 1568. Oil on panel. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.  108 57 Abraham Ortelius, Arx Britannica (Map of Brittenburg), ca. 1567– 68, detail. Engraving. British Library, London.  109 58 Sixteenth-century Netherlandish School, after Maarten van Heemskerck, Cardinal Andrea della Valle’s Collection of Antiquities, 1553. Engraving. Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.  110 59 After Pieter Bruegel, The Fall of Icarus, ca. 1580 –1600. Oil on canvas. Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels.  116 60 Pieter Bruegel, The Calumny of Apelles, 1565. Pen and brown ink with brown wash on paper. British Museum, London.  119 61 Philips Galle, after Pieter Bruegel, Temperance (Temperantia), from the series The Virtues, ca. 1559 – 60. Engraving. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.  120 62 Philips Galle, after Pieter Bruegel, The Alchemist, after 1558. Engraving. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.  120 63 Giorgio Ghisi, after Luca Penni, The Calumny of Apelles, 1560. Engraving. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.  122 64 Lambert Lombard, The Calumny of Apelles, ca. 1560 – 66. Pen and ink over red chalk on paper. Galleria degli Uffizi, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe, Fondazione Horne, Florence.  122 65 Lambert Lombard print, after Hieronymus Bosch, Christ Carrying the Cross, ca. 1556 – 60. Engraving. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.  125 66 Pieter Bruegel, The Calumny of Apelles, 1565, detail. Pen and brown ink with brown wash on paper. British Museum, London.  125 67 Philips Galle, after Pieter Bruegel, The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, ca.

Illustrations ix

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1560 – 63. Engraving. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.  125 68 Lucas van Leyden, Hope, 1530. Engraving. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.  126 69 Enea Vico, after Parmigianino, Lucretia, ca. 1535– 67. Engraving. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.  126 70 Maarten van Heemskerck, Samson, from the series Twelve Strong Men, ca. 1550 – 60. Oil on panel. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.  132 71 Pieter Bruegel, The Three Soldiers, 1568. Oil on panel. The Frick Collection, New York.  133 72 Albrecht Dürer, The Death of the Virgin, from the series The Life of the Virgin, 1510. Woodcut. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.  134 73 Pieter Bruegel, The Death of the Virgin, 1564. Oil on panel. Upton House, Banbury, England.  135

75 Marcantonio Raimondi, after Marco Dente, after Raphael, Virgin and Child with the Archangel Michael, Tobias, and Saint Jerome, ca. 1520 –50. Engraving. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.  137 76 Pieter Bruegel, The Peasant and the Nest Robber, 1568. Oil on panel. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.  138 77 Giorgio Ghisi, after Michelangelo, The Eritrean Sibyl, ca. early 1570s, detail. Engraving. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.  139 78 Pieter Bruegel, The Damned, ca. 1562. Pen and brown ink, black chalk on paper. Musée de Louvre, Paris.  141 79 Claes Jansz. Visscher, title page from Regiunculae et Villae aliquot Ducatus Brabantiae, 1612. Etching. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.  147 80 Pieter Bruegel, The Magpie on the Gallows, 1568. Oil on panel. Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt.  150

74 Pieter Bruegel, Christ and the Adulteress, 1565. Oil on panel. The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London.  136

Illustrations x

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Acknowledgments

This book began, as I am sure many do, in a failed essay. The paper was for a graduate seminar on Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel and I wrote on Bruegel’s Peasant Dance (fig. 56) and the doll-like figure of the child at lower left. I wanted to describe the way the artist hinted at both an individual and a broader cultural history through material details, like the girl’s hand-me-down clothes, but the result was less than satisfactory. A decade after that short essay, I owe many individuals and institutions thanks for the help and support that made this volume possible. First, I would like to thank Joseph Koerner, who convened the seminar at University College London that got me thinking about Bruegel and found the time and patience to advise my work at the Courtauld Institute of Art. I am quite sure that I didn’t really know what I was working on for at least a year, but Joseph was a generous reader whose suggestions and questions always provoked and inspired. At the Courtauld, I received travel grants and language-training funds, and I was being supported by an Overseas Research Student Award. I also received grants from the Newby Trust and the Sir Richard Stapley Educational Trust in the UK, as well as the Walter Read Hovey Memorial Fund Award from the Pittsburgh Foundation. The University of London Central Research Fund subsidized an extended trip to various cities in Germany and to Prague. Finally, a paid Visiting Fellowship at Harvard University in 2007– 8 came at a crucial juncture in the project and allowed me to begin writing. My time in London was immeasurably enriched by the fellowship of friends and colleagues. Among my cohort at the Courtauld, I must particularly thank Jim Harris, Charlotte de Mille, Tom Nickson, and Sarah Turner. I benefited from discussions with Professors Joanna Woodall and Susie Nash, as well as the other members of the Renaissance and Early Modern sections at the institute. The Courtauld’s collaborative ventures, like the Research Forum’s Writing Art History Group and the Graphic Arts Group, both led by Pat Rubin, acted as important sounding boards for crucial ideas and tangential musings. I also had the privilege to work as a print room assistant at

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Acknowledgments

the Courtauld Gallery for three years under Stephanie Buck, who taught me how to look closely and gave me the opportunity to work on another daunting artist. In London, the manuscript benefited from a critical reading by Charles Ford and Jeanne Nuechterlein, and many of their questions prompted the revisions that followed. Portions of chapters 2 and 3 were first published as “Rural Memory, Pagan Idolatry: Pieter Bruegel’s Peasant Shrines,” Art History 34, no. 3 (June 2011), and “Producing the Vernacular: Antwerp, Cultural Archaeology, and the Bruegelian Peasant,” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 3, no. 1 (January 2011). They are reprinted in expanded form here with the permission of the Association of Art Historians and the Historians of Netherlandish Art. For their assistance and encouragement during the publication process for these two articles, I would like to thank Sam Bibby and Alison Kettering, respectively. Both articles grew out of conference papers, the first delivered at a session chaired by Elizabeth Honig and Ann Jensen Adams at the 2007 College Art Association conference, the latter at a session of the 2010 Historians of Netherlandish Art meeting convened by Ethan Matt Kavaler and Todd Richardson. In both cases, comments from the audience were of immense help in clarifying my own ideas. For talking to me about Bruegel at various points over the past ten years, I would like to thank Odilia Bonebakker, Douglas Brine, David Freedberg, George Gorse, Theo Hermans, Bertram Kaschek, Keith Moxey, Yemi Onafuwa, Larry Silver, and Christopher Wood, as well as audiences at the Courtauld, Columbia University, the Frick Collection, and Pomona College. I owe a particular debt to Nicole Blackwood, who was with me on my first trip to Antwerp, held my hand (literally and figuratively) throughout the initial research process, fed me in Boston, and read several drafts of the manuscript—not only a dear friend but someone who has helped me think in different ways, a true gift. The book in its current form was drafted while I was a Mellon Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Columbia University. I must thank the other fellows—Marisa Bass, Frédérique Baumgartner, Rebekah Compton, Chanchal Dedlani, Sarah Guérin, Prudence Peiffer, Jeffrey Saletnik, and Robert Schindler—for the privilege of their company and their advice on work and life. We will always have Joe’s. I finished the manuscript after joining the Newcomb Art Department at Tulane University, where I have found a warm home. My thanks to Mia Bagneris, Elizabeth Boone, Anne Dunlop, Holly Flora, Michele Foa, and Michael Plante for welcoming me into the department and helping me learn to navigate New Orleans. The dean’s office of the School of Liberal Arts generously supported the acquisition of images for the book, as did the Newcomb Art Department. This publication was made possible by a generous grant from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund of the College Art Association, a fellowship grant from the Historians of Netherlandish Art, and a Renaissance Society of America–Kress publication grant. I would like to thank Ellie Goodman and Charlee Redman at Penn State

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University Press for shepherding this project through the revision process and for their enthusiastic support. I am further indebted to Suzanne Wolk for her careful editing of the text. To Elizabeth Honig and the other reviewer of the manuscript, who remained anonymous, I owe a profound debt of gratitude for their incredibly generous and considered reading of the text. It is a much better book for their efforts, for which I am truly thankful. I lived in six cities in three countries while working on this project, and gave birth to two lovely daughters in the interim. This book could never have been finished without the support of Phil Young, who, besides always carrying the heavy stuff, is my home. Thank you for being an amazing partner and parent to our girls. I am also grateful for my wonderful family. I particularly want to thank my parents, Rene Piña and Larry Porras, as well as my grandparents, César and Marilyn Piña and Luis and Ruth Porras, who have always supported my education and, more important, have provided me with examples of how to live and work well. It is fitting that two of my fellow students in the graduate seminar where this project began would help to see it through to its present form. And so my final thanks to Gina Glazcock-Broze, who handled the acquisition of image permissions and the wrangling of captions, and to Nathaniel Prottas, who kindly read several drafts of the manuscript.

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int ro d u c t i o n

Peasants and Pagans

The English word pagan describes either a follower of no religion or an individual of polytheistic faith. The word itself has an intriguing etymology. Like the French païn, it is derived from the Latin paganus, or peasant. The religious significance of paganus, preserved in the modern English and French derivations, is believed to have arisen from the conservative rural adherence to the old gods after the Christianization of Roman towns and cities. Paganus thus came to distinguish between believers and heathens, urban and rural, military and civilian populations.1 One of the first early modern multilingual dictionaries, Christopher Plantin’s 1562 Latin-Greek-French-Dutch Dictionarium Tetraglotton, draws on these implicit distinctions in its translation of paganus as the French villageois and paysant, as well as the Dutch dorpman or boer.2 Thus translated, paganus is the word for rustic, farmer, or peasant.

But Plantin’s dictionary also alludes to the modern usage of the word pa-

gan. The entry preceding paganus in the dictionary is paganalia, a word that in the sixteenth century was freighted with religious significance and particularly associated with pre-Christian worship. Paganalia is translated as fêtes de villages, boeren feeste, and dorpfeesten (village or peasant festival). The contemporary

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Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

peasant festival is thus laden with a frisson of the idolatrous past. Plantin’s definition of paganus collapses the temporal distinction between classical antiquity and the vernacular present. The country farmer at the fringes of the Roman Empire becomes the sixteenth-century Dutch peasant, similarly removed from an early modern Netherlandish culture renowned for its cities. In both cases, the paganus is symbolically left behind in a changing world. But what facilitated Plantin’s translation of the antique heathen into the form of the local peasant? Moving between paganus and peasant (boer) is a linguistic and social as well as a temporal shift. Historical imagination—the reconstruction of the past but also the active creation of tradition—underpins such a translation. Coined by the English philosopher Owen Barfield, historical imagination describes the processes by which the past is re-created in the mind of the historian.3 This book investigates how the early modern historical imagination enabled the sixteenth-century Netherlandish peasant to become an embodiment of pagan antiquity. Focusing on the works of one of the period’s great artists, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, I explore the fluid and flexible approach to the picturing of local history in Bruegel’s age. Today, Bruegel is rarely recognized as an artist concerned with history or the historical imagination. Instead, he is best known as a Renaissance artist of the everyday world, the painter of Dutch proverbs (Netherlandish Proverbs, fig. 1), of Children’s Games (fig. 3), and of the contemporary Netherlandish peasant at work and at play, as in the iconic Hunters in the Snow (fig. 2). Although Bruegel designed numerous religious images, landscapes, and scenes evocative of his predecessor Hieronymus Bosch (fig. 4), Bruegel’s current art-historical identity is equated predominately with his peasant pictures. The word paganus, then, accurately describes the subjects of Bruegel’s most enduring and debated images. In this volume I argue that Bruegel’s famous peasant pictures and Boschian nightmares, his scenes of biblical history, landscapes, and proverbs, and his skillful manipulation of various painting styles uniquely represent the multifaceted concept of history as understood in the sixteenth-century Low Countries. This shifting notion of history is evoked in the definition of paganus offered by Plantin’s dictionary, and I situate Bruegel’s work within a diverse network of artists, publishers, historians, geographers, politically motivated nobles, and socially ambitious merchants, who were all involved in the early modern imagining of Netherlandish history. This book seeks to reclaim Bruegel as an artist of the sixteenth-century historical imagination, embodying the Janus-faced character of Renaissance Europe: obsessed simultaneously with the past and with an uncertain future. Though centered on Bruegel, this book proposes a broader reassessment of Renaissance attitudes toward history and traces the emergence of archeological and anthropological practices in historical thinking, as well as their intersections with artistic production. The mining of classical texts, the foundation of archaeology, the study of custom, and an

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emerging conception of local art history were all part of reconstructing the past in the Low Countries. This book therefore is aimed not only at art historians interested in Bruegel but also at early modern historians, scholars of literature and historiography interested in the formation of Netherlandish historical identity in the sixteenth century and in competing Renaissance notions of history more generally. I began with the definition of paganus because I believe that it points to an untapped understanding of Bruegel’s work and of early modern historical thinking. The space between the paganus and the boer, Latin and Dutch, classical antiquity and the everyday world of the sixteenth-century Low Countries, is exactly where art historians have grappled with Bruegel’s works. How do we reconcile Bruegel’s famous peasant subjects with the great humanist and geographer Abraham Ortelius’s praise of Bruegel as being like the ancient Greek painter Apelles? Paganus naturalizes this surprising comparison by articulating the tension between past and present, local

Fig. 1 Pieter Bruegel, Netherlandish Proverbs, 1559. Oil on panel. Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Photo: bpk, Berlin / Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Jörg P. Anders / Art Resource, New York.

Introduction 3

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Fig. 2 Pieter Bruegel, Hunters in the Snow, from the series The Months, 1565. Oil on panel. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York.

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

and universal, that many scholars of Renaissance culture see as emblematic of early modern thought. Traditionally, art-historical writing on Bruegel attempts to fit the artist into one of two dominant narratives: Bruegel is either a social satirist, presenting images of the peasantry in service of a traditional cautionary moral, or Bruegel is a proto-ethnographer, recording peasant culture for a newly emergent urban audience that enjoyed visiting rural festivals. More recently, scholars have sought the middle ground, stressing Bruegel’s role as both traditionalist and innovator.4 In light of this recent work, I argue that Bruegel navigated a shifting terrain in aligning classical antiquity and vernacular tradition, forging a unique vision of the Netherlandish past while also recording the anxieties of the contemporary moment. In his famous peasant scenes, his images of biblical and classical narratives, and his innovative deployment of various stylistic modes, Bruegel confronted history—the pagan past, local custom, and

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the artist’s own representational heritage. In doing so, Bruegel presented an image of how people in the sixteenth-century Low Countries saw their own antiquity and modern rebirth, their own “Renaissance.”

Defining Antiquity Before discussing Bruegel’s interest in history, it is first necessary to recognize what antiquity meant in the Low Countries of the 1550s and ’60s. Sixteenth-century Europeans were obsessed with the search for origins. Renaissance humanism is usually associated with the revival of classical learning, the translation of ancient texts and civic forms, and an attempt to place the civilizations of Greece and Rome at the foundations of European culture. In the popular imagination, the Renaissance is particularly identified with Italy and with the revival of classical style in art and literature.

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Fig. 3 Pieter Bruegel, Children’s Games, 1560. Oil on panel. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York.

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Fig. 4 Pieter van der Heyden, after Pieter Bruegel, Big Fish Eat Little Fish, 1557. Engraving, first state of four, published by Hieronymus Cock. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1917. Photo: www.metmuseum.org.

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

But classicism was not the only aesthetic language used to evoke the antique past. The Renaissance interest in antiquity was everywhere experienced as a local phenomenon, and each locality had its own particular genealogies to explore, in conjunction or in competition with ancient Greece and Rome. Elizabeth Honig has called these local Renaissances multilingual, capable of using multiple styles and historical referents concurrently, all in the service of the revival of “antiquity.”5 The import of classical ideas thus coincided with the search for a vernacular, that is, indigenous, identity. In northern Europe there were fewer standing monuments of classical antiquity than in Italy and southern Europe; thus the region had a less manifest claim to directly resurrect the Greek or Roman past of their ancestors. Local history therefore became a crucial supplement to northern notions of antiquity and cultural identity. Recognizing this hybrid nature of northern humanism nearly fifty years ago, Jean Seznec, in his seminal work The Survival of the Pagan Gods, wrote that in the North the cultural reintegration of the pagan gods was supplemented by “something of their own blood and soil.”6 Seznec recognized the hybrid alterity of the Renaissance outside Italy, where antiquity was understood as intimately connected to local tradition. Acknowledging the diversity of Renaissance “antiquities,” I use the term antiquity to refer to both classical (Greek and Roman) cultures of the pagan past and those distinctly Netherlandish historical traditions and customs seen by Bruegel’s contemporaries as

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comparably ancient. In contrast to my use of the term antiquity, which can be understood as both local and foreign, I use the word classical specifically to demarcate subject matter drawn from the ancient cultures of Greece and Rome, as opposed to local or vernacular conceptions of antiquity. With these terms I seek to replicate the multiple ways in which Bruegel and his contemporaries imagined their own history. By the mid-sixteenth century, the search for local cultural origins was well under way in the Low Countries, not in competition with classical scholarship but as its complement. Antiquarians and geographers like Abraham Ortelius were interested in the history and culture of Greece and Rome, as well as in local Netherlandish history, geography, and customs.7 In 1552, Ortelius published his first map, an illustration of Brittenburg (fig. 6), the ruins of a Roman fort off the coast of Katwijk, near Leiden. The fort was believed to mark the bounds of the classical Roman Empire, but, crucially, these ruins were not seen as the vestiges of a conquering antique civilization. Instead, material found at the site fed the contemporary belief that the historical people of the Low Countries had been trading partners, even allies, of the Romans. These antique Netherlanders, the Batavians, were mentioned in Tacitus’s first-century Germania and had been the subject of historical writing and mythologizing since the start of the sixteenth century.8 As I argue in subsequent chapters, Brittenburg was a symbolic locus at the intersection of local and classical history in the Low Countries. The rise of archaeological interest in sites like this, increasing etymological and philological research into the origins of Netherlandish place-names, and the publication of works on Dutch language and customs were all part of a search for local origins and an emerging sense of Netherlandish cultural history. Given the limited textual references to the Batavians in surviving classical sources and the local scarcity of antique archaeological survivals, it was necessary for Netherlandish historians to look elsewhere for an account of their past. Peasant culture and local tradition were mined for their historical value, as living remnants of the past. Costume, vernacular architecture, and peasant custom were all increasingly described as historic. The Netherlandish search for origins thus encompassed classical antiquity, local history, and the articulation of a vernacular identity. Bruegel’s art both reflected and contributed to the creation of this hybrid past, or what I call here a vernacular antiquity. Bruegel not only depicted many of the customs of particular interest to historians and collectors of customs; he shared these authors’ and publishers’ concern with reproducing the material detail of these local traditions. He also deployed various artistic styles, returning again and again to techniques and iconographies historically valued in the Low Countries. On at least one occasion, in the drawing The Calumny of Apelles (fig. 60), Bruegel also directly confronted the artistic masters of classical antiquity. I argue in this book that Bruegel’s pictures, in what they depict and how they do so, exhibit a complex relationship to time and social context embedded in the creation of a Netherlandish historical identity.

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Bruegel’s Localities

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

But why were the Low Countries’ intellectuals, middle-class merchants, and artists so occupied with the past in the middle of the sixteenth century? One of the most compelling motivations was the fact that the region was at the forefront of social and economic change. The Low Countries, today encompassing Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, were one of the most heavily urbanized areas in Europe in the sixteenth century. Antwerp, the region’s economic and cultural capital, was home to a hundred thousand people of diverse nationalities: Germans of the Hanseatic League, Jews expelled from Iberia, English, French, and Italian merchants, and the administrators of Philip II’s ruling Habsburg government. As the premier North Sea port for western Europe, Antwerp was also a gateway to the ever-expanding globe, with ships arriving with timber from the Baltic, silver from the Spanish New World colonies, and beaver pelts from North America, as well as west African gold, Indian spices, and diamonds borne on Portuguese vessels from the Far East. Home to the main western European stock exchange, the port of Antwerp in the decades around 1550 is estimated to have brought seven times more revenue to the Spanish Crown than all the New World colonies combined.9 The tremendous rise of Antwerp and the Low Countries as an economic superpower directly affected the local landscape. Canals were dug to speed the supply of goods and materials between inland towns and the sea. Increasing demand for land necessitated large reclamation projects and the development of new ports, warehouses, and civic buildings. In the 1560s and ’70s, a new citadel and town hall were built for the city of Antwerp. Property developers like Gilbert van Schoonbeke embarked on ambitious real estate ventures and made a fortune in consolidating plots and constructing, marketing, and selling entirely new urban and suburban neighborhoods.10 Antwerp’s financial success enabled middle-class merchants and tradesmen to fund the physical transformation of the region as well as their own consumption of luxury goods, including the artworks produced by Bruegel. Paintings, sculpture, books, and prints filled not only the townhouses of Antwerp and Brussels but also the country estates that were increasingly popular among the well off. We know that Bruegel’s paintings hung in at least one of these spelhuizen, or suburban pleasure houses. In chapter 3, I investigate the multiple temporal and social resonances between Bruegel’s works and this new kind of social setting. The globalized economy underscored both the particularities and the contingencies of the Netherlandish experience while blurring the boundaries between global and local, town and country. Contact with foreign traders and lands helped to define local identity in contrast to the internationalism of the urban marketplace. But changes in global trade also produced shifts in socioeconomic reality and in the physical geography of the Low Countries, as the demands of industry contributed to fluctuations

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in the local prices of grain and fuel. At the same time, rural labor became increasingly tied to the urban economy, and suburban villas further complicated clear divisions between city and country. An appreciation of the expanding world and a rapidly altering local landscape compelled the writing of local histories, the collections of customs and songs, the systematization of the Dutch language in dictionaries like Plantin’s, and, as I argue in this book, the production of images like Bruegel’s. The transformation of the Low Countries’ geographic and economic landscape in the sixteenth century was accompanied by bouts of religious unrest and political dissatisfaction with the Spanish Habsburg government. Charles V, the Holy Roman emperor and king of Spain, who ruled the Low Countries from 1506, had faced down outbursts of Protestant fervor and political rebellion throughout his reign. But his son, Philip II, who inherited the Burgundian Netherlands in 1555, was not born and raised in the region, as Charles was. Philip spoke no Dutch and did not even visit the territories after 1559. At the same time, a Netherlandish or Dutch cultural identity was being proposed in verse, image, and song; the region’s history was being written and its language codified. For those dissatisfied with Habsburg centralizing policies on religious, tax, and governance issues, it was possible to draw upon a developing sense of “Dutchness” to articulate these grievances as foreign impositions. To this end, emerging Netherlandish histories could be mobilized as evidence of the region’s traditional autonomy. This is not to say that the simmering religious and political tensions that would erupt in the 1566 iconoclasm (Beeldenstorm) and the outbreak of full-scale revolt against the Spanish in 1572 were caused directly by publications like Plantin’s Dutch dictionaries or even Bruegel’s painted and printed images of the local peasantry. It was the wider climate of political and religious unrest, especially in the 1560s, that catalyzed the already burgeoning interest in Netherlandish identity as culturally distinct and historically valid. The Dutch revolt resulted in the establishment of the first postclassical republic in any major nation in Europe. The search for historical precedent was crucial for this new nation, without recourse to the powerful established symbol of a sitting monarch.11 Yet Bruegel died in 1569, just at the start of the Dutch revolt. Crucially, his work speaks of a period when Netherlandish history and identity remained in flux and were not yet tied to a specific political struggle. In one way, the sixteenth-century Netherlandish fascination with vernacular antiquity was a response to the rapid pace of local change. Bruegel and his contemporaries witnessed rural villages turn to new trades, religious unrest threaten established church traditions, and the very landscape transformed by industry and construction. The historical imagination of Bruegel’s age reflected these developments. The folklore historian Konrad Köstlin has hypothesized that the repeated invoking of the antiquity of native history is what allows modernity to be recognized as modern.12 In Köstlin’s view, an active local historical imagination is symptomatic of a desire to mark

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the contemporary moment as “modern,” in contrast to the imagined past. Likewise, Bruegel’s images of Netherlandish customs and rural life, evocative of local history, would have highlighted the temporal and/or social disjuncture between the artwork and its setting within a modern urban home or suburban villa. The economic, political, and religious uncertainties of Bruegel’s lifetime are thus reflected in the period’s historical imagination and the drive to distinguish the past from the present.

Historical Distance

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

The era in which Bruegel lived, in many ways, is one that is recognizable to us today. It was a world where increasing social tensions between urban and rural populations and different religious beliefs could suddenly escalate into acts of seemingly unpredictable social violence such as the iconoclastic riots of 1566. The destructive violence of this iconoclasm sparked condemnation as well as social and cultural introspection, a familiar response to those familiar with twenty-first-century riots or acts of domestic terrorism. The global economy of the sixteenth century affected the ways in which people conceived of local identity and nostalgically evoked an imagined past. Again, this resonates in today’s world, where urban residents often fetishize traditionally crafted goods and locally grown food. Popular film and television period dramas allow viewers to enjoy an image of the past available only to a knowing present; I argue that Bruegel’s pictures play a similar game, navigating the historical and social distance between then and now, us and them.13 For example, in his encyclopedic painting Children’s Games (fig. 3), Bruegel depicts a game of knucklebones, a popular game widely believed to have antique origins.14 Bruegel shows the game midaction, as played by two adolescent girls in a prominent position at lower left. In his 1518 Colloquies, Erasmus had described this very game, a form of dice played largely by children and women in the sixteenth century, as originating with the Roman occupying forces of the ancient Low Countries.15 A popular practice as pictured by Bruegel is granted historical perspective through an awareness of its supposedly antique origin. The game thus evinces the intertwining of classical and vernacular antiquity. Although I have selected a specific example of one game that Bruegel’s contemporaries believed had documented antique origins, the example can be extended to the entire panel; sixteenth-century viewers could demonstrate their own knowledge by describing multiple games’ antique origins.16 However, the temporal and historical implications of Children’s Games are clear even without the invocation of Latin and Greek sources. Bruegel’s contemporaries debated the best way to educate children and the role of play, as mid-sixteenth-century Antwerp was home to many new educational institutions.17 While some of Bruegel’s games are clearly aimed at preparing children for their adult lives (such as the mock

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wedding and the girls playing with dolls), other activities are less obviously aimed at fostering future social skills. Yet even these “pointless” games grant the picture a historical dimension. Tumbling and wrestling, pastimes that require few props or toys, were understood as timeless; sixteenth-century historians described children of antique civilizations engaging in similar sports.18 Bruegel’s panel allows viewers to recognize pastimes from their own childhood. The delight in the picture, even today, lies in recognizing familiar activities, games that appear to have always been played. The power of Bruegel’s images is such that modern visitors to the famous Bruegel gallery of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (home to the largest collection of surviving paintings by the artist) immediately become absorbed in the recognition of details: the boy on the hobby horse in Children’s Games or the toddler cushioned in pillows in the right foreground of The Gloomy Day (fig. 41). Some of Bruegel’s faces find echoes in our own surroundings, but others are like caricatures in their distorted reality. Bruegel’s gift lay in combining the transcription of quotidian realities with an inventive artistry all his own. See, for example, the contrast between the group of minute figures curling on the background ice pond in Hunters in the Snow (fig. 2), the scene’s fantastic landscape setting, and the syncopative rhythm of the hunters’ black silhouettes on the snow in the foreground. The reaction of twenty-first-century gallery-goers to Bruegel’s art strikes at the heart of what I believe is the originary function of Bruegel’s pictures: they were meant to be discussed and enjoyed. This book’s aim is to reclaim a crucial aspect of that conversation, an understanding of these images as meditations on a shared history. That these pictures speak about the past as well as the moment of their creation has been overlooked in part because Bruegel succeeds in making them so present to us today. Erwin Panofsky famously described the Renaissance (“rebirth,” or rinascita in the Italian of Giorgio Vasari’s foundational account of the history of art) as the first period that “looked upon classical Antiquity from a historical distance; therefore, for the first time, as upon an ideal to be longed for instead of a reality to be both utilized and feared.”19 The turn to the classical past as the source of a self-styled modernity results in the folding of time, a temporal juxtaposition of past, present, and future. Recently, Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood have offered a compelling reappraisal of Panofsky’s description of Renaissance historical distance, discussing the complex ways in which artists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, both north and south of the Alps, sustained an ongoing dialogue on the temporality of the image.20 Gerhard Wolf has suggested that there are in fact multiple models of historical memory at work in the early modern period, responding to diverse local stimuli.21 This book seeks to ground the more fluid notion of Renaissance time and historicity posited by Nagel and Wood within a specific cultural context (the Low Countries of the 1550s and ’60s), focusing on the work of Bruegel, one of the most original and well-studied artists of the sixteenth century. While I use Nagel and Wood’s exploration

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of the complex temporal status of the early modern image or object, I also discuss the perceived temporality of customs and traditions, as well as of artifacts. Unlike Nagel and Wood, I argue here for an understanding of history and the historical imagination as a fundamentally local construct, capable of simultaneously mobilizing multiple models for accessing the past—the study of textual and physical remnants (archaeological, philological, etymological) and custom as a historical source (including art’s own local traditions) and as lived history. Bruegel’s work offers a meditation on these multiple historical models and on the mediated nature of history itself. In its material detail, Bruegel’s art claims both to replicate lived experience and simultaneously to evoke an imagined Netherlandish past. The Low Countries of the artist’s lifetime offered multiple opportunities for a similar compression of time and space. For example, real peasants labored outside the many spelhuizen, or pleasure villas, while inside these structures, images of peasants embedded in an imagined past hung alongside scenes of mythical and biblical history.22 The bustling construction site of Antwerp offered another startling contrast between the historical vision of the Low Countries as an antique arcadia and the economic powerhouse of the present. In this book, I argue that Bruegel was an artist deeply aware of the power of art to represent the local historical imagination and the contemporary moment simultaneously, suggesting the collapse of both time and space.

“Who Is This New Hieronymus Bosch for the World?”

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

When Pieter Bruegel died in 1569, he left behind a wife and two young sons. Probably only in his midforties at the time of his death, Bruegel presumably also left an active workshop with drawings and paintings, both finished and unfinished works. Today, only about thirty-five paintings, approximately eighty drawings, and roughly sixty prints designed by the artist are known, depicting a diverse array of subjects, from panoramic landscapes to religious scenes, vernacular proverbs, and monumental peasant scenes.23 Tantalizingly few other biographical records have survived the intervening centuries: Bruegel’s 1551 registration in the Antwerp painter’s guild; a contract from the same year recording the artist’s minor role in a Mechelen commission; a record of his 1563 betrothal and later marriage in Brussels to Mayken Coecke, daughter of the painters Pieter Coecke van Aelst and Mayken Verhulst Bessemers; and finally the artist’s 1569 death and burial in the Brussels Kapellekerk.24 Given the paucity of archival material on Bruegel, art historians have relied upon three foundational accounts of Bruegel’s life and work written within thirty years of the artist’s death, in order to come to terms with his extraordinary oeuvre. These earliest commentators on Bruegel’s art—Domenicus Lampsonius, Abraham Ortelius, and Karel van Mander—praised it as rooted in a particular locality and representational

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history; but each author also makes a claim for Bruegel’s universal appeal within an emerging history of art. These early texts on Bruegel, written in both Latin and Dutch, demonstrate the complex and interwoven relationship between local and classical history, presenting the artist as reflecting an emerging vernacular antiquity. One of the first to evaluate Bruegel’s work critically was the poet and artist Dominic Lampson, who latinized his name to Lampsonius and collaborated with the primary publisher of Bruegel’s prints, Hieronymus Cock, on the 1572 Pictorum aliquot celebrium Germaniae inferioris effigies (Effigies of Some Celebrated Painters of Lower Germany), a series of artist’s portraits with accompanying neo-Latin verse. Although published by Cock’s widow, Volcxken Diericx, Cock and Lampsonius probably conceived of the series before Cock’s death in 1570. Below Bruegel’s portrait (fig. 5), Lampsonius’s verse reads: To Pieter Bruegel, painter. Who is this new Hieronymus Bosch for the world, versed in imitating the master’s ingenious dreams with such great skill of paintbrush and pen—so that sometimes he surpasses even him. Pieter, [you are] blessed in your spirit, as you are blessed in your skill, for in your own and your old master’s comic type of painting, full of wit, you deserve glorious rewards of praise, everywhere and from everyone, no less than those of any artist.25

As in many of the other portrait verses, Lampsonius characterizes Bruegel’s art as emulative of an earlier Netherlandish painter, in this case, Bosch.26 Such master and apprentice pairings stress the importance of the local art-historical inheritance, while allowing for multiple pathways through the twenty-three portraits in the series. Bruegel is depicted here in profile, his eyes directed upward. His portrait and that of Quentin Massys, often referred to as the founder of the Antwerp school of painting, are the only ones that show the artist in strict profile, underscoring Bruegel’s importance within the series and recalling the portrait format of classical coins and medals. Bruegel’s poem is also one of only three texts (the poems on Bosch and Joachim Patinir are the other two) composed of two columns, creating another parallel between Bruegel and foundational artists of the previous generation. It is unclear whether the portrait and the verse were composed before Bruegel’s death or in response to it. In any case, the print was designed by someone who knew the artist well. Cock was Bruegel’s primary publisher, and the inclusion of the artist in this pictorial canon of Netherlandish art could have served as a vehicle of self-promotion for Cock’s Antwerp publishing firm, Aux Quatre Vents (The Four Winds). Lampsonius’s verse singles out Bruegel’s technical prowess as well as his skill in imitation and wit, characteristics that mark the artist for universal praise and admiration.

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Fig. 5 Johannes Wierix, Portrait of Pieter Bruegel, in Domenicus Lampsonius and Hieronymus Cock, Pictorum aliquot celebrium Germaniae inferioris effigies, 1595 (first edition 1572), plate 19. Engraving and letterpress. Davis Museum, Wellesley College, Gift of Mrs. Toivo Laminan (Margaret Chamberlin, Class of 1929). Photo: Davis Museum at Wellesley College / Art Resource, New York.

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

Another contemporary and friend of Bruegel’s, the antiquarian and geographer Abraham Ortelius, would return to the topos of imitation in his epitaph to Bruegel, while again stressing the artist’s singularity. Also written in Latin, Ortelius’s text was composed in several stages, possibly beginning as early as 1574, though probably after 1584.27 Ortelius writes, “That Pieter Bruegel was the supreme picturer of his time, no one—unless jealous, envious, or ignorant of his art— could deny. . . . It is said that the painter Eupompus, when asked which of his predecessors he imitated, gestured toward a crowd of men and said to imitate nature herself, not a particular artist. This thought is a fitting one for our Bruegel, of whose pictures are hardly works of art, but works of 28 nature.” Ortelius, like Lampsonius, knew his subject well. The epitaph’s opening, in which Ortelius blames death for jealously taking Bruegel in his prime, is a moving encomium to a departed friend. It was one of six poems written by Ortelius within his own Album amicorum, a manuscript otherwise filled with poems dedicated to Ortelius and written by his close friends, intended for circulation among a select group of artists and scholars in Antwerp. Here, Ortelius takes up the pen himself to praise a departed colleague and displays his own role as a devoted friend. Ortelius’s epitaph for Bruegel draws upon Pliny’s descriptions of the great masters of antiquity from the Historia naturalis, specifically, the Greek painters Apelles, Timanthes, and Eupompus. According to Pliny, Apelles represented the unrepresentable (e.g., ephemera like lightning) in his painting of the natural world, while Timanthes skillfully composed scenes to evoke that which he did not represent— or, as Ortelius elegantly writes of Bruegel’s works, “In all of his works there is always something more to understand beyond what is depicted.”29 Eupompus followed only nature but was also a renowned teacher and founder of a regional school of painting.30 Through his references to these artists, as Walter Melion has compelling argued, Ortelius cast Bruegel not only as the premier artist of his historical moment but as the key representative of a northern school of painting devoted to the imitation of nature.31 While Ortelius and Lampsonius situate Bruegel within an established artistic canon, neither author includes any biographical details about the artist. Lampsonius’s description of Bosch as Bruegel’s “old master” is part of his rhetorical strategy in the

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Effigies, which stresses the continuity between generations of Netherlandish painters. Bosch died before Bruegel was born and could hardly have been his actual teacher, though Bruegel did begin his career by emulating Bosch (see fig. 4). Karel van Mander offered the first biography of Bruegel in his 1604 Het Schilderboeck (The Painters’ Book); the text itself was probably written at the close of the sixteenth century. Van Mander was a young man living in West Flanders when Bruegel died, but he could have consulted the artist’s two surviving sons for information about their father. Written in Dutch, Van Mander’s biography was part of a multi-volume work aimed at artists and art lovers alike. Van Mander’s life of Bruegel also sketches the artist as the exemplar of a particularly Netherlandish mode of naturalism. Like Lampsonius’s and Ortelius’s earlier texts, Van Mander emphasizes Bruegel’s imitative capacity and his place in the pantheon of great northern artists, writing, “Nature found and struck lucky wonderfully well with her man— only to be struck by him in turn in a grand way—when she went to pick him out in Brabant in an obscure village amidst peasants, and stimulate him toward the art of painting so as to copy peasants with the brush: our lasting fame of the Netherlands, the very lively and whimsical Pieter Brueghel.”32 It is unlikely that Bruegel was born a peasant, but Van Mander conflates the artist with his well-known subjects here. This serves two purposes. First, it emphasizes Bruegel’s innate talent, mirroring a rhetorical strategy used in Giorgio Vasari’s earlier Italian Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects.33 Second, this opening rhetorical flourish—nature picked Bruegel out, just as an artist chooses a model—underscores his characterization of Bruegel as the consummate painter of nature, absorbing and representing the world around him. This is emphasized by another striking passage in Van Mander’s biography, where the author writes that Bruegel “swallowed all those mountains and rocks [of the Italian Alps] which, upon returning home, he spat out again onto canvases and panels.”34 Bruegel, according to Van Mander, similarly digested the appearance of the local peasantry by disguising himself as a peasant and attending peasant festivities. This anecdote, whatever its veracity, conveniently recalls a story told by Gian Paolo Lomazzo about Leonardo da Vinci’s artistic prowess in reproducing the visages of various guests at a banquet.35 While Lampsonius cited Bosch as Bruegel’s artistic master and Ortelius listed a bevy of comparable antique painters, Van Mander directly targeted a public familiar with Netherlandish artists, the masters of antiquity as well as figures of the Italian Renaissance, whose fame had been promoted by Vasari and others. Van Mander singles out Bruegel’s skillful ability to depict landscapes and figures in his biography of the artist and throughout Het Schilder-boeck in sections on landscape, how best to represent emotion, and the use of color.36 Ortelius had claimed that Bruegel reconciled the Aristotelean antipodes of ars (art or artifice) and natura (nature), making paintings that are “of nature.” Van Mander too emphasized Bruegel’s ability to transform the world around him into art, but instead of comparing Bruegel

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to artists of antiquity like Ortelius, he used metaphors of digestion and disguise to describe Bruegel’s naturalism. Like Lampsonius before him, Van Mander saw Bruegel’s praiseworthy artistry as both skillful and comic (bootsigh).37 Despite differences in language, purpose, and audience, Lampsonius’s, Ortelius’s, and Van Mander’s texts are remarkable in their commonalities. Key early documents on the critical reception of Bruegel’s art, all three characterize Bruegel’s work as uniquely skilled and distinctly localized in time and place. Lampsonius and Van Mander situate Bruegel within a newly emergent Netherlandish canon—beginning with Jan van Eyck and including Bosch, Patinir, and Massys. Bruegel’s particular skill for imitation merits his inclusion in this pantheon, just as imitation was itself becoming a central conceit in the definition of northern painting.38 Ortelius’s reference to Eupompus, the ancient founder of the Sicyon school of painting, operated in a similar fashion and placed Bruegel as the point of origin for later Netherlandish painters. In their divergences and similarities, then, these three texts play with the distinctions between high and low culture, as well as with Bruegel’s art-historical heritage as indebted to both vernacular and classical antiquity. Lampsonius, writing in neo-Latin about a “second Bosch,” embraces Bruegel as an indigenous artist. Ortelius, while stressing Bruegel’s similarity to the ancient masters, also calls him “the supreme picturer of his time.” Van Mander’s Dutch text describes the artist as a joker but also uses Bruegel’s work to illustrate the particular strengths of Netherlandish painting’s use of color, depiction of landscape, and representation of diverse emotional states. Shifting between Latin and Dutch, these texts transpose descriptions of classical, northern, and Italian artists onto Bruegel. These early responses to Bruegel’s work navigate the divide between vernacular and classical language and imagery in a manner analogous to our early encounter with paganus. These authors define Bruegel’s art by simultaneously evoking the classical past, locality, and history—the key ingredients of a vernacular antiquity.

Translation as Negotiation

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

Lampsonius, Ortelius, and Van Mander all attempt to find a balance between Bruegel’s art as tied to a specific time and place and its universal or historical value. The apparently unique characteristics of Bruegel’s art—his monumental peasants, variegated painting technique, remarkable landscapes, and fantastic devils—are likened to those of other artists, from antiquity onward. The evocative translation of paganus in Plantin’s dictionary discussed at the start of this chapter undertakes a similar temporal shift in its attempt to find symmetrical significance between languages. The metaphor of translation underpins this book’s methodology. As Joanna Woodall has pointed out, translation is a dynamic that allows one to escape the simple

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opposition between “classical” and “vernacular” traditions and to understand the movements between and across these concepts.39 Plantin’s translation of paganus, the juxtaposition of paganus, villageois, dorpman, boer, allows the reader to reconsider each word in its literal and symbolic connotations as well as the network of connections and deviations between the Latin, French, and Dutch words. Each formulation/definition is brought into dialogue with others, and it is left to the reader to negotiate this interchange between idioms, denotations, and connotations. Translation binds the Dutch boer to the multifaceted Latin paganus. In this volume, I discuss the ways in which Bruegel’s pictures mobilize multiple views or references to history in a related fashion, preserving the image’s interpretative fluidity. Translation is also a useful metaphor because in Bruegel’s lifetime the interchange between languages was continual. Antwerp, as commercial metropolis and publishing center, saw the publication of works in a number of modern European languages (Dutch, French, English, German, Italian, and Spanish) as well as in Latin and Greek, produced both for the international merchant population based in the city and for the export market. Authors like Lampson/Lampsonius and Jan van Gorp van der Beke (Becanus) latinized their names for international publication. Schooling in the Low Countries included some instruction in Latin as well as in modern tongues, in preparation for students’ future careers in trade.40 The ability to speak multiple languages was so prevalent in the Low Countries that Lodovico Guicciardini, an Italian based in Antwerp, included facility with language as part of his description of the ethnic character of Netherlanders, alongside their height, their expertise in maritime matters, and their loquaciousness.41 Yet the perpetual process of translation also contributed to a growing contemporary awareness of linguistic drift.42 The perils of translation meant that meaning could be lost, or significantly altered, in moving from one language to another. Languages themselves are not fixed, stable entities. Words and meanings change over time, as we have seen in our own discussion of pagan/paganus. Sixteenth-century translators, too, were conscious of language’s capacity for transformation. The first historical accounts of language appear in the middle of the sixteenth century.43 Indeed, during Bruegel’s lifetime the notion of what constituted a good translation was open to debate.44 Plantin’s multilingual Dictionarium Tetraglotton was designed to meet this demand for more effective translation, but it was not enough to stem anxieties about translation’s vulnerabilities. Umberto Eco has equated the role of the translator with that of the negotiator— to consult multiple parties and ultimately reach a settlement where “each party renounces something else and at the end everybody feels satisfied since one cannot have everything.”45 In the following chapters, I explore how Bruegel evokes the generative spirit of Bacchic festivity, emerging ideas about local history, cultural identity and social hierarchy, and Netherlandish art’s own history. These readings can

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Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

intersect and reinforce one another, but they can also clash within the confines of a single image, forcing the viewer to interrogate and choose from competing interpretative possibilities. Viewers of Bruegel’s works, like Eco’s translator, must negotiate meaning for themselves. For both commercial and pragmatic reasons (given the fraught religious and political circumstances of the period), Bruegel’s pictorial strategy was often deliberately ambiguous. But this does not mean that Bruegel’s images allow for any given interpretation; as Eco writes, we cannot have everything. In the chapters that follow, I argue that Bruegel pictures the act of translation—between the past and the present and between foreign and indigenous sources—as a continually negotiated process. To see Bruegel’s paintings and prints functioning solely as social satire or as an encapsulation of a particular theory of art misses how these pictures functioned in a culture recognizably modern in its concerns, yet also obsessed with the past. Here, another brief etymological detour is necessary. Translatio, the Latin root of the English translation, means to transfer, to carry over. In the religious context, the term was used to describe the physical transfer of holy relics from one location to another. Various attendant rituals heightened the symbolic power of this migration. By the sixteenth century, translatio encompassed not only the physical movement of artifacts but also linguistic exchange and broader cultural transfers, yet the word retained a sense of this transfer of power from one place to another. Translatio was itself a mobile concept, subject to local interpretative variants. In the context of the German Renaissance, for example, translatio functioned as a perceived sociopolitical continuity between the antique Roman polity and the contemporary Holy Roman Empire, as opposed to the re-creation of antiquity embodied in fifteenth-century Italian (particularly Florentine) culture.46 In chapter 1, I propose that the mid-sixteenth-century Netherlandish context for translatio was a place where contemporary social distinctions, as well as temporalities, clashed. Using Ortelius’s map of the ruins at Brittenburg as a guide, I explore the ways in which Bruegel’s contemporaries envisioned a vernacular antiquity. I focus on how sociocultural differences between urban and rural populations were constructed within a historical perspective and given a temporal dimension. Vernacular custom, particularly the local peasant culture pictured by Bruegel, was increasingly recognized as historical. Bruegel’s circle of acquaintances shared this interest, and the subjects of Bruegel’s pictures themselves reflect topoi of particular import in the local historical imagination: proverbs, weddings, rural costume, religious customs, and local festivals. In chapter 2, I turn to Bruegel’s paintings of traditional historia, specifically those narratives drawn from biblical history. I discuss how Bruegel depicts competing models of historical authority—archaeological survival and the material accrual of tradition—in The Flight into Egypt (fig. 22) and The Tower of Babel (fig. 30). I argue that Bruegel complicates Leon Battista Alberti’s famous conception of historia (historical drama or narrative) by using the methodology of Netherlandish historians and

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collectors of customs who looked to unwritten sources of communal authority— customs and costumes, oral traditions and songs—to complement their written histories. In Christ Carrying the Cross (fig. 34), Bruegel undermines any singular model for imagining the past, while also displaying his own ability to manipulate style as a marker of competing historical models. In his religious narratives, then, Bruegel displays the contingent nature of history’s construction. In chapter 3, I turn from the translatio of history to Bruegel’s fluid translation of Bacchic iconography. In Bruegel’s design for the engraving Summer (fig. 43), a peasant literally occupies the traditional foreground position of the wine god as representative deity of the autumn harvest. While the central figure drinks, a fellow laborer, wreathed like a bacchant, looks on. These Bacchic referents in his images of carnival, of the festive and laboring peasantry, are symptomatic of the integration of classical ideas in Netherlandish vernacular culture. By picturing the peasant as an avatar of local antiquity, Bruegel explores the temporal and cultural distance inherent in the figure of the paganus. Bruegel references antiquity in a visual idiom distinct from his contemporaries. His lumpy peasant bodies and assorted painterly surfaces produce a unique aesthetic. In chapter 4, I turn to the question of Bruegel’s deployment of various artistic styles and his own construction of local art history. As both Lampsonius and Van Mander noted in the decades after his death, Bruegel was an artist rooted in the Netherlandish painting tradition. But in his drawing The Calumny of Apelles (fig. 60) and his grisaille paintings, Bruegel demonstrates that he was an artist profoundly concerned with both the manipulation of local and imported historical styles and the broader history of art. Moving between the past and the present, myth and social reality, Bruegel’s images engaged with the fraught question of Netherlandish history in the years just prior to the Dutch Revolt, as imperial, religious, and national identities were increasingly drawn into tension. Bruegel’s unique pictorial style and his manipulation of traditional iconographies represent the complexity of the contemporary historical imagination and the shifting relations between classical antiquity, vernacular history, and art history particular to this moment. In arguing for Bruegel as an artist who represented the fluidity of the later sixteenth-century Netherlandish historical imagination, I follow Ortelius’s description of his departed friend as “the supreme picturer of his time.”

Introduction 19

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ch a p t er 1

The Archaeological Peasant

In 1520, a severe storm uncovered a large ruin on the outskirts of Katwijk aan Zee, a village on the coast near Leiden. Although there had long been speculation regarding the presence of a large burgh (castle) at the site, the scale of the find was astonishing. The receding sea exposed the foundations of a fourwalled stone structure, each wall measuring approximately seventy-two meters in length. Coins, tiles, and other items found nearby confirmed the building’s antiquity. Using these archaeological finds as evidence, the Dutch historian Cornelis Aurelius argued that the stones were the remains of a Roman frontier fort, used as a base for excursions to Britain.1 The Arx Britannica, or Brittenburg, as the ruins came to be known, resurfaced again in 1552 and 1562, along with further evidence of Roman occupation. Though the site is now covered by the North Sea, modern archaeologists have largely concurred with Aurelius’s hypothesis, pointing to the building’s strategic location along the border of Germania Inferior.2

By the middle of the sixteenth century, the ruins at Brittenburg were fa-

mous enough to merit inclusion in Sebastian Münster’s best-selling geography and history, the 1550 Cosmographiae universalis. Abraham Ortelius, Bruegel’s

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Fig. 6 Abraham Ortelius, Arx Britannica (Map of Brittenburg), ca. 1567– 68. Engraving. British Library, London. Photo © The British Library Board (Maps C.9.d.4).

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

eulogist and the antiquarian and geographer who would go on to produce the world’s first atlas, published the earliest known plan of the ruins (fig. 6) around 1567– 68.3 One of Ortelius’s first maps, the sheet is undated. Surviving letters between Ortelius, the esteemed numismatist Hubertus Goltzius, and the philologist Guido Laurinus indicate that Ortelius was working on a map of Brittenburg from as early as 1566. The three men were all passionate antiquarians and may have actively collaborated on the map’s publication.4 The resulting print shows a plan of the archaeological site inserted into a topographical view. Across the bottom edge of the print, Ortelius included snippets of text on the Batavians from Tacitus’s Germania and images of several items found at Brittenburg: stones bearing inscriptions and carvings as well as an intact roof tile from the antique structure. First issued as a separate sheet, the map would eventually be incorporated in the 1581 revised edition of Lodovico Guicciardini’s Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi (Description of All the Low Countries). Guicciardini’s book, first published in Antwerp in 1567, provided a history of the region, alongside geographical descriptions, surveying Netherlandish customs and reviewing local sights, industries, and trades. Guicciardini, an Italian merchant resident in Antwerp, produced three further editions of the text, originally published in Italian and French but translated into multiple languages before 1600.5 Prior to the inclusion of Ortelius’s map, in the 1567 edition of the Descrittione, Guicciardini recalled how local peasants had found stones

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inscribed “x. G.I.” (which he took to mean ex germaniae inferioris [of lower Germany]), as well as several coins, vases, and other antiquities near the site of the ruined fort.6 While the plan of Brittenburg, various archaeological finds, and textual excerpts form a two-dimensional screen across the image, Ortelius situates the fort itself within a receding landscape. Numerous laborers are at work: excavating, or perhaps removing stones from the site. These are most probably peasants, as sixteenth-century archaeological finds were often first discovered by rural people engaged in plowing fields and other agricultural tasks.7 While some blamed peasants for stealing or reusing antique stones and objects, it was often rural people who brought inscribed stones, medals, and other items to the attention of scholars and the wider public. The numismatist Guillaume du Choul, for example, relied on local agricultural workers to bring him antique coins to study.8 Guicciardini himself grudgingly acknowledged the local peasants’ role in uncovering the structure and procuring artifacts at Brittenburg.9 The figures at work in Ortelius’s print are clearly from a lower order than those figures advancing on foot and in coaches to look at the site— one laborer even doffs his hat to a pair of figures approaching the ruin. This social interaction across class lines recalls the dynamics of more familiar genre scenes, such as Pieter Aertsen’s Peasant Feast (fig. 7). In Aertsen’s picture, a well-dressed couple in the background at right stop to enjoy a peasant celebration; a man wearing a sword at his hip appears ready to join

Fig. 7 Pieter Aertsen, Peasant Feast, 1550. Oil on panel. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York.

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Fig. 8 Hieronymus Cock, View of Ruins, from the Praecipua aliquot Romanae antiquitatis ruinarum, 1551. Etching and engraving. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Phyllis Massar, 2011. Photo: www.metmuseum.org.

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

in a peasant dance. In Ortelius’s print, however, peasant and town dweller meet in the countryside for a purpose apparently removed from the pleasures of rustic festivity. These visitors have come to witness the recovery of a vernacular antiquity. Although local peasants first recognized and unearthed the remnants of Brittenburg, the visitors depicted by Ortelius are the ones who comprehend the importance of this archaeological find. Ortelius shows the ruin itself in a schematic perspective, with the result that the peasants dig and move stones around a twodimensional pictogram hovering awkwardly in a flattened perspectival space. While the peasants engage with the ruin at the level of the stones, the print’s viewer confronts a plan. It is the buyer of Ortelius’s print and the upper-class visitor to the site who must make sense of the archaeological discovery and build a history around the artifacts found but unrecognized by the peasant. This unusual map, with its strange juxtaposition of schematic plan, genre detail, and classical text, positions Brittenburg as a symbolic locus where local history, the peasant, and classical antiquity meet. Ortelius’s map sheds light on the complexity and fluidity of concepts like “antiquity” and the “vernacular” in the late sixteenthcentury Low Countries and beyond. In 1586, at the urging of his friend Ortelius, William Camden would publish a history of ancient Britain “to restore her antiquity to Britain and Britain to her antiquity.”10 Similarly, in the second half of the sixteenth century in France, there was a trend toward emphasizing the Gallic (as opposed to Roman) identity of French history, in contrast to the previous historical model, which had celebrated Caesar as the bringer of classical culture to Gaul.11

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This chapter provides an introduction to what I term “vernacular antiquity” as imagined by Bruegel’s Netherlandish contemporaries, encompassing the incipient field of archeology and the local consumption of classical texts, as well as a growing interest in the codification of the Dutch language (in printed dictionaries, songbooks, and proverb collections) and the collection of customs. First, I consider the role of ruins, both physical and textual, in the construction of Netherlandish history, and the related turn to vernacular language and custom as a supplement to such sparse remains. The overlapping interests of antiquarians and collectors of customs provide a new model for understanding the subjects and interpretative possibilities of Bruegel’s pictures, their descriptive intensity and temporal syncretism. I argue that recognizing the complexity of this imagined vernacular antiquity yields a new perspective on Bruegel’s art, which represents rural life as both temporally and socially removed from the world of his urban audience.

Ruins The symbolic power of the find at Brittenburg was particularly acute because of its exceptionality. Ruins, the physical manifestation of the antique past so omnipresent to inhabitants and visitors of sixteenth-century Rome, were relatively rare in the Low Countries. In 1502, Aurelius had found a stone near Leiden bearing an abbreviated inscription, which he expanded to read “Gens Batavorum amici et fratres Romani imperii” (The Batavian people, friends and brothers of the Roman Empire), a quotation from Tacitus’s Germania referring to the pagan peoples of the Low Countries. Approximately fifteen years later, Philip of Burgundy acquired a stone fragment inscribed with a dedication to Hercules Magusanus that had been found in Zeeland.12 While antique coins, small inscribed stones, and statues did turn up with some regularity in the Low Countries, the sheer scale of the Brittenburg find was astonishing and unprecedented. Brittenburg’s two reappearances from the sea around the middle of the century coincided with the contemporary vogue for collecting printed images of ruins. In 1551, Hieronymus Cock published Praecipua aliquot Romanae antiquitatis ruinarum (fig. 8), a series of etchings based on drawings of Roman ruins possibly made during the Antwerp publisher’s sojourn to Rome. The series proved so successful that Cock published another series of ruins, the Operum antiquorum Romanorum, in 1562, the very year Brittenburg resurfaced for the third and final time. The monumental edifices of Rome, captured by Cock’s prints, embodied the physical survival of classical antiquity. Brittenburg offered the potential for a local equivalent. Cock and Ortelius thus shared a target audience represented in Ortelius’s map: antiquarian-minded townspeople who traveled by foot and by coach to see the physical remnants of the local antique

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Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

past. Unlike the ruins of Rome, however, Brittenburg was contextually unmoored. Little written tradition bound the site to a larger narrative of Netherlandish antiquity, great rulers, or battles. The history of the Low Countries in the classical period, prior to the discovery at Brittenburg, was known primarily through sparse textual records. As noted in the introduction, Tacitus’s first-century Germania called the tribes of the northern Rhine the Batavians.13 Earlier, Julius Caesar and Strabo christened the region Belgica.14 Popular myths and legends abounded concerning the origins of the earliest Netherlandish people: the fifteenth-century Burgundian dukes had traced their ancestry back to the heroes of Troy; the Roman soldier Silvius Brabo’s slaying of the giant Druon Antigoon was said to account for the foundation of the duchy of Brabant. Aurelius, who later identified Brittenburg as a Roman fort, wrote the first comprehensive history of the Low Countries, Die cronycke van Hollandt, in 1517. Aurelius was the first Netherlandish historian to use archaeological findings, along with classical textual sources such as Tacitus and Caesar and traditional narratives, as evidence.15 Aurelius’s methodological innovations inspired other Netherlandish historians to turn to local ruins in an attempt to fix them successfully in an antique past. Gerard Geldenhauer used inscriptions found on the Carolingian Valkhof not only as evidence of the Batavian presence at Nijmegen (Latin, Noviomagus) but also as a confirmation of the Batavian people’s friendship with the Roman Empire.16 The Valkhof was a palimpsest of local history, as the original Roman walls and stones had been reused and the structure rebuilt by successive generations. Geldenhauer knew the complex medieval history of the city, yet he saw the surviving inscription as an unproblematic link between the contemporary moment and antiquity. Ruins belong simultaneously to the present and the past, as they are used to create new histories.17 In the German context, Christopher Wood has discussed how even demonstrably contemporary artifacts, objects we would now call forgeries or replicas, were still embraced for their historical value in the early modern period.18 In many cases, the claimed link to the past superseded the object’s actual physical age. The distinctions between antique, medieval, and more recent archaeological remains were not clearly defined in the sixteenth-century Low Countries. The authenticity of the stone that Aurelius found in 1502, for example, which he claimed affirmed the ancient friendship between Batavians and Romans, was questioned later in the century by some antiquarians who felt that it was not a Roman object. The same stone, however, was used as unproblematic evidence as late as 1610, in Hugo Grotius’s De antiquitate reipublicae Batavae.19 Bruegel lived more than a generation after the publication of Aurelius’s and Geldenhauer’s early histories, but in the 1550s and ’60s there was a resurgent interest in Netherlandish antiquity, probably inspired by the reemergence of the ruins at Brittenburg. For example, Hadrianus Junius, a Haarlem-based physician and

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historian, spent the 1560s writing his Batavia, based on Tacitus’s short description in the Germania. Junius, like Ortelius, knew Bruegel, or at least shared a circle of acquaintance with him, as he provided an inscription for the artist’s 1565 engraving The Parable of the Good Shepherd. In his own writings, Junius critiqued the unquestioning repetition of traditional legends as historical evidence, such as the story of the giant Druon Antigoon’s foundation of Brabant. Junius’s Batavia devoted numerous pages to the description of archaeological finds from Brittenburg.20 Like Junius’s history, Ortelius’s map of Brittenburg presents both textual and archaeological evidence as proof of the site’s antiquity. These diverse pieces of evidence include excerpts from Tacitus’s Germania, Roman roof tiles and coins, and the striking angular geometry of the fort’s ground plan. Ortelius’s map assembles these ruins in order to imagine what a local antiquity looked like. But Brittenburg was a one-off. Once it returned to the sea in 1562, the later sixteenth century saw no further significant archaeological finds as prominent in the local historical imagination. Ortelius’s map attests to the popularity of the site and the contemporary thirst for knowledge about local history, a desire that could not be slaked by the rare discovery of Netherlandish ruins. Philology, like archaeology, allowed for the recovery of the past through the analysis of ruins, in this case textual rather than material fragments. Brittenburg’s newfound prominence led to further questions about Netherlandish antiquity, questions that neither the scant references in classical texts nor the few objects divulged by the earth could answer. Given the paucity of material and textual ruins from antiquity in the Low Countries, historians and antiquarians, including Ortelius himself, increasingly looked to the vernacular—to Dutch language, songs, proverbs, costume, and customs—to picture this local antiquity. In the mid-sixteenth century, when throngs of visitors traveled to see the ruins at Brittenburg, Guicciardini borrowed Caesar’s antique descriptions of the Netherlandish people for his own contemporary chorography, and middle-class urban households sang songs from the fair at Hoboken. These apparently unrelated phenomena can all be connected to growing interest in the historicity of local culture. It was also at precisely this moment that Bruegel became known for images of peasant weddings, kermises (church festivals), children’s games, and carnival, along with his numerous landscapes and religious pictures. Bruegel’s particular iconographic innovations and market success in these decades signal the ways in which his pictures parallel and intersect with the contemporary production of a vernacular antiquity.

Defining the Vernacular In the most direct sense, the word vernacular (from the Latin vernaculus, meaning domestic or native) is taken in English to mean local language or idiom. Plantin’s

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Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

Dictionarium Tetraglotton, discussed in the introduction to this book, was one volume in a rising tide of multilingual Dutch dictionaries and grammars.21 These texts, aimed at easing the process of translation, also produced a more systematized and uniform Dutch vernacular. The inclusion of Dutch alongside Latin, Greek, and other vernacular tongues in works like the Dictionarium Tetraglotton helped raise the scholastic profile of the Netherlandish language. Cornelis van Ghistele, the Dutch rhetorician (rederijker) and humanist, had lamented in the preface to his 1556 Dutch translation of the Aeneid, “many an artful mind is frightened and recoils from translating anything into our Dutch language.”22 From the mid-sixteenth century onward, numerous Dutch translations of classical works appeared, including translations of Ovid’s Heroides and Metamorphoses, Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Terence’s Comedies, and Horace’s Satires.23 These works were aimed squarely at the educated urban populace of the Low Countries, whose knowledge of Latin may have been quite limited. In Antwerp, the sixteenth-century boom in so-called free schools, where the vernacular (Dutch and/or French) was the operating language, meant that Latin instruction was often limited to psalms and prayers.24 Merchants in the global entrepôt of Antwerp preferred these new schools’ curricular emphasis on bookkeeping and modern languages to the older church schools’ traditional Latin instruction, as better preparation for careers in trade. The turn away from reading Latin among the urban merchant class did not mean that these burghers were uninterested in antiquity. The Latin texts on Ortelius’s map of Brittenburg could be roughly understood by those with passing knowledge of the language, or recognized as excerpts from longer texts by those with a more robust classical education. The map itself was eventually integrated into vernacular histories of the Low Countries, such as the 1581 edition of Guicciardini’s Descrittione. The numerous Dutch and French vernacular translations of classical texts published in the Low Countries in this period attest to the popularity of antique subject matter, even among those with limited humanist training. Van Ghistele’s translations were aimed not only at those with limited Latin—several of his Dutch translations were printed alongside, or referred extensively to, the original text.25 The rhetorician appealed to the widest possible audience interested in ancient literature, from Latin-educated patrician elites to merchants more comfortable reading in Dutch. Although the project of translating ancient works into the vernacular is often described as a modernizing endeavor, it was often justified by scholars like Van Ghistele with appeals to the historical character of the vernacular itself. Van Ghistele, who bemoaned others’ reluctance to translate works into Dutch, offered historical validation for his own work as translator in the preface to his translation of Terence’s Comedies. He pointed out that Terence’s plays were themselves derived from Greek works, placing his own translation within a tradition established in classical antiquity.26 Van Ghistele also directly compared the structure of these ancient comedies to the local

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Dutch drama of the rhetoricians, or rederijkers.27 Not only did translating works into the vernacular have an antique precedent (Greek into Latin), but elements of vernacular culture (rederijker plays) themselves continued an ancient practice. The vernacular, according to Van Ghistele, had its own antiquity. This was precisely the view of the Dutch language put forward by the painter and rhetorician Lucas de Heere and the Antwerp lawyer Jan van der Werve. De Heere, in his 1565 Den hof en boomgaerd der poësien (The Court and Orchard of Poetry), acknowledged the importance of Latin, French, and German poetic examples but proclaimed, “Good invention and beautiful subjects have always / flourished under our Flemish poets, . . . / . . . And above all, we ought to employ / our language more to embellish it and our country.”28 De Heere attests to the antiquity and quality of both Dutch poetic practice and Netherlandish art; another of his odes is dedicated to the “Flemish Apelles,” Jan van Eyck.29 In chapter 4, I return to de Heere’s claim for Netherlandish art history, but it is important to note here that de Heere argues for the perceived historical value of vernacular language, both written and pictorial. Jan van der Werve similarly praises the vernacular in his 1553 legal dictionary Het tresoor der Duytsscher talen: “Help me to raise up our mother tongue (which now lies concealed / in the earth like gold), so that / we may prove how needless it is for us to beg for the assistance of other languages.”30 Van de Werve likens the evocatively termed “mother tongue” to an archaeological find or a precious natural resource concealed in the earth. Recognizing the historical value of the Dutch language thus allowed for a recovery of the past not unlike the physical rediscovery of the Roman fort at Brittenburg. Indeed, the contemporary interest in etymology, the study of the origins of words and place-names, was conceived as a kind of textual archaeology. Antiquarians and historians like Johannes Goropius Becanus, Petrus Divaeus, and Ortelius used linguistic research into both vernacular and Latin place-names to establish the antiquity of Netherlandish towns and cities.31 We have seen how Aurelius took the etymology of the rumored burcht te Bretten to confirm his hypothesis that Brittenburg was a Roman fort used for excursions to Britain; thus the burcht te Bretten became Brittenburg, or the Latin Arx Britannica. Junius’s Batavia, though more reliant on archaeological evidence than previous Netherlandish histories, was still primarily devoted to the discussion of etymological evidence, with research into place-names accounting for nearly half the text.32 The unique value of the vernacular as a historical asset depended upon its linguistic purity. This meant eliminating foreign loanwords from the language in an attempt to retain the Dutch language’s historical state. In 1559, Van de Werve would republish his dictionary, replacing the French-derived Tresoor in the title for the more suitably Dutch Schat. Dirck Volckertszoon Coornhert, a prominent translator of classical works, an engraver, and an admirer of Bruegel’s work, also advocated a return to

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Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

the purity of “onse nederlandsche sprache” (our Netherlandish speech) in the preface to his 1561 Dutch translation of Cicero’s De Officiis.33 Language, like material remains, was subject to temporal change. In the sixteenth century, a language’s link to the past determined its legitimacy—a vernacular should resemble its antique origins as closely as possible.34 The recovery of an “uncontaminated” Dutch language paralleled the race to document Brittenburg before it was once again swallowed by the waves. Some, like the Antwerp physician and humanist Jan van Gorp van der Beke (known by the latinized form of his name, Johannes Goropius Becanus), argued that the Dutch vernacular was itself an uncorrupted antique language. Becanus asserted that Diets, the local dialect of Antwerp, descended directly from the language spoken in Paradise by Adam and Eve.35 While later scholars such as Justus Lipsius and Joseph Justus Scaliger ridiculed Becanus’s methods, later sixteenth-century historical accounts of European languages acknowledged the vernacular’s capacity to be transformed over time while simultaneously arguing for the ancient origin of everyday words and phrases.36 The study of vernacular proverbs and songs intersected with the etymological and archaeological interests of antiquarians and humanists. Erasmus had famously assembled proverbs from antiquity in the successive and expanding editions of his Adagia, compiling multiple accounts of each proverb’s origin and interpretative possibilities, often with reference to vernacular equivalents. In the 1553 edition of the Adagia, roughly one-third of the commentaries on Erasmus’s collected sayings included references to the Dutch version of the proverb. The appeal to the vernacular helped readers gain access to the breadth of the antique proverb’s meaning. Symon Andriessoon’s 1550 Duytsche adagia ofte spreecwoorden, published in Antwerp by Heynrick Alssens, went even further. Andriessoon’s collection presented traditional, biblical, and antique proverbs alongside one another, and all were printed in Dutch, encouraging readers to appreciate the scholarly and historical value of the vernacular. Proverbs were appreciated as pithy expressions of perennial wisdom. Neither Erasmus nor Andriessoon assigned authors to individual proverbs, though Erasmus sketched the historical context for many individual sayings. For Erasmus, the auctoritas, or authority, of the proverb lay in its rhetorical strength, its ability to encapsulate ancient wit and knowledge. To become a proverb, a saying must persist over time. It must remain as true in the present as it was in the faraway past. Erasmus’s and Andriessoon’s inclusion of vernacular proverbs underscored the historical potential of the Dutch language. With a renewed appreciation for the perceived antiquity of the Netherlandish language and for proverbial sayings, Bruegel’s monumental Netherlandish Proverbs (fig. 1) takes on new dimensions. Like Erasmus’s and Andriessoon’s proverb collections, it contains both Dutch expressions and those derived from biblical parables or classical

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languages. Just to the right of the center of the panel, a man throws roses before swine, a vernacular variant of Christ’s parable in Matthew 7:6. Yet while many of the proverbs depicted by Bruegel have equivalents in multiple European vernaculars, several are particular to the Dutch tongue. The proverb enacted at the center of Netherlandish Proverbs, “she hangs a blue cloak over her husband,” is one such saying, a reference to female deception. Bruegel depicts the proverb via a prominently placed pair of figures—the woman in red and the man whom she is covering up with a blue cloak are in the central foreground of the panel. The saturated color of the woman’s red gown attracts the eye even in a composition crowded with figures from top to bottom. Bruegel repeats the red/ blue combination of this central pair in various formulations across the panel (in the structure above the central pair’s heads, the costume of the young man spinning the world on his thumb to their right, and at lower left in the juxtaposition of the woman in red tying a devil to a cushion and the blue-clad man biting a pillar). These patches of red and blue throughout the image return the viewer’s eye to this couple, the boldest exemplar of the red/blue coupling. This central proverb regarding the blue cloak of deception would have carried historical resonance for Bruegel’s audience. It appears in both textual and pictorial forms—morality plays, poetic refrains, tapestry and print designs—in the Low Countries from the late fifteenth century onward.37 It was so well established that in Van Ghistele’s 1551 play Aeneas and Dido, one character uses the expression to comment, “it will be difficult to be able to hang the blue cloak over her [Dido].”38 Recalling that Van Ghistele argued that Dutch rhetorical drama continued the form of antique drama, his use of the Dutch proverb in his version of the classical tale contributes to the imagined antiquity of the vernacular saying. Bruegel’s pictorial interest in proverbs, demonstrated not only in the Berlin panel but in a related painting in Antwerp, The Twelve Proverbs, as well as in prints like Big Fish Eat Little Fish (fig. 4), thus reflects not only the humanist’s compilation of Latin adages and common rhetorical pedagogical exercises39 but a broader interest in proverbs tied to the growing appreciation for the historicity of the Dutch language. Vernacular proverbs were imagined as ancient in origin; collections of such familiar sayings provided access to the past while simultaneously promoting the “mother tongue” as a language worthy of expressing constancy, experience, and perspicacity. In the same way, mid-sixteenth-century authors and translators argued that Dutch was an appropriate language for the dissemination of erudition. Dutch words could convey the potency of antique drama or the wit of a proverbial saying. In both textual proverb collections and Bruegel’s painted and printed products, the perceived historical character of the familiar proverb added sheen to the everyday words of the present. In a similar fashion, songs, costumes, and local customs could also be collected and discussed as representative of a distinctly Dutch vernacular antiquity.

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Bruegel and Susato: The Kermis at Hoboken and Cultural Memory

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

In the preface to the first volume of Tielman Susato’s collection of eleven Dutch songbooks, published between 1551 and 1561, the publisher writes that he wants to celebrate “our Netherlandish mother language” and “our fatherland’s music” as being as sweet and artful as Latin, German, and Italian songs.40 Susato, like Van Ghistele, Van der Werve, and de Heere, appeals to the vernacular as a worthy language, evoking its paternal character. Bruegel’s pictorial interests intersect with the aims, ambition, and methodology of the proverb collectors as well as those of artists and authors like Susato, who shared an interest in documenting and celebrating local Netherlandish traditions. Susato, himself an immigrant to Antwerp from Westphalia, had made his name as a publisher of French chanson. The publication of eleven books of Dutch liedekens (songs) was a relative risk, given the more limited Dutch-speaking market and the more fashionable status of both French chanson and Italian madrigals. Susato’s Dutch songbooks included courtly love songs, religious pieces, one entire volume devoted to dances, and numerous zotte liedekens, foolish and often risqué songs typically performed at festivals and at carnival time. The zotte liedekens represent a unique musical form, often complex in pattern, fast-paced in lyric, and with few repeating sections.41 With music and lyrics for three or four singers, the songbooks’ polyphonic arrangement required musical training on the part of the reader, who needed to arrange his or her own musical accompaniment.42 Susato’s intended audience thus included court habitués, civic elites, and well-off tradesmen and merchants, all of whom enjoyed playing, singing, and dancing, often when entertaining guests. Susato’s publication was aimed at this section of the urban populace, familiar with both international trends and local traditions. Susato’s third Dutch songbook, composed solely of dances, was again drawn from diverse sources. Alongside pieces popular at European courts, the Antwerp publisher included dances from local festivals and villages, referencing the particular village, region, or kermis (church festival) where the song or dance was performed in the title bestowed on each piece, such as “de Poitou” or “for the kermis of St. Jans.” Susato recast these local monophonic and presumably familiar tunes as more complex musical arrangements for the enjoyment of urban audiences. Susato’s volume included a popular song associated with the kermis of Hoboken, a few miles outside Antwerp, the very village festival pictured in Bruegel’s 1559 design for the engraving The Kermis at Hoboken (figs. 9, 10).43 Bruegel’s print and Susato’s songbook are evidence of the increased interest in such local festive customs. On the banner at left in Bruegel’s design, there is a motif of crossed arrows, identifying the scene as the Festival of the Longbowmen, held the day after Pentecost. Bruegel shows several events associated with this festival taking place at the same moment:

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Fig. 9 Pieter Bruegel, The Kermis at Hoboken, 1559. Pen and ink over chalk on paper. The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London. Photo: The Samuel Courtauld Trust.

a procession emanating from the church at center, a crowd gathered around a makeshift stage at upper left, a ring dance at right, and an improbable archery competition taking place across a crowded village square. When the engraving produced after Bruegel’s drawing (fig. 10) was published by Bartholomeus de Mompere, the publisher added the inscription: “The peasants delight in such festivals: to dance, jump, and drink themselves as drunk as beasts. They insist on holding their kermises, even though they have to fast and die of the cold.”44 This paraphrases the text on another engraving (dated the same year as Bruegel’s design) by Pieter van der Borcht, (fig. 11), which also depicts a raucous village festival composed of multiple interlocking vignettes. De Mompere published both Van der Borcht’s and Bruegel’s designs, and it appears that he recycled the text for use on both images. Unlike Van der Borcht however, Bruegel does not picture peasants lowering their trousers or hitching up their skirts to relieve themselves, nor does he include scenes of peasant violence or drunken vomiting in the foreground. While Bruegel and Van der Borcht both record various kinds of kermis activities, there is a notable absence of violence in Bruegel’s design, as well as a material specificity in Bruegel’s print that is absent in Van der Borcht’s. While Bruegel, Van der Borcht, and Susato all transform the ephemeral products of a rural festival into something to be consumed by an educated urban audience, I would argue that Bruegel and Susato place particular stress on the particularities of local custom, granting historical permanence to transient phenomena. The name of

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Fig. 10 Frans Hogenberg, after Pieter Bruegel, The Kermis at Hoboken, 1559. Engraving, second state of four, published by Bartholomeus de Mompere. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1926. Photo: www.metmuseum.org. Fig. 11 Pieter van der Borcht, Peasant Kermis, 1559. Etching and engraving. Published by Bartholomeus de Mompere. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Purchase, A. Hyatt Mayor Purchase Fund, Marjorie Phelps Starr Bequest, Barbara and Howard Fox Gift, and Charles Z. Offin Fund, 2000. Photo: www.metmuseum.org.

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the village—Hoboken—is clearly visible on Bruegel’s drawing, done in the same ink as the drawing. Bruegel includes events like the archery contest and the curious egg game taking place at lower right, which appear specific to this festival or region. The locality of the event and its observable details are important to Bruegel and Susato. Both artist and publisher draw on the memory of their audience and perhaps on their own experience of the event. Custom, in which vernacular language, lived experience, and history meet, is thus an authoritative source for both artist and publisher.

Custom as Living History Sixteenth-century Netherlandish historians increasingly used custom as an important source for the writing of vernacular histories. There is a classical precedent for this trend: Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian had all used the commonplace altera natura to describe the intimate connection between a people and their physical environment.45 Custom—the practice of specific rituals and rites, the wearing of particular dress—bound the present day to the historical past. Custom, then, was both second nature and the foundation of cultural history. With few physical monuments or antique textual accounts to rival those of Rome, a historical sense of Dutch identity was increasingly vested in the collection of such local traditions as songs, dances, festivals, and costumes. Guicciardini’s Descrittione (published in both French and Italian) was perhaps the most popular vernacular survey of Netherlandish customs. After describing the Low Countries’ geography, Guicciardini devotes the second section of his Descrittione to the “quality, and costumes of the men and women” of the Low Countries, drawing equally from ancient textual sources and his own observations. His description of the local aptitude for languages and maritime skill seems rooted in his own experience as an Italian merchant based in Antwerp. In the same section of text, however, Guicciardini characterizes the contemporary Netherlanders’ loquacious and forgiving temperament as “conforming to what Caesar writes was the ancient custom.”46 Bruegel’s Kermis at Hoboken and his related design for the engraving The Kermis of Saint George, from the same year (fig. 12 is a 1601 edition of the second state of the print), reflect a related perception of the historical durability of custom.47 The two designs, though produced by different publishers, echo each other visually; both have a strong diagonal axis along a centrally placed wagon and are anchored on one side by an inn and a large triangular banner. Both designs also feature a prominently placed pair of observers/participants in the foreground, as well as a fool accompanied by children. These foreground figures accentuate the social distance between the presumed urban observer/buyer of the print and the carousing peasants, presumably seen as both foolish and childish.

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Fig. 12 Joannes van Doetecum the Elder and Lucas van Doetecum, after Pieter Bruegel, The Kermis of Saint George, ca. 1559. Etching and engraving, second state of four, printed 1601, published by Paul de la Houve. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund. Photo: www.metmuseum.org.

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

In The Kermis of Saint George, the inscribed flag within the print reads: “Let the peasants hold their kermis.”48 This inscription, like the image itself, is certainly more ambiguous than the text condemning peasant excess on the related Kermis at Hoboken print and Van der Borcht’s image of rural festivity. In fact, this text has been read as a tacit appeal to the new local lord, Balthazar Schetz, to continue the popular festival despite renewed Habsburg legislation limiting the number and duration of annual kermis celebrations.49 The printed inscription’s position corresponds with the artist’s extant inscription on the Kermis at Hoboken drawing (fig. 9), which may indicate that it relates to Bruegel’s own wording on the (now lost) original drawing, as opposed to the text that de Mompere added later to the engraved Kermis at Hoboken. The sentiment that peasants should keep their rural festivals could be interpreted both as a reinforcement of social mores (this is a peasant festival that it is appropriate to observe but not to participate in) and as a mobilization of a historical argument for the maintenance of the status quo. If the latter, Bruegel’s plea for the continuation of local custom here was not necessarily a proto-revolutionary critique of Habsburg rule. Crucially, however, in either case, the artist/publisher appeals to an understanding of peasant custom as a traditional practice.50 Guicciardini made the connection between the festive customs of the ancient Netherlanders and those of the contemporary inhabitants of the Low Countries more explicit, ascribing these characteristics to the particular atmosphere and landscape of the region. Chorographies such as Guicciardini’s combined the study of

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geography and history, reading the landscape itself as a cultural artifact.51 According to Guicciardini, the local climate accounted for the typical Netherlander’s love of drink and feasting—the Italian famously claimed that the average Netherlander would travel twenty-five to thirty leagues to attend a peasant kermis or wedding.52 Bruegel’s two print designs attest to the broader interest in visually consuming these kinds of rural events; they are also part of an established local artistic tradition of depicting such encounters. Pieter Aertsen had depicted urban visitors to such a rural gathering in 1550 (fig. 7), nearly a decade before Bruegel’s drawing Kermis at Hoboken. Yet rather than focus on a single vignette, as Aertsen did, Bruegel’s design provides a visual survey of Hoboken’s revelries, a pictured collection of customs with particular local resonance (from the procession of statues to the traditional archery contest). Bruegel, like Susato, claims to represent a distinctly Netherlandish tradition; Guicciardini makes a similar assertion about what he sees as a historical characteristic of the local populace. Guicciardini highlights the extraordinary distances that local people traveled in order to attend such festivities. In several prints, Bruegel depicts wagons full of people traveling out into the local countryside. Bruegel’s 1555 design for the engraving titled Plaustrum Belgicum (The Belgian Wagon, fig. 13) shows a long covered wagon descending into a Flemish village; in the related print Pagus Nemorosus (Wooded Landscape, fig. 14), a similar wagon fords a flooded road, accompanied by outriders. The cloth covering of this vehicle has been raised, revealing that it is loaded with passengers rather than goods. A comparably laden wagon departs from the city in Bruegel’s Ice Skating Before the Gate of Saint George. Given that such wagons (now empty of travelers) appear in the foreground of designs for both The Kermis at Hoboken and The Kermis of Saint George, Bruegel may also allude here to the Netherlanders’ willingness to travel in order to partake of such events. Bruegel represents this form of transport as a specifically local custom (the print is, after all, titled The Belgian Wagon), but this vehicle was also imagined as historical. In 1596, Ortelius wrote for his godson a short guide to Belgo-German civilization, the Aurei saeculi imago, or Mirror of the Golden Age. The booklet is divided into ten sections, each short text addressing an aspect of ancient Belgo-German culture (religion, childhood, diet, family life, etc.). Van der Borcht provided the accompanying engraved illustrations. In the section on family life, Van der Borcht pictures the ancient Belgo-Germans living in simple huts and caves yet still using the familiar Belgian wagon for transport (fig. 15).53 Van der Borcht sees this vehicle, which Ortelius’s text does not mention specifically, as a suitably antique way to illustrate the honoring of familial bonds via travel; the artist is also probably responding to the seeming ubiquity of such wagons in Bruegel’s prints of traditional rural Netherlandish life. Van der Borcht thus calls upon the Bruegelian image of peasant life to picture an imagined Belgo-German antiquity.

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Fig. 13 Joannes van Doetecum the Elder and Lucas van Doetecum, after Pieter Bruegel, Plaustrum Belgicum (The Belgian Wagon), from the series The Large Landscapes, ca. 1555 –56. Etching and engraving, second state of two, published by Hieronymus Cock. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1926. Photo: www.metmuseum.org. Fig. 14 Joannes van Doetecum the Elder and Lucas van Doetecum, after Pieter Bruegel, Pagus Nemorosus (Wooded Landscape), from the series The Large Landscapes, ca. 1555 –56. Etching and engraving, second state of two, published by Hieronymus Cock. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1926. Photo: www.metmuseum.org.

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Fig. 15 Pieter van der Borcht, Vita Familiaris, in Abraham Ortelius, Aurei saeculi imago, 1596. Engraving and letterpress. Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde (M5), Leiden University Library. Photo courtesy of the Leiden University Library.

This kind of slippage is less surprising when one considers the well-known Ovidian proverb “Nemo sic mores vetustos estimat ut rusticus” (No one keeps old customs like a peasant), a long-established motif in Netherlandish culture.54 The Netherlandish love of feasting reported by Guicciardini and others, whatever its claims as a document of contemporary practice, was by the mid-sixteenth century also an established trope of historical writing on the Low Countries. Already in 1508, Erasmus’s “Adage on the Batavian Ear” had turned Martial’s classical epigram on the ignorance of northern peoples into a defense of Netherlandish culture. Erasmus’s commentary on the ancient proverb discussed both historical and contemporary Netherlandish cultural simplicity and love of feasting. “The reason for this [feasting],” he wrote, “is, I think, the wonderful supply of everything, which can tempt one to enjoyment . . . partly due to the native fertility of the region, intersected as it is by navigable rivers full of fish, and abounding in rich pastures.”55 The classical epigram is analyzed as describing the historical and the contemporary atmosphere of the region, the local peasant’s love of feasts depicted as a tradition stretching back to the days of classical antiquity.

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Fig. 16 Cornelis van Dalem, Landscape with Farm, 1564. Oil on panel. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. Photo © Tarker / Bridgeman Images.

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

Erasmus links this limited and derogatory classical reference to Netherlandish antiquity with the imagined historicity of local customs in order to create an image of vernacular antiquity. In the 1517 Divieskroniek, Aurelius draws a similar analogy in his description of the Batavian diet as rich in meat and dairy products, taking advantage of “rich pastures full of animals and .  .  . fruitful agricultural land.”56 Drawing on Aurelius’s earlier Batavian history, ancient texts, and observed practice, both Hadrianus Junius’s Batavia (probably finished in 1568 – 69, though not published until 1588) and Ortelius’s 1596 Mirror of the Golden Age describe the ancient Netherlanders as lovers of drink known for a diet rich in dairy and meat.57 Guicciardini singled out the contemporary peasant’s consumption of bread, butter, and cheese as well; like Aurelius and Erasmus, he attributed this everyday diet to the abundance of the local landscape.58 Bruegel’s images of local populations similarly highlight this supposedly historical love of dairy products and beer. In Peasant Dance (fig. 56), Bruegel transcribes the strangely vertical bulbous form of the butter alongside a small dish of salt and half-eaten piece of bread, as well as the various shapes of ceramic drinking jugs used by the peasants. In the lower left corner of Peasant Wedding (fig. 17), a man pours amber-colored beer into a jug, as if displaying the drink to the viewer before an overflowing basket of salt-glaze jugs. The specificity of these painted details parallels that of the textual descriptions offered by Guicciardini and Ortelius, as when Guicciardini passes on the recipe for a popular Netherlandish ale (consisting of boiled water, cereal, and hops).59 Historical and contemporary descriptions of the Netherlandish landscape, diet, and temperament all emphasize the same characteristics (dairy-loving people, festive drinkers, inhabitants of a bountiful land). The present practices of the local peasantry as pictured by Bruegel are precisely those used as a window onto the Batavian past. Ortelius may cite Strabo, Tacitus, and others, but his illustrator just as easily reaches for the familiar Belgian wagon or figures drinking in a rural setting—two familiar Bruegelian motifs. If the contemporary peasant enjoyed festivity, so did the ancient Netherlander. While the antiquarian was interested in ruins (physical and textual remnants of a distant past), the collector of customs turned the objects of his interest (practices, behavior) into a different kind of historical record. In this view, traditional customs such as peasant feasting assume a kind of antiquity. The temporal distance in each case is distinct: whereas ruins can be inserted into chronological histories, customs may be observed in the present, but their origins stretch back beyond living memory into the recesses of the past, an imagined antiquity. Cornelis van Dalem, a contemporary of Bruegel’s also working in Antwerp, visualized how both customs and ruins could be seen as historical remnants. Van Dalem and Bruegel knew each other, for they collaborated on the publication of the 1561

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engraving View of the Reggio di Calabria.60 Van Dalem appears to have made most of his income from trade rather than from painting, and he was well schooled in history and poetry.61 At the center of his 1564 Landscape with Farm (fig. 16) is a ruined stone arcade with gothic arches, overgrown with vegetation and pockmarked with age. Ruins evoking ecclesiastical architecture had often appeared in biblical history paintings (as the setting for the adoration of the magi, for example), but this ruin stands at the center of the composition, flanked only by decrepit peasant cottages full of

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Fig. 17 Pieter Bruegel, Peasant Wedding, 1568. Oil on panel. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York.

gaping holes and peeling plaster. The dwelling on the left has collapsed, its thatched roof hanging in pieces. Despite their deplorable condition, these buildings are not unoccupied. In the structure at right a man is moving hay, while a woman and child approach and a laborer returns from the fields. The ruined stone building, perhaps a church, is a monument to the past. The peasants inhabiting the dilapidated cottages are a living version of this past, presumably existing in the same way as when their cottages, and even the stone building, were new. In bringing together the ruin and contemporary peasant life, the artist envisions the circular relationship underpinning the histories and chorographies written by Aurelius, Guicciardini, and Ortelius. I contend that this pictorial analogy offers a new way of approaching Bruegel’s images of peasant life and Netherlandish customs. As in Van Dalem’s painting, the historical imagination of the antiquarian and the collector of customs often overlapped. The living, breathing culture of the everyday was integrated into the fabrication of a vernacular antiquity. Bruegel’s images of Dutch proverbs, local customs, and festive traditions participated in this imagined history, focusing on many of the same aspects of Netherlandish culture mined by others for their supposedly historical value.

Bruegel and the Batavian Past

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

Many of Bruegel’s surviving images depict precisely those areas of cultural life of interest to contemporary historians and collectors of customs: childhood (Children’s Games, fig. 3), feasts and festivals (The Kermis at Hoboken, fig. 9), religious customs (The Battle Between Carnival and Lent, fig. 47), costume (Peasant Dance, fig. 56), and weddings (Peasant Wedding, fig. 17). These are the same areas described as representative of local culture in Guicciardini’s vernacular history and Ortelius’s Latin history of the Low Countries. Methodologically, too, Bruegel shared the proto-ethnographer’s and antiquarian’s interest in material detail and valued the importance of close observation. The artist was also connected—by friendship, patronage, or commerce—to many of the key figures in this renewed interest in local antiquity. As an artisan, Bruegel probably would not have received a classical education comparable to that of Erasmus or Ortelius. Yet Ortelius, as we saw in the introduction, called Bruegel a friend and was his patron—he owned Bruegel’s grisaille Death of the Virgin (fig. 73) and called him the greatest painter of his age. Coornhert, who translated ancient works into Dutch and campaigned for the return to a purer, more historical vernacular, was also an engraver and publisher acquainted with Bruegel. Hieronymus Cock, whose popular printed series of Roman ruins tapped into a local taste for images of antiquity, was also the publisher of the bulk of Bruegel’s print designs. Junius, who was at work writing his Batavia in the later 1560s, also provided the inscriptions for the 1565 engraving of Bruegel’s design for The Parable of the

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Good Shepherd. Although artist and author need not have met (Bruegel was living in Brussels at the time), both men worked for Cock and thus shared a commercial, and possibly a social, network. Bruegel’s documented connections to these men, all interested in vernacular antiquity and the classical past, do not mean that his art must be seen solely against the backdrop of an elite circle of humanists and antiquarians centered in Antwerp. The diverse backgrounds, professions, and products of these men also attest to the broader interest in vernacular antiquity in Bruegel’s time. Proverb collections were used for education and entertainment throughout the Low Countries; similarly, Susato’s songbooks were

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Fig. 18 Pieter van der Borcht, Frugalitas & Gula, in Abraham Ortelius, Aurei saeculi imago, 1596. Engraving and letterpress. Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde (M5), Leiden University Library. Photo courtesy of the Leiden University Library.

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

aimed primarily at middle-class households. Coornhert’s translations were from Latin into Dutch; Guicciardini was an Italian who published in two vernaculars. One need not be familiar with Tacitus’s Germania in order to appreciate Brittenburg as a ruin of local antiquity. Similarly, one could appreciate the perceived historical character of Netherlandish festivities and traditions without quoting Erasmus. Bruegel’s pictures were intended for just such an urban, somewhat educated audience, familiar with classical antiquity from vernacular translations and rhetoricians’ performances but not necessarily sharing the humanist pedigree of Ortelius or Junius. By the latter half of the sixteenth century, the link between custom, landscape, and local history was well established; Bruegel’s images propose similar connections. In the panel Peasant Wedding (fig. 17), for example, Bruegel alludes to the fertile landscape characteristically evoked in historical and contemporary descriptions of the Low Countries. The wedding feast takes place in a barn stacked high with straw, where guests tuck into the offerings of the heavily laden table. Both the overflowing barn and the table display the bounty of the land. Bruegel depicts this rich celebratory diet, noted also by Guicciardini and Ortelius, complete with sides of meat and rijstpap

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Fig. 19 Pieter van der Borcht, Peasant Wedding, 1560. Etching. Published by Bartholomeus de Mompere. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Elisha Whittelsey Collection, Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1956. Photo: www.metmuseum.org.

(a saffron-tinted rice pudding) and washed down by copious amounts of beer poured by the peasant at far left.62 Van der Borcht’s later illustration of the ancient Belgo-Germans’ diet (fig. 18), in Ortelius’s Mirror of the Golden Age, uses a similar juxtaposition of abundant landscape and figures feasting. Ortelius’s text describes the festive fare of the ancients: porridge, meat, and copious amounts of drink.63 The table in Van der Borcht’s design is likewise covered in knives and hunks of meat and bread. A figure at right is occupied in spooning out the porridge. Two of the figures hold drinking vessels, and a large container reminiscent of an amphora stands in the foreground. The image recalls the fare Bruegel depicts in Peasant Wedding—the bowls of rijstpap, the meat and knives on the table, the pile of ceramic jugs in the foreground—just as Erasmus and Guicciardini collapsed the distinction between contemporary and antique Netherlanders in their descriptions of the local love of feasting. Van der Borcht included such details in his own Peasant Wedding (fig. 19), down to the large cauldron used to prepare the rijstpap and the various bridal gifts brought to the event. Bruegel’s and Van der Borcht’s attention to these material details of custom memorializes such traditions. Yet while Van der Borcht presents the wedding feast as a disordered scene characterized by unruly crowds, poor table manners, drunken groping, and vomiting, Bruegel’s painting is more sedate: a crowd is visible at top left but no one is asleep, sick, or canoodling at the table. Notably, when called

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Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

upon to describe the customs of vernacular antiquity, Van der Borcht and Ortelius use the more restrained visual language of Bruegelian peasant festivity as their model, rather than the excess of Van der Borcht’s own earlier prints. Methodologically, Bruegel’s attention to the minutiae of festive or peasant culture replicates the profusion of details noted by authors like Guicciardini in their numerous exhaustive lists (see the Descrittione’s catalogues of rivers, forests, walled towns, types of fish found in the Low Countries, and even local artists’ names). Guicciardini claimed to have “personally investigate[d] necessary things” in the Descrittione, as well as to have consulted known textual sources.64 In the same vein, while Ortelius cites classical authors and archaeological evidence in his Brittenburg map, by including images of visitors to the site he also makes a rhetorical claim for the image as recreating direct experience of the ruin. Similarly, Bruegel’s Peasant Wedding includes details—such as the makeshift tray made from an unhinged door, the large overturned tub acting as a seat for the well-dressed man at far right, the variegated colors and grooved indentations of each salt-glazed jug—that attest to witnessed practice. Bruegel’s unique attention to the minutiae of rural costume, the way clothing is constructed and ornamented, similarly anchors these peasants in a particular place; indeed, for Bruegel’s contemporaries, the study of costume was closely linked to that of both cartography and custom.65 Through these details, Bruegel, like Guicciardini and Ortelius, asserts his authority as a compiler of information. The rhetorical claims to observation and direct experience made by Bruegel, Guicciardini, and Ortelius did not mean that each artist or author began anew. Bruegel did not invent the peasant picture any more than Guicciardini or Ortelius invented Netherlandish history writing. Rather, artist and author refocused existing tradition. By turning to custom as valid historical and pictorial source material, each man made a set of claims about the antiquity and value of such customs. Bruegel took peasant imagery, known from domestic objects, linen paintings, and prints, and produced monumental images. Contemporary Dutch proverb or song collections did much the same thing, taking existing collections (such as Erasmus’s Adagia or French books of chanson) and replacing the content with that of local derivation. Simultaneously, historians turned to the vernacular to provide etymological evidence of the region’s antiquity, while local customs and traditions were described as originating in the ancient past. The antique origin of peasant customs meant that peasant culture, much like the Dutch language, could provide access to the past precisely where there was a local absence of texts or physical remains. The figure of the peasant was increasingly identified with a historical, even an ancient, Dutch identity, in contradistinction to the increasingly urban character of the sixteenth-century Low Countries. But if the contemporary peasant had inherited the diet, costume, and other customs of the Batavians, how was it possible to reconcile the social realities of peasant life with the mythic projection of a vernacular antiquity? Surely, no one wanted to emulate peasant

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life or behavior as an exemplar of antique culture. Bruegel’s images evoke the historical nature of peasant life but also maintain a clear social distinction between this rural subject matter and the presumed urban viewer. Rather than eliminate moralizing or satirical referents, the Netherlandish historical imagination naturalized the idea that social difference could be understood as evocative of temporal distance.

Time and the Other Reinhart Koselleck, one of the great modern explicators of the emergence of the concept of history and historical change, provides us with a useful observation on the relationship between time, history, and cultural difference drawn from his analysis of the historical thought of the Hellenic world. Koselleck remarks that the difference between the barbarian (the non-Greek) and the Hellene is that the Hellene was once like the barbarian. The barbarians’ contemporaneousness is perceived in terms of their non-contemporaneous cultural level.66 The “Other” is thus presented as the preevolved state of the dominant culture. Or, to put it simply, we too were once like them, but now we have evolved. Koselleck’s formulation demonstrates how contemporary cultural differences are constructed within a historical perspective and given a temporal dimension. Guicciardini’s assertion that Netherlandish temperament had remained unchanged since antiquity, or Van der Borcht’s imagining of ancient Belgo-German life as being peasant-like (fig. 15), reveals a basic assumption about peasant culture as fundamentally temporally static, in contrast to the evolved culture of the urban populace. The town dweller who consumes these texts and images is understood to belong to a civilization with its own history. But peasant life is seen as pre- or ahistorical. It does not change and therefore can be mobilized as a representation of a local antiquity. A large panel by Cornelis van Dalem, now known as Landscape with the Dawn of Civilisation (fig. 20), offers a pictorial example of this kind of imagined temporal collapse of the contemporary Other into the past. The panel pictures a small group of people clothed in skins and simple costumes. Their occupation appears to be pastoral—a herd of sheep and cattle is led by a couple at left, while a shepherd boy plays the pipe for his flock of goats at top right. The family home is made of wood and thatch, built into the rock face at right; it resembles the ruined peasant cottage in Van Dalem’s Landscape with Farm (fig. 16).67 The painting underscores the perceived parallel living conditions of early man and the Netherlandish peasant. While the rocky landscape and exotic animal skins worn by these characters mark them as foreign, Van Dalem also makes his figures recognizable, positioning them in family groups (women with children, men at work and in conversation by the family home). Though temporally removed, these figures are also culturally familiar.

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Fig. 20 Cornelis van Dalem, Landscape with the Dawn of Civilisation, 1560 – 67. Oil on panel. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Photo: HIP / Art Resource, New York.

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

As the New and Old Worlds came into more frequent contact throughout the sixteenth century, Europeans often portrayed the native peoples of America, Asia, and Africa as sharing certain resemblances with known social groups. The European peasant in particular was often a touchstone of comparison for many European explorers who encountered Native Americans.68 The peasant, like the New World “savage,” was seen as unaffected by the technological and social “advances” of urban Europe, a living embodiment of Renaissance Europe’s own cultural past. As Johannes Fabian has argued, it is the denial of coevalness that underpins the foundations of anthropology’s study of the Other.69 Yet Koselleck’s argument also allows for socially distinct groups, described as if they lived in the past, to be connected to the dominant culture; though removed socially and temporally, such populations can be connected via the implication of a shared history. The Netherlandish peasant was not just an anthropological Other but also a window into the local past. Rural society was imagined as temporally immobile, exhibiting a way of life unchanged since antiquity, because of the supposed impossibility of social progression in peasant life. But the economic and social realities of the sixteenth-century Low

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Countries were quite different. In Bruegel’s lifetime, many peasants came to the city for employment, and the countryside was drastically altered by the effects of cottage industries like linen production, as well as by the colonization of rural areas by wealthy owners of newly constructed country villas, or spelhuizen.70 Technological developments allowed for vast land reclamation, construction, and drainage projects that were completed largely through the use of peasant labor diverted from agricultural work.71 Culturally, these economic changes affected rural communities, as increasingly high rents and a growing population meant that a smaller proportion of the nonurban economy was engaged in agriculture. More rural inhabitants became tied to wage labor in the city or engaged in trades (market gardening, transport) aimed at urban markets.72 This led to a blurring of the cultural boundaries between city and country. Former peasants increasingly made up the population of urban poor. Indeed, peasants’ extended journeys to attend family weddings, described by Guicciardini, offer secondhand testimony of the dispersal of rural communities in the sixteenth century. Local festivities such as the kermis took on additional significance as symbolic reunions of historically rural neighborhoods. Not that you would know any of this from Bruegel’s pictures, where the nonagricultural labor of the Netherlandish peasant is conspicuously absent. According to Van Mander, Bruegel was commissioned by the Brussels city authorities to paint the excavation of the canal linking Antwerp and Brussels, but he died before completing (or possibly even starting) the project.73 In what remains of Bruegel’s oeuvre, the peasant is depicted only at work in traditional tasks largely unchanged for centuries: making hay in summer (fig. 26), slaughtering pigs in winter (fig. 2). As we have seen, even the contemporary festive activities that Bruegel described so captivatingly were understood as ancient in origin or as reflecting the historical Netherlandish love of celebration. Bruegel’s panel The Land of Cockaigne (fig. 21) encapsulates the artist’s view of the peasant as socially and temporally fixed. In this representation of the Dutch fantasy of Luilekkerland (lazy-luscious land), Bruegel paints a sleeping peasant, a knight, and a sprawled-out cleric, presumably sleeping off a large meal.74 This return to the medieval model of the three estates (peasantry, nobility, and clergy) avoids the contemporary reality of the Low Countries’ economic fortune, based on trade and the booming urban economy, both of which allowed for new forms of social mobility. The painting thus presents overlapping forms of cultural nostalgia. The land of Cockaigne was a late medieval vernacular legend of a fantasyland devoid of human labor and brimming with food, where cooked geese laid themselves down on platters to be eaten. Bruegel uses this evocative and well-known tale to represent an ideal model of the traditional social order, with the peasant (shown holding a grain flail) associated solely with the countryside. Bruegel’s Land of Cockaigne is pointedly located just outside the bounds of a recognizably modern city (possibly Antwerp), visible along the

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Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

horizon—the town is separated from Luilekkerland by the mountain of porridge that one must eat through to reach the land of plenty. The undeniably urban character of the later sixteenth-century Low Countries, dominated by the international mercantile center of Antwerp, was decidedly different from the vision of the three estates pictured by Bruegel in The Land of Cockaigne, or from the supposedly rural Batavian past. Yet the production of a mythical Netherlandish vernacular antiquity reinforced the presumed integrity of historical cultural transmission by playing upon what Homi K. Bhabha has called “a continuous, accumulative temporality”—a conception of history defined by the notion of a longue durée.75 In comparison with the rapid growth of urban, socially mobile middleclass populations in the Low Countries, the sixteenth-century peasant was pictured by Bruegel and his contemporaries as unchanged for hundreds of years. The imagined temporal fixity of the peasant, in Bruegel’s images and the various texts considered in this chapter, contributed to the perceived separation between the festive subject and the literate urban populace that consumed these representations of peasant life. The audience for Bruegel’s works probably had some exposure to texts like Guicciardini’s, as well as to other early histories and collections of customs that described peasant traditions, which would have shaped their understanding of the artist’s peasant scenes. The peasant, as pictured by Bruegel, could therefore operate simultaneously as contemporaneous “Other” and as a kind of historical figure, an embodiment of the local past. Koselleck’s description of the Hellene’s equation of the barbarian with the precivilized Hellene operates in a similar fashion, concurrently distancing and relating the Hellene and the barbarian. Rather than present a romantic view of the peasant as the soul of a nation, this balance between imagined historical distance and lived proximity allows for both social critique and appropriation. Bruegel was not the first or the only artist to picture rural customs as originating in the distant past. Pieter Aertsen’s 1550 Peasant Feast (fig. 7) had presented the richly laid, nearly life-size festive peasant table in the foreground as if to invite the viewer to take a seat. The booming market for peasant imagery both in large-scale paintings and in printed form coincided with the burgeoning trade in printed dictionaries, songbooks, and proverb collections around the middle of the century. Yet Bruegel’s images complicate the strictly moralizing and didactic quality of many earlier and contemporary images of peasant life, such as Van der Borcht’s prints (figs. 11 and 19).76 Bruegel’s pictures often directly cite customs or events of interest to the local historian or collector of custom while offering multifaceted references to time and history. As we shall see in the following two chapters, Bruegel’s images depend upon an emerging social distinction between peasant subject and urban viewer; but they are also agents of a complex process of historical imagination. It was an appreciation of peasant practices as historical that removed some (though not all) of the moralizing charge from Bruegel’s representations of traditional rural festivities.

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As the embodiment of the local past, the peasant could be mobilized as a positive vision of vernacular antiquity. For example, at the 1561 Landjuweel, a competition between local rhetorician chambers held every three years, the Haagspel (the secondary contest within the larger competition) posed the question: which underrated occupation was the most useful and honest? The unanimous response was agriculture, often represented in the resulting plays by the figure of the local peasant.77 These responses highlight the peasant’s symbolic role within the historical social order. As a keeper of traditions and customs, the peasant was a valuable cultural resource. This is not to say that the peasant was understood as a simulacrum of the ancient Batavian farmer. According to Guicciardini, the inhabitants of the Low Countries were tall and well proportioned, but also shorter than they had been in the time of

Fig. 21 Pieter Bruegel, The Land of Cockaigne, 1567. Oil on panel. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. Photo: Alte Pinakothek, Munich, Germany / Bridgeman Images.

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Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

Caesar or even of Charlemagne.78 Guicciardini attributed this change to the decline in the moral discipline of the Netherlandish people and to their changing way of life. Sixteenth-century historians esteemed the unpolluted vertical transmission of culture as one of the better indicators of social integrity.79 Guicciardini’s comment implies, therefore, that variations in the traditional agricultural Netherlandish way of life were in fact a form of cultural decay. Peasant existence, tied to the land, was perceived as slower to adapt and thus as the last to succumb to this kind of change. Characterizing the peasant as temporally fixed allowed the peasant to serve as both a positive representative of a particularly local past and a negative model for social behavior. The question of whether Bruegel’s peasants were to be viewed as moralizing or comedic has dominated the history of scholarship on the artist—but understanding the conceptual construction of the peasant as a transhistorical figure reveals this opposition as a false dichotomy.80 Because of his unique temporal status, the peasant could be used both as a living link to the Batavian past and as a reminder of present-day social distinctions. For example, images like Bruegel’s Land of Cockaigne and Kermis at Hoboken may celebrate a fixed view of the peasant’s place in the social order and the historical continuity of Dutch vernacular customs, but they also delight in the rough features and lumpy bodies of the peasantry. Peasants, with their bodily exuberance and crude manners, were to be distinguished from the clean, composed, and decorous urban middle and upper classes. In the large-scale peasant pictures, Bruegel’s figures are often dolllike, all disjointed limbs and odd angles, as in the couple rushing in from the right to join the dance in Peasant Dance (fig. 56). With their small heads and large feet (exemplified in the corpulent figure of the peasant in The Land of Cockaigne), Bruegel accentuates the peasants’ supposed lack of grace and bodily refinement. Bruegel’s contortions and distortions of the peasant body are immediately apparent when one contrasts his view of peasant festivity with that of his predecessor Aertsen, whose figures appear athletic and nearly graceful in comparison (fig. 7). The conviviality of the Netherlandish peasant, portrayed so exceptionally by Bruegel, was marked as both historically valuable and morally suspect. Erasmus and Ortelius stressed the Netherlandish race’s historical proclivity for festive excess, but also their hospitability and kindness.81 Guicciardini writes that the modern Netherlander’s “vice is drinking to excess .  .  . but this is somewhat excusable because the air of the country is most of the time humid and melancholic.”82 At the same rhetoricians’ festival where the peasant was lauded as the practitioner of the noblest, most overlooked occupation, the contemporary peasant was also satirized as a figure of crude excess and exuberance.83 The festivity of the Netherlandish peasant was thus consistently described as both a contemporary and a historical phenomenon, derided but also excused. The peasant’s key role in the historical imagination of Netherlandish antiquity allowed representations of the contemporary rural populace,

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and of their customs and festivities, to negotiate between peasants’ positive and negative social roles. In Ortelius’s map of Brittenburg, the example with which I began this chapter, the peasant also mediates between the physical remains of the past and the historical knowledge of the present. In Bruegel’s lifetime, the contemporary peasant and the antique past met not only via the physical discovery and manipulation of archaeological remains but also through their own lived experience and vernacular traditions. The peasant’s unique temporal state—at once historical and timeless—allowed a kind of temporal collapse between ancient Batavian farmer and contemporary peasant. The peasant thus could simultaneously act as a living archaeological record, an embodiment of local history and an observable social inferior. Rather than reconstruct a narrative history showing how Bruegel’s images of peasants and contemporary histories and collections of customs influenced and quoted one another, I have proposed here a more nebulous relation, whereby influence traveled in multiple directions and flowed in successive currents. Bruegel’s artistic career unfolded against the backdrop of profound social and economic changes in the Low Countries, and in a time of broad renewed interest in vernacular antiquity. The idea of the peasant as a historical remnant had a particular cultural currency in the later sixteenth-century Low Countries, centered around (but not limited to) the intellectual output of Antwerp humanists, publishers, and artists—many of whom knew and worked with Bruegel. But an interest in vernacular antiquity was felt beyond Antwerp and extended beyond Ortelius’s narrow academic circle to a larger educated populace who bought songbooks and proverb collections, attended rhetoricians’ classicizing plays, and owned Bruegel’s paintings and prints. This chapter has explored how Bruegel’s images and his interest in vernacular customs and material detail intersect with the subjects and methodological approaches of contemporary antiquarians and collectors of customs. An understanding of both the role of custom as a source in the writing of local history and the imagined temporal instability of the peasant offers new avenues for the interpretation of Bruegel’s art as directly engaging with the production of a vernacular antiquity. Bruegel’s innovative paintings of proverbs, peasants, and festive customs were part of a wider interest in the historical character of these topoi. But how did Bruegel picture history? The following two chapters attempt an answer, beginning with the artist’s images of biblical narratives, before returning to the historical imagination as represented in his famous peasant pictures.

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ch a p t er 2

Hybrid Histories

There are no surviving records of any altarpieces or public commissions completed by Bruegel’s workshop during his lifetime.1 This is somewhat surprising given that Bruegel lived in an age when every guild had an altarpiece and when large urban construction projects, like the redesigning of the Antwerp town hall, were under way in the Low Countries. Yet the artist apparently worked

The very great achievement of a painter is not a colossus but the historia; the praise of genius is, in fact, greater in a historia than in a colossus.

—leon battista alberti, On Painting

mostly for individual rather than civic or church patrons. We can identify only a handful of surviving names—the geographer Abraham Ortelius, the merchant Nicolaes Jonghelinck, the Antwerp mint master Jean Noirot, the controversial archbishop of Mechelen, Cardinal Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle—as Bruegel’s patrons.2 Antwerp had a well-established art market, the Schilderspand, where artists could show prospective clients their wares.3 Bruegel could have produced works “on spec” for sale in such a venue, but given the high social standing of the known collectors of Bruegel’s paintings, it seems more likely that Bruegel’s clients commissioned paintings directly from the artist. Bruegel’s move to Brussels in 1563 indicates that by this date at least, the artist was secure enough in his fame (and his predominately Antwerp-based client base) to move to the nearby court city.4

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Fig. 22 Pieter Bruegel, The Flight into Egypt, 1563. Oil on panel. The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London. Photo: The Samuel Courtauld Trust.

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

Despite Bruegel’s apparent failure to garner large-scale church commissions in the form of traditional altarpieces, roughly a third of his surviving paintings are scenes of religious narratives. This includes tales from the Bible as well as apocryphal stories understood in the mid-sixteenth century as constituting religious history. This chapter reassesses Bruegel’s history paintings in light of the more fluid and adaptable notion of history and the Netherlandish historical imagination outlined in the previous chapter. I focus on three of these religious scenes—The Flight into Egypt (fig. 22), The Tower of Babel (fig. 30), and Christ Carrying the Cross (fig. 34)—as all three are rare examples of works by Bruegel where we can reconstruct something of their original viewing context, and all clearly display the artist’s multifaceted historical imagination. In describing Renaissance history painting, art historians often rely on Leon Battista Alberti’s 1435 On Painting, in which the Italian artist, architect, and author defined the painting of historia as the artist’s highest task.5 Beyond the representation of historical subjects and events, Alberti stated that the ideal historia was a unified composition consisting of nine or ten figures varied in gesture and movement, designed to both attract and sustain the viewer’s attention and emotional engagement.6 Alberti saw historia more broadly than his classical antecedents did: historia could refer to the representation of recorded historical events, biblical and classical narratives, and allegorical compositions like sacra conversazione, and could encompass relief sculpture as well as large-scale painting.7 While historia in classical Latin contained the description of both past events and narrative accounts, by the mid-sixteenth century historians saw their own work as inextricably bound to the broader study of geography, science, and philosophy.8 We have seen how, in Bruegel’s age, history was an eminently expandable category. Guicciardini and Ortelius, for example, folded descriptions of Netherlandish custom and traditions into the res gestae of the classical historia. Beyond the Low Countries, authors like Jean Bodin explored history as a genre, advising readers on how to evaluate historical writing and the work of historians.9 Like his contemporaries, Bruegel uses a flexible notion of history, contesting the use of any singular or dominant mode of historical representation in his religious narratives. Instead, in panels like The Flight into Egypt, The Tower of Babel, and Christ Carrying the Cross, the artist presents conflicting models of historical reconstruction, using archaeological survival, the material accrual of local traditions, and the manipulation of artistic style itself. In doing so, Bruegel incorporates the methods of contemporary collectors of customs, antiquarians, and local historians who embraced ruins, textual traces, and unwritten sources of history as offering access to the past. Bruegel, by citing earlier artists and manipulating his figural style and technique, also demonstrates his awareness of the history of local artistic production. In his religious history paintings, the artist thus represents the multiple ways in which history can be accessed and reimagined.

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Picturing the Falling Idol Bruegel’s Flight into Egypt (fig. 22) appears to be the antithesis of an Albertian historia: few figures are visible and the striking mountain landscape is the dominant visual element. The panel is small (roughly 37 ∑ 56 cm) and jewel-like in detail. In the foreground, a tiny male figure leads a donkey bearing a woman and infant along a ridge; he is about to descend into a deep crevasse. This is the Holy Family, fleeing into Egypt. But Egypt is a fantastic locality: the coastal villages appear Netherlandish, but the steep mountains at left and in the background recollect Alpine terrain. The hazards of the Holy Family’s journey into the unknown are heightened by a subsidiary scene at left, where two heavily laden pilgrims cross a perilously slight bridge. The format of the landscape painting itself recalls the previous generation of Netherlandish painters. Artists like Henri met de Bles, Jan van Amstel, and Lucas Gassel (fig. 23) perfected this kind of expansively detailed, banded landscape formula in the 1530s and ’40s, moving from warm tones in the foreground to a cool blue background populated with minuscule hamlets.

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Fig. 23 Lucas Gassel, The Flight into Egypt, 1540. Oil on panel. Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht. Photo © Bonnefantenmuseum Maastricht, Loan Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands.

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

At the bottom right corner of Bruegel’s diminutive Flight into Egypt, there is a small gabled wooden box attached to a pollarded willow (fig. 24). A tiny gray figure appears to fall forward from this peculiar structure at a jaunty angle. A casual viewer may almost miss this modest construction, a strange detail nearly subsumed within the breathtaking landscape. This structure is an idol—specifically, a falling idol, shown in the act of self-destruction as the Holy Family passes. A well-established part of the iconography of the flight into Egypt, the story of the falling idol originates in an apocryphal gospel, the Protoevangelium of James.10 According to this text, upon the Holy Family’s entrance into a pagan temple in Egypt, all of the temple’s idols crumbled in the presence of the Christ child. Thus the false gods of the pagans collapse before the true godhead. By 1500, painters often included this subsidiary narrative in depictions of the flight into Egypt.11 Netherlandish artists typically illustrated the idol’s spontaneous self-destruction by representing a figural sculpture toppling from its pedestal or cracking in two as the Holy Family passes. For example, in the right-hand background of Simon Bening’s illumination of around 1525– 30 (fig. 25), a golden statue breaks at the knees, its lower legs remaining fixed to its columnar base as the upper body topples. This idol takes the form of a classical statue positioned atop a freestanding column. Bruegel’s idol is not dissimilar to Bening’s. Both are

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Fig. 24 Pieter Bruegel, The Flight into Egypt, 1563, detail. Oil on panel. The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London. Photo: The Samuel Courtauld Trust. Fig. 25 Simon Bening, The Flight into Egypt, ca. 1525 – 30. Tempera colors, gold paint, gold leaf, and ink on parchment. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, MS Ludwig IX 19, fol. 47v. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

monochromatic, though Bruegel’s figure has a gray finish evocative of carved stone rather than Bening’s apparently metallic surface. The figure, though unidentifiable, holds a spear or staff similar to that of Bening’s illuminated idol. Yet in Bruegel’s Flight into Egypt, the pagan idol does not fall from a stone column but topples from a gabled wooden box attached to a tree. Bruegel was not the first artist to use the form of a tree shrine to imagine the falling idol of the apocryphal narrative. In the 1540s, Netherlandish artists in the circle of Lucas Gassel and Jan van Amstel had all used gabled shrines to house the falling idol in their respective depictions of the flight into Egypt.12 Bruegel, following these local predecessors, translates the pagan idol into a distinctly familiar idiom—that of a rural tree shrine. In its form, the falling idol recalls similar constructions seen at the center of Bruegel’s monumental panel of peasant labor Haymaking (fig. 26) and his drawing Wooded Landscape: all are small gabled wooden structures housing a devotional statue.13 This is markedly different from the structure of the (functionally similar) shrine pictured in Bruegel’s design for the engraving Hope (figs. 27 and 28).14 There, Bruegel depicts a shrine with an ornately carved or cast housing that rests on a column placed at the side of a busy city street. The complex composite form of this urban shrine reflects contemporary developments in Netherlandish architectural praxis. For

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Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

example, the Antwerp town hall of Cornelis Floris de Vriendt, under construction in the early 1560s, used a similar manipulation of classical orders.15 While the shrine of Hope was clearly made and used by city dwellers (fig. 28), the wooden form of the shrines in Haymaking and The Flight into Egypt reveal their rural use. Although the devotional figures within such rural shrines, usually made of wood or clay, were often mass-produced in cities like Antwerp and Mechelen, their gabled housing was often made by local artisans. Bruegel’s wooden shrines are thus simple, relatively unadorned objects, the product of peasant labor and their surrounding rural

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Fig. 26 | opposite Pieter Bruegel, Haymaking, from the series The Months, 1565. Oil on panel. Lobkowicz Palace, Prague. Photo: Lobkowicz Palace, Prague Castle, Czech Republic / Bridgeman Images.

Fig. 27 Philips Galle, after Pieter Bruegel, Hope (Spes), from the series The Virtues, 1559. Engraving. Published by Hieronymus Cock. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1928. Photo: www.metmuseum.org.

Fig. 28 Detail of Galle, after Bruegel, Hope (Spes), from the series The Virtues, 1559.

environment. Yet in The Flight into Egypt, this familiar type of shrine is cast backward in time. By picturing the falling idol as a peasant shrine, Bruegel draws upon the presumed historicity of local rural customs.

A Peasant Idol? The shrine in Bruegel’s Flight into Egypt, in both its facture and cultural origin, is a curious amalgam. The inner sculpture or idol appears to be the product of pagan antiquity, a form of classical statuary. The shape of the gabled shrine housing this object, however, would have been remarkably familiar to its audience. Post shrines and other local religious markers—images hung from trees, crosses posted in fields or along thoroughfares—turn up repeatedly in Bruegel’s images. On one level, Bruegel’s

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Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

frequent representation of these objects reflects the prominence of the rural shrine in Netherlandish provincial geography, but the juxtaposition of classical idol and local shrine also intersects with contemporary debates about rural religiosity and the imagined historical continuity of rural praxis and belief.16 In the Low Countries and across sixteenth-century Europe, thousands of obscure religious markers, post shrines, and crosses dotted the countryside. Often associated with particular neighborhood rituals (the blessing of the fields, healing, and the working of miracles), these crosses and shrines could also act as sites of remembrance, commemorating not only miraculous occurrences but also tragedies affecting individuals or the community at large.17 Some of these markers were part of local, regional, or even international pilgrimage networks, acting as signposts to other pilgrimage destinations. Thus, while often intensely local in origin and use, rural religious markers could also function as part of the sacred landscape of a global Christendom. Bruegel’s falling idol, housed in a gabled shrine attached to a pollarded willow, would have recalled the particular popularity of arboreal shrines in the Low Countries, among them trees shaped like crosses, image- or statue-bearing trees, and even trees thought to have healing powers.18 A striking number of Netherlandish Marian cults of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were associated with trees, including Our Lady of the Lime Tree, Our Lady of the Cherry Tree, Our Lady of the Alder, Our Lady of the Elm, Our Lady of the Vine, Our Lady of the Hazel, and Our Lady of the Dry Tree.19 The shrine in Bruegel’s Flight into Egypt, then, is a generic composite of such familiar local tree shrines, intended—perhaps surprisingly—to re-create the pagan idol of the apocryphal Christian text. Bruegel’s juxtaposition of the form of the gabled tree shrine and the falling pagan idol in The Flight into Egypt recalls complaints made by sixteenth-century religious reformers.20 Both Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli argued that the continued use of rural religious sites like tree shrines represented an erroneous and superstitious turn to local authority and folk magic.21 For many Protestants, the continuation of such pagan practices under a Catholic aegis was symptomatic of the compromised and corrupted nature of the contemporary church.22 Iconoclasts, eager to eradicate these perceived signs of persistent pagan memory, targeted rural crosses and shrines in particular.23 Even orthodox Catholics entertained doubts about the doctrinal basis for such folk traditions. Painted three years before the 1566 Netherlandish iconoclasm, or Beeldenstorm, Bruegel’s Flight into Egypt has been read as a related indictment of rural Catholic practice. In the Low Countries, the ideas of Luther, Zwingli, and other religious reformers circulated in print and via sermons delivered by field or hedge preachers (so called because in the mid-1560s, crowds of thousands gathered in the countryside outside Netherlandish towns and cities to hear these open-air sermons).24 Rural religious sites like those pictured in Haymaking and The Flight into Egypt were therefore not only places for popular devotion but also at the front line of reformist religious critique.

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Bruegel’s shrine— conflating rural religious marker and pagan idol—seems to connect the two modes of worship in precisely the same manner as those who disapproved of peasant shrines did. But The Flight into Egypt is one of the rare panels in Bruegel’s oeuvre for which scholars have identified an original, or at least very early, owner of the picture: the Habsburg statesman and churchman Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle. Granvelle, who addressed the opening session of the Council of Trent on behalf of Charles V, was a chief minister to Margaret of Parma (the regent ruler of the Low Countries) and, from 1561, cardinal and archbishop of Mechelen. Following Granvelle, the panel was later owned by the distinguished collectors Peter Paul Rubens and Pieter Stevens.25 Granvelle was a passionate collector and patron of the arts. His Brussels palace was enlarged and expanded throughout the 1550s to house his burgeoning collection of paintings, statues, antiquities, medals, small bronzes, prints, and drawings.26 Jacques Jonghelinck, the sculptor brother of Bruegel’s patron Nicolaes, had a studio in this residence; besides Jonghelinck, Granvelle supported the international careers of the Flemish sculptor Giambologna and the painter Antonis Mor. Granvelle probably acquired The Flight into Egypt directly from Bruegel, who had moved to Brussels late in 1563, the year the panel is dated.27 The following year, Granvelle was forced to leave the Low Countries when the local nobility opposed his role in the controversial enactment of political and religious policies of centralization. It is certainly possible, given the popularity of the hedge preachers and the increasing climate of mistrust vis-à-vis the Spanish, that Bruegel agreed with the criticism of contemporary religious reformers. But it is highly unlikely that The Flight into Egypt, owned by Cardinal Granvelle, represented any direct condemnation of the veneration of countryside shrines.28 Whatever Bruegel’s personal religious beliefs, it was both a political and an economic necessity to exercise self-preservation through professional opacity.29 Bruegel’s often overlooked move, in 1563, to Brussels, the center of the Habsburg administration, does not preclude the possibility that the artist held unorthodox opinions. It is more likely, however, that he was looking to cultivate court tastes rather than to subvert the religious and political establishment. That Granvelle owned The Flight into Egypt is evidence that Bruegel succeeded in finding patrons in this new setting. But if the painting does not conflate peasant shrine and pagan idol in the service of reformist rhetoric, then how does this strange detail operate within Bruegel’s image of biblical history?

A Hybrid Monument The shrine in The Flight into Egypt is more than a documentary element, a straightforward reflection of local religious topography; Bruegel’s idol-cum-shrine operates

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Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

as a site of cultural memory, signaling the historic character of local rural custom. This object is a hybrid form, an amalgamation of materials (wood/stone) and influences (local/foreign) as well as temporalities (present/past). Picturing the pagan idol as contemporary peasant shrine links the two objects across time and differing historical context via their functional similarity as testaments to the presence and power of a deity in the rural landscape. In translating the form of the pagan idol into that of the rural tree shrine, Bruegel also follows the earlier artistic model of Van Amstel and Gassel (fig. 23). These artists all produce in paint an Erasmian type of imitation, conceiving of the shift from pagan idol to peasant shrine as a kind of translation. In the Ciceronianus of 1527, Erasmus had addressed the problem of “correct imitation,” arguing that the inflexible repetition of Ciceronian form and vocabulary did not constitute the ideal imitation of classical rhetorical practice. Erasmus argued that the vocabulary of Cicero could and ought to be adapted to fit the conditions of everyday life.30 Similarly, Bruegel, Gassel, and the other artists who used the tree shrine as an idol selected a pictorial model of veneration known to their audience. These artists translated the entire biblical scene, set in the wilderness of Egypt, into a pseudo-Netherlandish countryside. The pagan idol, rather than being placed atop a classical column, was thus housed in a comparable familiar outdoor context, the gabled wooden shrine. This translation is appropriate not only because idol and shrine share a representative function, but also because the peasant shrine was increasingly viewed as a kind of historical remnant. The hybrid form of Bruegel’s shrine, then, does not point toward the heresy of peasant religion; instead, it manifests a growing sense of peasant culture as historic and as culturally distinct. I have discussed how peasant customs and traditions were mined as historical sources, buttressing the creation of an imagined vernacular antiquity in the absence of significant archaeological or textual remains. The pagan past was often accessed via the imagined antiquity of vernacular peasant culture. Seen in this light, it is not surprising that Bruegel turned to a familiar form of contemporary peasant religion in order to portray the distant past convincingly. The rural shrine translates the past event into a familiar contemporary form, and the form of the shrine is itself a comparable historical artifact. The temporal collapse inherent in the hybrid shrine supports potentially reformist readings of the panel, but it also offers another kind of interpretative social distinction. As we saw in the previous chapter, the peasant’s perceived temporal immobility was often used to signal the sociocultural differences between peasant populations and urban consumers of histories and collections of customs. The tree shrine is thus a testament to the historical character of Netherlandish peasant culture, but it also marks that culture as fixed and separate from that of the viewer. It is this sense of difference, rather than a particularly reformist disdain for a peasant superstition, that allows the pagan idol to be pictured in the form of a local peasant shrine.

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Shrines such as this one had previously been included in images of peripatetic or vagrant populations to mark their lack of community. Hieronymus Bosch, Albrecht Altdorfer, and Hans Holbein had all included such rural religious markers in scenes depicting early sixteenth-century peddlers or shepherds.31 Given the subject of The Flight into Egypt, Bruegel’s inclusion of the rural tree shrine holding an idol could also refer to the use of these markers by travelers bereft of social bonds to a fixed church and community. More typically, however, Bruegel depicts similar rural religious markers as functionally connected to rural communities, used and maintained by local people. For example, in Bruegel’s Peasant Dance (fig. 56), it was presumably the dancing peasants themselves who placed flowers in the jug hanging below an image of the Virgin affixed to the tree at right.32 In Haymaking (fig. 26), the post shrine stands on the roadside between the fields where the peasants work and a line of figures bearing baskets of fruit and vegetables back to the village. A tiny barrel is affixed below the devotional statue, where offerings (monetary or symbolic, such as a sheaf of wheat) could be placed in acknowledgment of a successful harvest.33 The fertility of the field was thus specifically connected to the efficacy of the local shrine and the peasant’s labor. In Haymaking, Bruegel pictorially reinforces these causal links between the fertility of the fields, the labor of the local peasantry, and the rural shrine. The hybrid shrine in The Flight into Egypt thus signals both the Holy Family’s journey into the unknown and the historical continuity of a familiar local peasant practice. As a hybrid form, the shrine reminds the viewer of the antiquity of the historic moment depicted while also creating a link to the contemporary Netherlandish viewer’s experience of rural life. These kinds of rural religious customs were seen as part of a longue durée phenomenon. The presumed duration of these customs made them problematic for religious reformers. Given the provenance of The Flight into Egypt, however, Bruegel’s hybrid shrine is more a monument to local history than a direct critique of the persistence of pagan mores. But the shrine is not the only historical artifact in Bruegel’s Flight into Egypt. Halfway up the rocky outcrop at left, there is another man-made monument to historical time: a broken column. Painted in the same blue-gray and warm yellow pigments as the mountains, the column is distinguishable from the rocks surrounding it only by the outlines of its rounded base and abruptly shattered top. The presence of a fragmented column in a landscape typically symbolizes the remains of classical antiquity, as in Bening’s earlier illumination (fig. 25). The broken classical column and the locally derived arboreal shrine are positioned opposite each other in a diagonal running along the center of Bruegel’s panel. The Holy Family is about to descend into the dark valley separating these two enigmatic objects, one an archaeological remnant of the antique past, the other a hybrid object collapsing contemporary vernacular tradition into its imagined pagan origin.

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Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

Each represents a version of history, one derived from classical antiquity and the other from vernacular history. I have discussed how historians, linguists, geographers, and collectors of customs drew upon both ancient sources and local customs as comparable source material for the imagining of a Netherlandish history. In The Flight into Egypt, Bruegel pictures these competing, but not exclusive, modes of historical imagination via these two artifacts: hybrid peasant shrine and classical column. The panel is what Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood have termed an “anachronic” work of art—that is, an object that depicts hesitation and/or the multiplication of temporal constructs.34 In this case, I would argue that Bruegel hesitates or visualizes the tensions between the archaeological model (column) and the use of custom and tradition as a substitute for the past (shrine) within the contemporary historical imagination. Nagel and Wood have described how Renaissance viewers understood artifacts’ potential to belong simultaneously to more than one historical moment.35 Expanding Nagel and Wood’s argument beyond the object, I contend that historians and collectors of customs like Guicciardini and Ortelius treated customs and traditions (such as the building of tree shrines) as both ancient and contemporary in a similar manner. The figure of the peasant was the ideal vehicle, or substitute, for a vernacular antiquity. The customs and traditions of the Netherlandish peasant were figured as unchanging, both observable in the present and originating in the deep past. The hybrid shrine in The Flight into Egypt demonstrates how peasant practice is subject to this kind of temporal collapse, as Bruegel assumes that rural people have always built such objects and that therefore such locally produced artifacts offer access to an otherwise remote past. The familiar local tree shrine is depicted as a historical, pre-Christian construction, yet it also directly calls to mind the hundreds of tree shrines and chapels (and their supposed historicity) dispersed throughout the Low Countries. The contemporary peasant shrine is connected via a chain of memories, replications, and substitutions with the pagan idol. This is what religious reformers found so upsetting: the idea that this chain could extend back even to the practices of rural people prior to the Christianization of Europe. While Bruegel does not picture the peasant as a contemporary pagan in the service of a reformist polemic, a certain moral and cultural ambiguity underlies the artist’s temporal logic. The rural tree shrine, understood as the antique product of a local culture, is a vernacular alternative to the ruined column pictured on the opposite side of The Flight into Egypt. The building of rural religious markers is a vehicle of cultural transmission over time, unchanging from generation to generation; peasants build shrines as they have always built them. But the classical architectural form of the column embodies another kind of survival, an archaeological recovery. The column refers to classical ruins known through prints like Hieronymus Cock’s 1551

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Fig. 29 Joannes van Doetecum the Elder and Lucas van Doetecum, after Hieronymus Cock, View of Ruins, from the Operum antiquorum Romanorum, 1562. Etching and engraving. Published by Hieronymus Cock. British Museum, London. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum / Art Resource, New York.

and 1562 series of etched and engraved views of Roman ruins (figs. 8 and 29).36 Additionally, recalling our encounter with Brittenburg, such archaeological finds, though rare, were not unheard of in the Low Countries. The painted column could therefore also refer to the local landscape’s own potential for archaeological discovery, as at Brittenburg. The inclusion of both the column and the shrine draws attention to both objects as embodiments of time. Their juxtaposition simultaneously promotes and denies the importance of the physical survival of antiquity. The column has endured, albeit in a fragmentary form; the tradition of building wooden arboreal shrines is sustained, although the pagan idol within has fallen. Bruegel does not picture the use of custom or of archaeological finds as incompatible historical models, as both the column and the shrine work to situate his Flight into Egypt in the past.37 Rather, in this panel Bruegel pictures both models of historical thinking operating in the same space.

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Fig. 30 Pieter Bruegel, The Tower of Babel, 1563. Oil on panel. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York.

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

Architectural History in The Tower of Babel Bruegel illustrates the same tension between historical models in another scene of biblical history painted the same year as The Flight into Egypt, but this time on a much larger scale. On a panel more than a meter square, The Tower of Babel (fig. 30) depicts the gargantuan construction of Nimrod’s Babel, reaching toward heaven.38 Again, Bruegel juxtaposes the language of classical architecture with local building techniques and traditions. His tower takes its façade and structural makeup (red brick clad with stone) from the antique Roman Colosseum, while its construction takes place in a contemporary Flemish town. Bruegel must have seen the ancient stadium while in Rome in the early 1550s. Though no drawings of the structure by his hand survive, we know that Bruegel visited the city because his drawing of Rome’s port at the Ripa Grande is extant.39 By the mid-sixteenth century, the Colosseum had become a symbolic locus for the achievements of antiquity. Around the same time that Bruegel drew the Ripa Grande, Bruegel’s fellow Netherlander Maarten van Heemskerck painted a 1553 double selfportrait, picturing himself posed in front of the edifice (fig. 31). In the background, Heemskerck shows himself drawing from the ruin, as if to certify his artistic and intellectual credentials. Aside from the reference to the Colosseum in The Tower of Babel, Bruegel, as far as we know, did not produce such an overt proclamation of his own experiences with Roman antiquity, but his visit to the city must have exposed him to classical artifacts. Mid-sixteenth-century Rome was a vast building site. Pope Paul III had handed over exclusive rights to excavate the ruins of the Forum to those in charge of building the new Saint Peter’s Basilica according to the aging Michelangelo’s designs for the site. Bruegel’s visit to the city at this moment would thus have provided a vision of Roman antiquities as an ancient form and exposed their potential for modern reuse and transformation. In Bruegel’s Tower of Babel, the lines of stone are clean and unbroken; the artist reimagines the famous chipped and overgrown ruin as a new edifice. The painting produces something akin to the physical experience of classical antiquity in contemporary Rome, where the distant past was in the process of being recovered and transformed by modern construction methods. Although Bruegel’s vision of the tower in the form of a rebuilt Colosseum was unique, his evocation of Rome as Babylon was not new. As early as the fifth century, Saint Augustine had called Rome the “Babylon of the West.”40 In the sixteenth century, it was religious reformers who most often argued for a symbolic link between Rome and the city of Babel, punished by God. Margaret Carroll has recently documented how commonly this epithet was used in the 1550s and ’60s in the escalating political and religious conflicts taking place in the Low Countries.41 Bruegel’s tower is placed next to a recognizable Netherlandish cityscape, leading many art historians to

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conclude that the artist was proposing an analogous critique of Roman dominion (via the Habsburgs and the Roman church) over the Low Countries.42 As in our discussion of Bruegel’s Flight into Egypt, a closer consideration of the Tower of Babel’s original context undermines a reading of the panel as an outright critique of contemporary religious and political circumstances. The 1563 Tower of Babel was probably owned by Nicolaes Jonghelinck. Although he came from a lower social class than Granvelle—from the ranks of Antwerp’s merchants and tradesmen rather

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Fig. 31 Maarten van Heemskerck, SelfPortrait with Colosseum, 1553. Oil on panel. Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK. Photo © Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge / Art Resource, New York.

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

than European aristocracy—Jonghelinck was also a wealthy and prominent art collector associated with Habsburg rule.43 An ambitious Antwerp merchant, Jonghelinck leased the right to collect the Habsburg government’s toll of Zeeland (a tax on all goods shipped to the region) and the Brabant land tax, covering goods traveling though Antwerp, Louvain, and Brussels. In 1554, he purchased a country estate at ’t Goed ter Beke, a large suburban villa outside Antwerp in a neighborhood inhabited by well-off merchants. In 1556, Philip II, the king of Spain and ruler of the Low Countries, visited Jonghelinck’s villa, where the merchant’s art collection was held. As part of Jonghelinck’s collection, it is unlikely that The Tower of Babel contained any overt or direct criticism of Habsburg rule in the Low Countries. Jonghelinck, after all, depended on the Habsburgs for his lucrative positions; his sculptor brother, Jacques, similarly benefited from Granvelle’s artistic patronage. Jonghelinck’s art collection and his estate at Ter Beke were part of a strategy of social advancement, allowing the merchant to emulate the real estate holdings and wealthy trappings of the historic nobility.44 As with The Flight into Egypt, the social position of Bruegel’s known patron makes it unlikely that this panel contained an intentional political barb. Instead, the painting reconfigures the present as a continuum of the past so that the similarities between Nimrod and Philip II in the Vienna Tower of Babel function more generally as an allegory of the overambitious nature of human sovereignty

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Fig. 32 Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy, France. Photograph. Photo © iStock.com/Jasmina81.

rather than as a specific indictment of Habsburg rule.45 Peter Parshall has described Bruegel’s images of Babel as paradoxically “topical in their very refusal to be so”; that is, the artist often chose topically resonant subjects but depicted them in such a way as to stymie the identification of specific referents.46 Thus, while not denying a potential reading of the panel as political or religious satire, I am more interested in how The Tower of Babel pictures history. Following our discussion of the hybrid shrine in The Flight into Egypt, I specifically want to explore Bruegel’s references to the Colosseum as addressing the problematic project of historical reconstruction. Here, my interest is in the panel as a complex meditation on the nature of time and historical imagination. As in The Flight into Egypt, the composite forms of Bruegel’s tower bring together materials and traditions associated with both the city and the countryside, classical antiquity and more contemporary building traditions. Bruegel’s tower evokes the Roman Colosseum but also the much nearer island commune at Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy (fig. 32), where the successive Romanesque and Gothic fortifications and abbey arise from a coastal granite outcropping.47 The waterfront location and geographic foundation of Bruegel’s tower echo this famous Christian pilgrimage destination, while the form of the structure is based upon the most renowned ruin of pagan antiquity. But the tower is not composed solely of classically derived or even Gothic monumental architecture. A number of subsidiary structures are crammed between the massive piers and arches of Bruegel’s tower. Many of these discordant buildings have thatched roofs, signaling their distinctly rural character. From the start of the sixteenth century, thatch-roofed buildings had been forbidden in many Netherlandish towns and cities as a fire hazard.48 The recognizably contemporary Netherlandish city surrounding the painted tower contains no thatched-roof structures; Bruegel

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Fig. 33 Pieter Bruegel, The Tower of Babel, 1563, detail. Oil on panel. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York.

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

pointedly places such edifices only outside the city walls, apparently in deference to contemporary practice. Yet this clear architectural distinction between urban, suburban, and rural is not maintained in the tower itself, where thatch-roofed cottages, wooden structures, and brick subsidiary buildings have been built into the very fabric of the stone structure. These vernacular buildings, presumably intended to hold the families of the builders and masons at work on the great tower, employ construction materials typically associated with local rural buildings, distinct from the brick and stone construction methods of the tower. These quotidian workers’ cottages would have been recognized as rural, at odds with the urban setting of the tower. Ledges have also been transformed into improbable gardens (fig. 33), and laundry hangs on a line suspended from one of the tower’s magnificent arches. Local rural architectural tradition is shown as physically and temporally contiguous with antique classical architecture, and as occupying a setting evocative of a renowned pilgrimage site. The tower is thus both rural and urban, pagan and Christian, local and foreign. Like the practice of building tree shrines, the wooden and thatched construction of rural villages and these worker cottages was also figured as “ancient” by sixteenthcentury historians of the Low Countries. Since the fifteenth century, even prior to the rediscovery of Tacitus’s Germania, wooden thatch-roofed architecture had been associated with northern architectural practice and history.49 In 1567, Hadrianus Junius’s Nomenclator, an octolingual, thematically organized dictionary (including,

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for example, sections on food and drink, animals, costumes, occupations) made an explicit linguistic connection between such ancient and rural building types, rendering tugurium Virg (virgin hut) as boeren huysken (little peasant house).50 Again, the perceived antiquity of peasant culture allows Bruegel to produce a hybrid historic form. His tower is based on a specific archaeological survival from the pagan past (the Colosseum) but incorporates traditional building types envisaged as unchanged since ancient times. Both the shrine in The Flight into Egypt and Bruegel’s Tower of Babel propose multiple ways to recover antiquity or picture history. The story of the Tower of Babel centers on hubris; as punishment for attempting to build a tower reaching to heaven, God scatters the people of earth and inflicts on them a confusion of languages so that they will no longer be able to understand one another. Bruegel’s depiction of the tower’s construction—the erecting of scaffolding, cutting of stone, winching up of supplies, unloading of supply ships—at first conceals the doomed nature of this hive of activity. Yet, on closer inspection, it becomes clear that the inside and outside of the ascending structure do not align. The tower’s verticals rise perpendicular to the slow incline of the spiraling base, implying that the entire structure is lopsided and will grow dangerously so as the structure rises.51 The ingenuity and detail of Bruegel’s design, the artist’s remarkable precision in rendering the tower’s architecture, as well as the ships, machinery, and processes of construction around the edifice, conceal the fact that the structure is destined to collapse. The tower evokes the ruin of the Colosseum, and it too is destined to become a ruin. Still in the process of being built, the tower is shown as—inevitably—already falling. Like The Flight into Egypt’s hybrid shrine, Bruegel’s tower is shown in the process of its own physical and temporal collapse. In both cases, we are watching a ruin come into being. If, pace Alberti, the greatest work “of a painter is not a colossus but the historia,” Bruegel’s Tower of Babel gives viewers a colossus that challenges the very notion of a single model of history. In recording humanity’s attempt to bridge the gap between heaven and earth, Bruegel reflects upon competing methods for joining a comparable gap between the faraway past and the observable present. Archaeology and custom offer contrasting but not exclusive models of historical imagination. In The Tower of Babel, as in The Flight into Egypt, Bruegel uses stylistic architectural differences— columns and gabled wooden shrines, stone arches and thatched roofs—to invoke these multiple yet insufficient paths to the past.

Style as Archaeology in Christ Carrying the Cross Bruegel’s awareness of style as a marker of the historical imagination at work is perhaps clearest in another of his biblical narratives, the 1564 Christ Carrying the Cross (fig. 34). Most probably also owned by Jonghelinck, this painting uses a marked shift

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Fig. 34 Pieter Bruegel, Christ Carrying the Cross, 1564. Oil on panel. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York.

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

in figural styles rather than contrasts in architectural language to suggest the multiple models available for the representation of this historic event. In Christ Carrying the Cross, Bruegel’s juxtaposition of different methods of reconstructing the past ultimately suggests the inherent subjectivity of the historical imagination. Bruegel’s Christ Carrying the Cross returns to an iconography thought to originate in the mid-fifteenth century with Jan van Eyck: a depiction of the figure of Christ bearing the cross toward Golgotha, born along by a tide of humanity. This Eyckian iconography (fig. 35) was reinterpreted by artists like Hieronymus Bosch (whose lost design is supposedly the basis for Lambert Lombard’s print design, fig. 65), by artists in the circle of Jan van Amstel and Henri met de Bles in the 1530s and ’40s, and by Pieter Aertsen in the 1550s, before its eventual redeployment by Bruegel here in 1564.52 Although the panel is indebted to this long local tradition for its overall compositional formula, Bruegel extended the scope of earlier scenes. The large panel is populated by an unparalleled sea of humanity occupied in dozens of small dramas: some are tangentially related to the central narrative (Simon of Cyrene’s wife has dropped her jug and pulls at her husband’s arm to prevent his being conscripted into assisting Christ), but most are incidental moments—men checking their shoes for mud, a small child being carried across a puddle, friends sharing a bowl of cherries. The view of the landscape has been zoomed out from earlier models, allowing for glimpses of distant towns and villages and even a harbor. Bruegel ambitiously expands the purview of an established Netherlandish iconographic tradition, both micro- and macroscopically. Bruegel, like many of his contemporaries and artistic predecessors, depicts the procession to Golgotha as if it is taking place in the present moment. Paralleling an Erasmian mode of imitation, the scene has been moved in space and time from the era of Christ to the present-day Low Countries. This was a common feature of sixteenthcentury Netherlandish biblical imagery, as we have seen in our discussion of The Flight into Egypt; Bruegel’s snow-covered Adoration of the Magi, Census at Bethlehem, and Massacre of the Innocents—Christmas narratives set in the frozen Flemish countryside—are further examples of this kind of temporal/geographic shift.53 Bruegel’s groups of contemporary figures in Christ Carrying the Cross, as Reindert Falkenburg has cogently argued, allow the viewer to judge and compare responses to Christ’s sacrifice.54 Anachronistic details within the scene, such as the rosary hanging from Simon of Cyrene’s wife, allow the viewer to reflect upon the hypocrisy of observing the outward forms but not the spirit of Christian compassion.55 Thus the familiar mass of Bruegel’s unsuspecting witnesses to the impending crucifixion underscores a perceived bond between the past and present: spiritual blindness. Bruegel’s Blind Leading the Blind, a later glue-size on linen painting directly connecting spiritual and physical blindness, pictures this proverbial saying depicted a historical truth in Christ Carrying the Cross.56 This is a vision of history as

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continually repeating itself, unable to recognize Christ’s divine nature either then or now. Formally, Bruegel’s march to Calvary resembles a wheel, with a strange rock formation surmounted by a windmill as its hub. The narrative is presented as moving along a predefined circular path around this rock, suggesting that the very landscape has been worn down by this endless repeating procession of human error and that history itself is a repetitive cycle.57 The contemporaneous dress of the crowd, coupled with the particular circular form of Bruegel’s composition, condemns man’s unending folly; the painting suggests that Bruegel’s contemporaries would crucify Christ with the same blindness to his divinity that afflicted his tormentors. The metaphor of blindness is underscored by the invisibility of Christ in this scene—he is a tiny blue figure at the very center of the panel, struggling under the weight of the cross amid hordes of witnesses. Even for those viewers primed

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Fig. 35 Sixteenth-century Netherlandish artist, after Jan van Eyck, Christ Carrying the Cross, ca. 1500 –1515. Oil on panel. Szépmu´´vészeti Museum, Budapest. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York.

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

to identify him, it is difficult to recognize Christ. The viewer, too, is tempted to become engrossed in the many subsidiary narratives taking place across this vast panel. Finding the moment of historical significance—the minuscule figure of Christ bearing the cross—is made challenging, in spite of Christ’s position at the physical center of the panel. In Bruegel’s painting, physical vision requires diligence and focus in a manner analogous to spiritual vision. He encourages the viewer to look through his painting to the spiritual center, but he also tempts that viewer away from this interpretative path, making the act of seeing a subject of the painting itself.58 Those who do recognize the tragedy of Christ’s death are notably outside the circular pathway of the masses. Four mourning figures are positioned prominently in the right foreground of Bruegel’s panel, rendered in a style markedly different from the crowd making its way to Calvary. Their dress, elongated limbs, and expressive gestures recall works by fifteenth-century Flemish painters such as Rogier van der Weyden (fig. 36). Bruegel here invites comparison between his own work and that of his most illustrious local predecessors. Mark Meadow has described Bruegel’s citation of Rogieresque figures as an “archaeological examination” of earlier Netherlandish art, evidence that the artist aligned himself with a historic local idiom in opposition to imported Italianate models.59 I return in chapter 4 to this question of Bruegel’s supposed stylistic “allegiances”; here, I should like to focus on what Meadow sees as Bruegel’s “archaeological” citation of

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Fig. 36 Rogier van der Weyden, Crucifixion with the Virgin and Saint John the Evangelist Mourning, ca. 1460. Oil on panel. Philadelphia Museum of Art, John G. Johnson Collection, 1917. Photo: The Philadelphia Museum of Art / Art Resource, New York.

fifteenth-century Netherlandish art, connecting this panel to the artist’s interest in style as a marker of historical imagination. The viewer recognizes these figures’ historical difference via their stylistic alterity; these are the models of ideal faith, but they are also marked as the historical witnesses to Christ’s death. The stark contrast between these foreground figures in Christ Carrying the Cross—who are not only depicted in a different style but are also larger in scale, wear antiquated costumes, and are physically isolated from their surroundings—and the rest of the scene makes this group immediately noticeable. Given that the panel probably hung at Jonghelinck’s Ter Beke, in a villa that also housed a work by the celebrated German painter Albrecht Dürer, one may also assume that many of the painting’s original viewers were aware of its particular reference to northern art history. While there is no doubt that the emotive response of these figures is intended to model an appropriate reaction to the impending crucifixion, the glaring stylistic differences between these figures and the remainder of the crowd also draw attention to the mediated nature of the biblical scene itself. Rather than translate the entire scene into the

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present moment, Bruegel’s vignette of recognizably older figures exposes the historical imagination at work. The figures in the foreground are pictured as if they were reanimated from an older painting. The jarring archaism of these figures alongside the contemporary hordes on their way to Golgotha forces the viewer to consider how these figures operate within the larger scene. Their clear stylistic and compositional separation suggests temporal distance, yet they are also part of the larger narrative. Bruegel’s inclusion of this antiquated group of mourners alongside the contemporary crowd reveals the contingent nature of representation; the artist produces different visions of the same event nested within one another on the same panel.60 Keith Moxey, quoting W.  J.  T. Mitchell, describes the painting as a “metapicture,” illustrating the transitional status between the presentation of Christ’s life and the representation of its significance for the devout viewer.61 I would argue that the panel’s stylistic bifurcation between mourners and uncomprehending crowd also demonstrates how history can be imagined in different ways at different moments. The disconnect between the contemporary multitude and the old-fashioned mourners in Christ Carrying the Cross reveals the staged nature of any historical reconstruction. Bruegel reflects upon how artists of the previous century translated the holy mourners of Christ’s death into their own stylistic idiom. His decision to include this outmoded group presents his vision of the procession to Calvary as one of many images of the past. The panel’s all-encompassing view allows the viewer to survey both the swarm of humanity and the distilled devotional moment in the foreground and to consider both representations of the biblical narrative side by side. Art historians have long described the parallels between Bruegel’s use of the elevated viewpoint in many of his religious paintings and landscapes, including this one, and the neo-Stoic detachment practiced by humanists like Bruegel’s friend Ortelius.62 Sixteenth-century neo-Stoics like Ortelius combined an embrace of antique Senecan stoicism with a Christian belief in the preordained nature of history; but it was only after Bruegel’s death in 1584 that Justus Lipsius formalized this philosophical outlook in his De constantia (On Constancy). Neo-Stoic detachment was not simply about removing oneself from the world; contemplation of the world was intended to produce appropriate spiritual action.63 In Christ Carrying the Cross, Bruegel offers viewers a chance to consider their own faith and actions—in the present moment, in an imagined historical past, and in comparison to an older model of devotion. Not only does the panel force the viewer to question how he or she would respond to the spectacle of the crucifixion; exposing the mediated nature of this vision of the past also poses a related question: how does one identify what needs to be seen and remembered? How does history come to be recorded? In his paintings of religious history, Bruegel proposes several methods for the reconstruction of the past, emphasizing

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the role of individual agency in the reconstruction of history in a method related to, yet distinct from, the tenets of neo-Stoic philosophy. In the three panels discussed in this chapter, Bruegel encourages a detached view of the scene depicted and a consideration of various historical models he uses to imagine history. The artist also encourages the viewer to recognize the human hand in the fabrication of history via the maintenance of customs, the retrieval of artifacts, and the recognition of artistic styles. Rather than stress humanity’s remove from the world, Bruegel’s pictures acknowledge that people make history in various ways, through text, ruins, or living traditions. In the paintings discussed here—Christ Carrying the Cross, The Tower of Babel, and The Flight into Egypt—Bruegel contrasts an archaeological remnant (a historic local painting idiom, the Colosseum, a column) with a view of history as accessible via the behavior of the viewer’s own contemporaries. In each case, the present makes the past accessible. Bruegel goes beyond the textual foundation of history, then, complementing familiar aspects of the historical religious narrative with the depiction of practices rooted in local cultural traditions perceived as historic. This practice calls upon the viewer’s familiarity with the textual source and the iconographic tradition, but it also appeals to the contemporary audience’s appreciation of the historicity of familiar local customs such as the building of tree shrines and thatched-roof cottages. Bruegel’s pictures of history comment on the difficulties of historical reconstruction by testing the viewer’s ability to see history in action. The Holy Family and the falling idol are minuscule in the landscape of The Flight into Egypt. The impeccably rendered structure of the Tower of Babel conceals its fatal design flaw. Christ is surrounded by crowds of distracting subsidiary narratives. The viewer’s own absorption in the apparent variety and veracity of material details threatens the ultimate message of these religious scenes.64 The viewer is encouraged to scrutinize the moment history is created and the ways in which that history is being imagined. In these three encounters with Bruegel’s images of religious history, we can see how Bruegel acknowledges the manifold ways in which history can be represented and imagined—through textual source, as archaeological remnant, via the continuation of lived tradition or the citation of archaic artistic style. Contemporary viewers could consider the links between these various modes of historical thinking by comparing and discussing the artworks before them.65 At Jonghelinck’s villa or Granvelle’s palace, where the panels originally hung, visitors could offer related commentary on local architectural and artistic heritage, the classical past, and universal human error. Bruegel’s images of historical subjects do not oppose an archaeological recovery or a classicizing reconstruction of the past; rather, they picture the representation of history as the result of a continual negotiation between the recovery of artifacts and the lived history of tradition. History, for Bruegel, is always being written and rewritten, reimagined and pictured in new ways and diverse styles. Hybrid Histories 79

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ch a p t er 3

Bacchic Excess

For the modern French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, three seemingly unrelated words— country, peasant, landscape— express a syntactical case of conceptual

Pays, paysan, paysage (country, peasant, landscape): this is like the declension of a word

unity. In the previous chapters, we have explored the temporal dimension of

or, rather, of a semanteme

this same semanteme, specifically, how peasant traditions and local customs

three words, each of which

that would not be any of these

were imagined as vehicles for a distinctly Netherlandish history tied to the lo-

would be one of its cases.

cal landscape. In this chapter, I focus on Bruegel’s well-studied images of the

of location (pays), the case of

Netherlandish peasantry and local festivity, discussing how these works intersect with the models of historical thinking explored thus far. As custom is transformed into history, pictures of peasants at work and at play take on new interpretative dimensions.

Here, I propose a perhaps surprising addition to Nancy’s formulation—

There would thus be a case occupation (paysan), and the case of representation (paysage). The location, occupation, and representation of a single reality.

—jean-luc nancy, The Ground of the Image

that of the Bacchic—as related to the conceptual triad of country, peasant, landscape, but temporally shifted to antiquity. Using the collection of Nicolaes Jonghelinck as a guide, I examine the understudied links between Bacchic and peasant imagery in Bruegel’s work. The Bacchic referent not only provides a negative exemplar for middle- and upper-class viewers; it also, crucially, validates and historicizes local practice by casting it as ancient. If peasant custom

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Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

could provide a living link to the local pagan past, Bruegel’s peasants could become contemporary bacchants, avatars of a vernacular antiquity. Nicolaes Jonghelinck’s country estate, called ’t Goed ter Beke, was one of the largest plots in a suburban development designed to capitalize on wealthy Antwerpers’ desire for country retreats. There were more than 350 such villas (called a speelhuys or a hof de plaisance) within twenty-five kilometers of Antwerp.1 A kind of rural retreat from the business of the city, these properties often conferred seigniorial status on their owners, while acting as a shrewd capital investment. Yet spelhuizen were not only the purview of the wealthy—access to clean water and pastureland meant that bakers, butchers, and brewers all owned countryside plots, not only for their enjoyment but for the benefit of their businesses.2 Whatever its capital value, a speelhuys was seen primarily as a space for leisure. Villa construction outside Antwerp and elsewhere was spurred on by the publication of so-called villa books on estate management that appeared from around 1540 onward, part of a broader renovatio of antique culture and its distinction between otium (leisure) and negotium (daily business).3 In the words of Charles Estienne, the author of a sixteenth-century European-wide best-seller on country villas, one lived a “life of liberty and innocence” in such homes.4 The building of spelhuizen like Ter Beke physically marked the suburban or rural environment as a space for “leisure,” at least for those who made their money in town.5 At Ter Beke, Jonghelinck amassed an impressive art collection for the enjoyment of himself and his guests, including a work by Dürer, more than twenty paintings by Frans Floris, and sixteen works by Bruegel.6 Jonghelinck’s collection of Bruegel’s paintings included Christ Carrying the Cross (fig. 34), The Tower of Babel (fig. 30), and the series The Months (figs. 2, 26, 41, and 42). In the later 1560s, Jonghelinck intended to install a series of eight nearly lifesize bronzes at this rural retreat, alongside this sizeable collection of paintings. The series, Statues of Bacchus and the Seven Planets, was completed by Nicolaes’s sculptor brother, Jacques. The surprising inclusion of Bacchus alongside the seven planets may have been a nod to the elder Jonghelinck’s role as the collector of the Antwerp excise tax on wine. The statue Bacchus, now preserved at Aranjuez (fig. 37), was originally designed as a fountain, presumably to stand at the center of the group. After much legal wrangling over the statue’s ownership following Nicolaes’s death, the city of Antwerp bought Bacchus for the triumphal entry of Alessandro Farnese in 1585, and it was eventually given to Farnese.7 As one of the few surviving large-scale mythological sculptures by Jacques Jonghelinck (or any sixteenth-century sculptor working in the Netherlands, for that matter), the art-historical significance of the Bacchus is unquestionable; at issue here is how it embodies the complex vision of Bacchic antiquity as understood in the Low Countries in the later sixteenth century. Surviving Renaissance guidebooks to Rome attest to the popularity of Bacchus in the sixteenth century’s imagination of classical antiquity, in descriptions of popular

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Fig. 37 Jacques Jonghelinck, Bacchus, ca. 1563 – 69. Bronze. Jardin de la Isla, Palace of Aranjuez, Madrid. Photo © iStock.com/ outsiderzone.

sites like the Mausoleum of Constantia and the ruins on the Aventine Hill as “Bacchic temples.”8 In the writings of Euripides, Strabo, Proclus, and other ancient sources, Bacchus is characterized by diverse, often contradictory qualities: he is a god of fertility and joy, muse of the arts, font of foolish intemperance and fury, and even the conqueror of India and a transmitter of civilization.9 Yet to the sixteenth-century mind, the ancient god of the vine was seen primarily as an allegorical representative of the vita voluptaria, a life devoted to the carnal pleasures of eating and drinking.10 Jonghelinck’s Bacchus is shown seated on a wine barrel, a traditional pose for the deity. At the 1561 Antwerp Landjuweel, the annual competition between Netherlandish rederijkers, or rhetoricians, one play depicted the wine god seated astride a barrel (fig. 38) alongside Ceres, the goddess of agriculture.11 This iconography turns up in the records of ephemeral creations, from exploding fireworks to table decorations.12

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Fig. 38 Sixteenth-century Netherlandish School, illustration to De Lelie (Diest) Haagspel, from Spelen van sinne (Antwerp: Willem Silvius, 1562). Woodcut. Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, call no. Neth 4397.1*3*. Photo courtesy of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

Contemporary prints depicting Bacchus as an agricultural deity present him atop a barrel alongside scenes of the autumn grape harvest; erudite emblem books often used the same visual topos.13 The Bacchus-on-a-barrel motif was clearly popular. There is an extant counterproof of a print of Bacchus on a barrel, dated 1552 and formerly attributed to Cornelis Cort, on the verso of an impression of Bruegel’s 1560 etching The Rabbit Hunt, indicating the sustained demand for images of Bacchus.14 At the other end of the market from Plantin’s emblem books and Cock’s prints, a fragment of a sixteenth-century pipe-clay plaquette found in Antwerp shows Bacchus and another figure, again sitting on top of a barrel.15 Such plaquettes typically represented devotional or religious subjects and were produced for pilgrims or parishioners on saints’ days. This object, along with related plaquettes depicting dancing peasants and fools, was mass-produced and probably made for the celebrants of carnival or another festive occasion. Jonghelinck’s Bacchus recognizes this link between local carnival and the ancient god of wine. In fact, Bacchus’s rotund figure resembles the fleshy personification of vernacular carnival more than the heroic male nudes of Jonghelinck’s Seven Planets. This stylistic difference registers most clearly when one compares the engravings of the bronzes completed by Philips Galle in 1586 (figs. 39 and 40) with the statue itself. The engraver has superimposed six-pack abdominals and other musculature on top of the undulating bronze surfaces rendering slack flesh, in an attempt to harmonize the engraved Bacchus figure with the representations of the other statues in the sculptural group. Indeed, Jonghelinck’s corpulent Bacchus looks more like one of Bruegel’s fleshy peasants than he does a classical Apollo. He is the relative of the rotund carouser in the right foreground of The Gloomy Day (fig. 41) or the unconscious laborer in the center of The Harvesters (fig. 42), two paintings also owned by Nicolaes Jonghelinck and on display at Ter Beke. As we shall see, Jonghelinck’s Bacchus also recalls the painted figure of King Carnival in Bruegel’s The Battle Between Carnival and Lent (fig. 47), who is shown in Bacchus’s familiar pose astride a barrel. The

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Fig. 39 Philips Galle, after Jacques Jonghelinck, Apollo (Sol), from the Statues of Bacchus and the Seven Planets, 1586. Engraving. British Museum, London. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum / Art Resource, New York.

Fig. 40 Philips Galle, after Jacques Jonghelinck, Bacchus, from the Statues of Bacchus and the Seven Planets, 1586. Engraving. British Museum, London. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum / Art Resource, New York.

resonances between Bruegel’s festive peasants and Jonghelinck’s Bacchus demonstrate the mobility and flexibility of the antique referent in the later sixteenthcentury Low Countries. The familiar form of the local peasant and the figures of Bacchus and carnival mingle and overlap in a particularly Netherlandish symbolic economy where antiquity, fecundity, festivity, and moral and social distinctions operate simultaneously.

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Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

In Bruegel’s scenes of religious history, we have seen how antiquity was pictured as both archaeological and cultural survival, encompassing the ruins of the Colosseum and the preservation of peasant customs. The iconographic echoes between Jonghelinck’s Bacchus and Bruegel’s peasants demonstrate a related phenomenon in which classical antiquity and vernacular identity intersect. Bruegel’s scenes of the local peasantry and their festive customs play with a multifaceted local Bacchic iconography in order to develop a new aesthetic of excess. Bruegel’s evocation of Bacchus is thus not only a case study in the complex reception of the classical past

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Fig. 41 | opposite Pieter Bruegel, The Gloomy Day, from the series The Months, 1565. Oil on panel. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York.

Fig. 42 Pieter Bruegel, The Harvesters, from the series The Months, 1565. Oil on panel. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1919. Photo: www.metmuseum.org.

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in the Low Countries; it also provides a useful example of how the artist creates vernacular avatars for antiquity, generating a discursive field of stylistic and hermeneutic possibilities for the imagining of history.

The Bacchic Guise of Summer

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

Bruegel’s 1568 design for the engraving Summer (fig. 43) illustrates the complexities of the Bacchic referent in sixteenth-century Netherlandish culture. Bacchus was not only the god of wine but was considered, along with Ceres, a god of agricultural fecundity and terrestrial abundance, particularly associated with the autumnal harvest.16 The print plays with the connections between Bacchic excess and agricultural abundance, satire, and pastoral. Bruegel suggests that the laboring peasant is the local embodiment of a vernacular antiquity, while underscoring contemporary ideas concerning social difference. The status of Bacchus as a god of the earth originated in ancient sources. Lucretius compared the gifts of Ceres and Bacchus in De rerum natura, while the second book of Virgil’s Georgics is dedicated to Bacchus. The vine and the ivy associated with Bacchus represented the wine god’s seemingly miraculous ability to produce abundance from absence: the vine goes from the appearance of death in the winter to full bloom in summer, while the ivy is evergreen even in the depths of winter.17 Bacchus’s relationship with the natural world therefore emphasizes the profusion, fertility, and diversity of nature. In the sixteenth-century Low Countries, Bacchus’s role as earthly deity was well established. At the Landjuweel of 1561, the group from Berchem, Den Bloeyenden Wijngaert, used Ceres and Bacchus together to represent the harvest months of August and September in their play.18 Bacchus could even symbolize the entire terrestrial sphere; Charles V’s triumphal entry into Bologna in 1530 was styled as a triumph of Bacchus and Neptune, symbolizing the emperor’s dominion over land and sea; nineteen years later, Philip II’s triumphal entry into Ghent would make use of similar Bacchic iconography.19 Bacchus’s realm was not just that of drinking and festivity but also of terrestrial prowess. Bacchus, as a god of festivity and agricultural fecundity, was linked to both carnivalesque excess and the pastoral landscape. A number of Bruegel’s contemporaries, including Frans Floris, Lambert Lombard, and Maerten de Vos, designed prints depicting Bacchus as an agricultural deity juxtaposed with scenes of peasant labor.20 In these representations, Bacchus is celebrated as the giver of abundance to the entire population, not just as a symbol of festive excess. In de Vos’s Autumn (fig. 44), for example, the classical figure of the deity is contrasted with the laboring peasants in the background. The symbolic union of god and season is achieved by dividing the

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Fig. 43 Pieter van der Heyden, after Pieter Bruegel, Summer, from the series The Seasons, 1570. Engraving, first state of two, published by Hieronymus Cock. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1926. Photo: www.metmuseum.org. Fig. 44 Adriaen Collaert, after Maerten de Vos, Autumn, 1587. Engraving. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

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Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

picture plane between a classically inspired foreground scene and a local landscape background. In his design for the engraving Summer, Bruegel subtly combines what had previously been held separate—the ancient referent and the local peasant at work in a familiar landscape. Bruegel discards the classical pictorial language typically used to represent the wine god as a muscular deity reclining in a peasant landscape. Rather, it is a rotund figure at left, crowned in a wreath like a classical bacchant, who raises the specter of Bacchus in Bruegel’s design.21 This wreathed laborer faces the viewer, one of a line of peasants at work scything the wheat. Behind these figures, other workers harvest fruit from the trees. A woman at left displays the rewards of this demanding employment: a heavily laden basket and a hat brimming with various fruits and vegetables. Peasant labor is directly connected with the diverse offerings of the earth here. In Bruegel’s Summer, the foreground position awarded to the wine god in de Vos’s print is occupied instead by the sprawling body of a drinking peasant. A clear diagonal connects this central figure to the wreathed Bacchic laborer across an aisle of cleared hay; the relationship between these two figures is accentuated by the intersection of the bent backs of the two peasants working between them. Mirroring each other across the center of the design, each peasant embodies a different conception of Bacchus. The peasant who gathers the fruits of plenty meets his reflection in the enjoyment of the drinking central figure. The profuse generosity of Bacchus as an agrarian deity is mapped onto the enjoyment of his abundance. Bruegel thus depicts two different embodiments of the same Bacchic plenty, in an image of Netherlandish peasants wearing Bacchic disguise.22 The central figure in Bruegel’s Summer dominates the composition and directly aligns the Bacchic fertility of the earth with peasant corporeality. The figure has momentarily paused from his work, laying down his scythe to enjoy a drink from an enormous jug. His muscular arms and legs are displayed to the viewer, as is his codpiece, made prominent owing to the figure’s sprawling squat. The virile peasant body is brought into dialogue with the Bacchic fruitfulness of the earth, as evidenced in the harvest. One of the drinking man’s shoes has slipped or been kicked off, and his bare foot breaks through the boundary of the image, thrusting forward along the scythe, into the zone of the inscription. At the center of the engraving’s inscription, the scythe, the bare foot of the peasant, and several heads of wheat encircle the word “Aestas” (summer). The peasant body, its labor, and the product of this labor come to stand for the season. The peasant body in its lumpen mass is aligned with the natural forces of the earth and with the terrestrial sphere, just as Jonghelinck later used Bacchus’s corpulence to reflect the wine god’s own overindulgence and generative capacity. The prominent placement of the drinking man’s codpiece further underscores the earthly fertility of the peasant body. His thirst, coupled with the conspicuous positioning of his genitalia, could have provoked a chuckle from a contemporary urban

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viewer, but Bacchus’s more serious sins (gluttony and lust) are less prominent in Summer. No viewer of this print would squat in such an inelegant position or drink in such an ungainly pose. Yet I would argue that despite the foregrounding of the bulky, drinking peasant body, the moralizing tone of the image remains gentle in its mockery. The peasant takes the place of Bacchus but appears to do so unselfconsciously. The Bacchic disguise these peasants wear is apparent to the viewer of the print but completely natural within the context of their environment. To recall the words of Nancy in the epigraph to this chapter— country, peasant, landscape, and the Bacchic are shown as conceptually linked. For Bruegel, the fertility of the land and peasant body evokes Bacchic plenty. Contributing to the Bacchic equation of land and peasant is the fact that nearly all of the peasants in Summer are faceless. The wreathed bacchant is one of only two figures who face the viewer, as every other figure’s face is obscured by a jug or a hat or is turned away from us. This is perhaps most apparent in the figure at right, whose vegetable-laden hat acts as a curious substitute for a head. As a result, Summer’s peasants lack individual identities; their primary identification is with the season and earthly abundance. Their working relationship with the terrain draws them more closely into it. Instead of seeing the drinking peasant’s face, we see his codpiece and the straining laces of his shorts. The fertility of the earth associated with Bacchus resides in the anonymous body of the local peasant. Bruegel combines the allegorical connotations of Bacchus, as both a festive and an agrarian god, with his image of local working peasants. While the peasants in Summer are comically round, Bruegel also displays his knowledge of anatomy and perspectival rendering in the foreshortened bulky right leg of the central drinking peasant. The scything peasant seen from behind at far left is shown in a contrapposto stance, which may be related either directly to Italian prototypes or indirectly to their mediation via locally produced prints.23 As we shall see in the following chapter, Bruegel often quoted or manipulated monumental Italian figural compositions: for example, the Michelangelesque central figure of The Peasant and the Nest Robber (fig. 76) echoing the form of the nude figure below the Eritrean Sibyl (fig. 77), or the complex intertwining of figures in works like Peasant Wedding (fig. 17), which evoke the Italian-influenced designs of Bacchic merriment, such as Heemskerck’s Triumph of Bacchus (fig. 45).24 In Summer, the muscular bulk of Bruegel’s foreground figure embodies familiar peasant subject matter with the figural sophistication associated with both Italian and local images of antiquity.25 This returns us to Jonghelinck’s statue of Bacchus. The fleshy corpulence of the bronze wine god fits his status as the god of fertile excess, but he is also an ancient deity. Jonghelinck presents an alternative to Apollonian classicism that is monumental but scarcely graceful. In Summer, and increasingly in works from the late 1560s, Bruegel’s figures grow in scale and come to dominate painted compositions

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Fig. 45 Maarten van Heemskerck, Triumph of Bacchus, 1536 – 37. Oil on panel. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York. Fig. 46 Frans Floris, Banquet of the Gods, 1550. Oil on panel. Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp. Photo © Lukas-Art in Flanders vzw (Hugo Maertens).

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like Peasant Dance (fig. 56) and The Peasant and the Nest Robber. The scale and power of these peasant bodies proclaim Bruegel’s ambition to produce a new form of largescale figural painting typically associated with paintings of religious or classical histories or allegorical subjects, like those produced by Frans Floris for the Jonghelinck villa. Floris’s Banquet of the Gods (fig. 46), for example, displays the artist’s familiarity with both classical iconography and the antique corporeal form. Floris’s Bacchus, at far right, is seated atop a barrel and crowned with a wreath; his body resembles that of Jupiter at left, though the folds of his stomach contrast sharply with the taut back of Mars at center. Bruegel’s peasant bodies and Jonghelinck’s sculpted Bacchus share a related interest in crafting a new kind of corporeal idiom distinct from the athletic nudes of Floris’s painting. This monumental fleshy form is particularly associated with Bacchic festivity and generative abundance. The statuesque yet rotund peasants of Bruegel’s Summer combine the symbolic labor typical of earlier representations of the seasons with a newly integrated iconographic reference to the Bacchic. The observable Netherlandish peasants embody the survival of antiquity, not only in the customs they practice but also in their very physical form, as a manifestation of Bacchic corporeality and plenty. The result is a peasant body that is both removed from the elegant ideals of comportment shared by Bruegel’s urban upper- and middle-class viewership and yet also monumental in its form.

Carnival and the Reign of Bacchus Bruegel’s evocation of the local peasant’s Bacchic corporeality in Summer relates to the wine god’s role as agrarian deity as well as his even more popular incarnation in local festivities. In his Praise of Folly, Erasmus describes Bacchus as the first follower of Folly among the gods, “ever merry conceited, ever young, ever provoking men to laughter with his sport and pleasantness.”26 Bacchus is the god of the good life, an existence devoted to pleasure. As liber pater, the father of freedom from everyday rules, Bacchus could be symbolically mobilized to describe any period marked by an excessive consumption of food and drink.27 The physical corpulence of both Jonghelinck’s Bacchus and Bruegel’s peasants results from such overindulgence, the physical manifestation of an inability to moderate behavior. In this light, the Bacchic resonance of Bruegel’s images of carnival and kermis take on more nuanced historical and moral dimensions. An allegorical representation of the triumph of body over spirit, Bacchus was the pagan personification of the Christian sins of gluttony and lust. An explicit warning against excessive festivity is given in one of the introductory verses to Lodovico Guicciardini’s description of Antwerp: “For if they are .  .  . given to Bacchus or ravishers of others, brief (alas) will be their life and fortune in this

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Fig. 47 Pieter Bruegel, The Battle Between Carnival and Lent, 1559. Oil on panel. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York.

world.”28 These lines, immediately juxtaposed with the Italian’s account of the city, not only reflect anxiety about overindulgence but comment specifically on the nature of festive practice in the city’s environs and the perceived dangers of such Bacchic freedom. Recognizing the brevity of carnival’s inversions, Eduard de Dene, in his mid-sixteenth-century “Vastenavend Dansliedeken” (Little Carnival Dance Song), wrote: Hear all those in the company of Bacchus And given over to Carnival Before the summer comes Don’t drink up all your money . . . Tomorrow you must be sober.29

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

Bacchus is the king of carnival. His followers may drink and carouse, but only while carnival lasts. Carnival celebrates the pleasures of the flesh before the forty days of the Lenten fast. Carnival, then, was the moment in the Christian calendar that tolerated the epicurean pleasures associated with Bacchus. Carnival, weddings, church festivals, and other festive occasions represented a relaxation or, in some cases, a cessation of norms and behavioral guidelines, just as to be under the rule of the liber pater was to be free of traditional authority and constraints. This popular association between Bacchus and carnival, as sanctioned by the contemporary church, did not go uncriticized by sixteenth-century church reformers. Sebastian Franck, in his Weltbuch, proclaimed carnival “the Bacchanalia of the Roman Church.”30 Franck and others saw the continuation of pagan traditions under the guise of church authority as proof that the “popish” church was no better than pagan religion. Regardless of specific doctrinal concerns about the pagan origins of carnival and other traditional feast days, the term bacchanalia was also used in wider circles as synonymous with carnival practice. Christopher Plantin’s 1573 dictionary, the Thesaurus Theutonicae linguae, for example, equated any vernacular drinkfeeste (drinking festival) with the bacchanalia. Even if these festive activities were not historical remnants of a pagan past, they certainly shared certain forms of revelry (namely, dancing and drinking). Both contemporary and ancient festivals were celebrations of overabundance. Although carnival was not directed at the veneration of the wine god, it remained a celebration of plenty that drew upon the forms of Bacchic merriment. Humanists saw carnival as the latest incarnation of a Bacchic tradition stretching back a millennium—a truly longue durée phenomenon.31 As represented in Dutch text and song, Bacchus’s relationship to carnival is perhaps the clearest example of the blurred boundaries between local culture and classical antiquity, the very embodiment of Netherlandish vernacular antiquity.

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Bruegel’s encyclopedic image of carnival festivities, The Battle Between Carnival and Lent (fig. 47), alludes to carnival’s Bacchic origin. Bruegel, following Frans Hogenberg’s earlier engraving of the same subject (fig. 48), depicts the personification of carnival in the now familiar pose of Bacchus astride a barrel.32 As Carnival reaches up to steady the pie on his head, his gesture— one hand curving upward toward his face—becomes the faintest echo of a Bacchic toast. Bruegel’s Carnival is not Bacchus; instead of an ivy garland, he wears a green cloth and a meat pie on his head. The Bacchic wreath is found instead adorning the entrance of the pub at left, where

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Fig. 48 Frans Hogenberg, The Battle Between Carnival and Lent, 1558. Etching. Published by Hieronymus Cock. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Elisha Whittelsey Collection, Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1957. Photo: www.metmuseum.org.

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

two interlaced garlands hang above the door. Bruegel’s painted figure of Carnival, as the corpulent embodiment of festive indulgence, draws upon the rich local interplay between Bacchic representation and vernacular carnival. Bruegel’s Carnival, like Bacchus, is the allegorical authority for a temporary inversion of the social order.33 Bruegel’s painting shows us this inverted world, filled with masked men and women stripped of their everyday identities. The artist depicts carnival as a time and space in which a utilitarian object like a cauldron can become a hat (as on the pink-robed figure in Carnival’s retinue), a stirrup (as hung from the side of Carnival’s barrel), or an object to be tossed in a kind of game (see the figures at center just above the well). The antiauthoritarian rule of Bacchus parodied social norms but also turned a satirical gaze inward. The 1580 Mandement van Bacchus, a satirical booklet published in Antwerp, demonstrates Bacchus’s role within this upside-down world. Though it postdates Bruegel’s lifetime, the text of the Mandement is part of a well-established satirical genre lampooning government placats, the public postings that advertised new laws and regulations in the Low Countries. Part of a broader tradition of mock pronouncements and comedic prognostications in both Germany and the Low Countries, the Mandement pokes fun at the tone and form of contemporary political edicts, but also at local drinking establishments and their patrons.34 Bacchus is understood here not only as an antique deity but as a popular and local figure whose symbolic antiauthoritarian reign extended over the taverns and drinkers of Antwerp and the surrounding area. The joking proclamation bears sixteen signatures—brewers and tavern keepers

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but also bookbinders, shoemakers, and other individuals who may have been known for their love of drink.35 Bacchus was also a stock character in vernacular drama, often turning up as a character in the factie, the farcical element of rhetoricians’ performance that often ended in a dancing song.36 For example, at the 1561 Landjuweel, the rhetorician chamber from Zoutleeuwen performed a factie with Bacchus as the protagonist. In this play, the wine god sits in a garden surrounded by four animals that represent both the stages of drunkenness and various national/regional alcoholic products (including Delen wine from Germany, Rommenije from Spain, and beer from Zoutleeuwen).37 The ancient god of wine is represented as a lover of Dutch beer. In fact, according to the factie, beer makes one the drunkest, and thus the best, follower of Bacchus. As a supplement to the main play, the farce was written to entertain and to generate laughter but, like the later Mandement, it also depends upon a kind of inward-facing social satire, exploiting a locality’s reputation for drinking to excess. The specificity of the Mandement or the Zoutleeuwen factie matches that of Bruegel’s painting; text, performance, and image depend upon the audience’s familiarity with such local customs. One must recognize the names of well-known drinkers in the Mandement or the drinks named by the rhetoricians, or, within Bruegel’s image, spot the pub sign bearing the emblem of the blue ship (a long-established Dutch topos for foolish behavior) in order to comprehend the image’s satiric bite. In front of this sign Bruegel places a hanging cluster of green wreaths, a vernacular reference to Bacchus’s symbolic reign over such drinking establishments and the social inversion of festive celebrations. For Bruegel, as for the authors of the Mandement and the Zoutleeuwen factie, Bacchus is a natural reference within a scene of local festivity. The ubiquitous presence of Bacchus in Netherlandish festive culture may also be connected to the contemporary collection of customs and traditions as valuable historical source. Recalling Erasmus’s words on the Batavian love of feasting (as part of his riposte to Martial’s supposed slight of Batavian culture, discussed in chapter 1), we have seen how the customs and character of the contemporary and historical Netherlander were imagined as continuous. Bruegel’s Battle Between Carnival and Lent is a “miniature collection” of observed carnival customs—the baking of waffles, the wearing of blown-egg necklaces, the squelching of the rommelpot— creating what Joseph Koerner has called “an atlas of human culture.”38 This is a specifically local atlas, legible to its original audience as a compendium of distinctly Netherlandish festive traditions seen as ancient in origin. These local customs were imagined as related to the Bacchic spirit of antiquity. The intended viewers of The Battle Between Carnival and Lent could enjoy the spectacle of carnival and Lenten activities, which Bruegel depicts as familiar in their detail and exotic in their imagined historicity. While not devoid of moral charge, the panel presents an

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Fig. 49 Pieter Bruegel, The Battle Between Carnival and Lent, 1559, detail. Oil on panel. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York. Fig. 50 Philips Galle, after Pieter Bruegel, Charity (Charitas), from the series The Virtues, 1559. Engraving. Published by Hieronymus Cock. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1928. Photo: www.metmuseum.org.

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image of the excesses of Bacchic celebration in balance with times of charity and austerity. Although Bruegel depicts Carnival as a Bacchic type, drinking, the traditional center of Bacchic celebration, is curiously absent in the foreground of the painting. The accoutrements of drink litter the scene, but only at top left do we see anyone actually drinking from a jug. There (fig. 49), a man wearing ragged clothes stands on a barrel surrounded by children, as a bucket of water is dumped over him from the window above. This comic vignette, perhaps illustrating the dangers of overconsumption (which leads to disgrace), is directly juxtaposed with an image of charity through the sharing of drink. A few paces to the drinking man’s left, a woman pours liquid from a jug into the waiting bowl of a pilgrim or visitor. Her act recalls the figures in Bruegel’s print Charity (fig. 50), where figures offer drinks from barrels and jugs in an act of communal generosity and spiritual grace.39 In The Battle Between Carnival and Lent, the jugs used by both the drunken man and the charitable woman are rendered in an identical shade of pale bluish gray, underscoring the connection between the two scenes. Drinking is a risky pleasure associated with carnival, while the giving of drink is a charitable act in Lent. Drinking is depicted as at once a social act, an extension of community life, and an act that, carried too far, puts one at risk of becoming antisocial, a disgrace to the community.40 Bacchic excess is balanced by the sharing of the wine god’s abundance. Bruegel thus transforms the oppositional iconography of The Battle Between Carnival and Lent, epitomized by Hogenberg’s earlier print (fig. 48), into an image of the ongoing and cyclical passage of time. There is a marked lack of confrontation in the “battle” at the center of Bruegel’s panel, as the personified Carnival and Lent seemed destined to pass each other. The so-called combatants do not lock eyes; indeed, the paired figures pulling each sled are already moving past each other. The spirit of antagonism that imbues Hogenberg’s engraving of the same subject is entirely absent in Bruegel’s panel. Instead of confrontation, there is a visual emphasis on circularity. The entire composition reads as a wheel, where the Bacchic excess of carnival and the austerity of Lent represent two sides of the same humanity.41 The careful composition of Bruegel’s panel—half Lent, half Carnival—hinges on a pair of figures to the left of the well walking on a patch of yellow ground; the spotlighted pair are led by a fool carrying a torch. The emblematic couple at the center of The Battle Between Carnival and Lent are on a deliberately ambiguous course. This allows the viewer to impose various itineraries throughout the panel, spectatorially wandering, selecting vignettes, and commenting upon them.42 In The Battle Between Carnival and Lent, as in Summer, the excesses of the followers of Bacchus—peasants and lovers of drink and social inversion—are rendered as part of the cyclical nature of human life, in tune with the seasons.

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Fig. 51 Sixteenth-century Netherlandish School, after Hieronymus Bosch, Singers of Bacchus, ca. 1560. Engraving. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Fig. 52 Sixteenth-century Netherlandish School, after Maerten de Vos, The Egg Dance, ca. 1580. Engraving. Published by Johannes Baptista Vrints. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Elisha Whittelsey Collection, Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1949. Photo: www.metmuseum.org.

Bacchic Others

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

The evocation of Bacchus in representations of local carnival festivities mobilizes classical and vernacular sources, laughter and moralizing satire. A related dialogue has driven much of the art-historical scholarship on Bruegel, as scholars have debated whether Bruegel was sympathetic to or critical of local peasant practice.43 Recognizing the Bacchic undertones of Bruegel’s images of peasants and local festivities also exposes the emerging sense of social distinction between urban middle-class society and both the urban and rural lower classes. To invoke Bacchus was to draw a line between the civilized viewer, cognizant of the need for bodily restraint, and the Bacchic Other. The Bacchic referent as a marker of social difference is used most explicitly in prints of festive peasantry. Such prints were relatively cheap and thus aimed at a broader audience than panel paintings like Bruegel’s Battle Between Carnival and Lent. However, these prints’ references to Bacchus were not simply one-dimensional

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expressions of religious or moralizing concern about a perceived reversion to pagan ways.44 These prints use the Bacchic referent as a means of marking social difference for the pleasure of the viewer. By comparing Bruegel’s works to these printed Bacchic peasant scenes, it is possible to interrogate how Bruegel referenced this understanding of the Bacchic Other in his printed images of festivity. An anonymous print from around 1560 bearing the invenit of Hieronymus Bosch (fig. 51) and titled Singers of Bacchus depicts a number of revelers singing from a book in which the musical notes take the form of food and drink.45 Inscriptions in Dutch and French identify this motley cast of characters (including a vomiting man and a corpulent seated figure) as students and singers of Bacchus. Here, there is a clear distinction between the viewer, who should view this kind of scene with distaste and mocking laughter, and the rude figures depicted. The Bacchic referent seems to act as a way of marking social difference, a form of negative self-definition, in Paul Vandenbroeck’s well-known phrasing.46 Yet this negative self-definition relies on the viewer’s familiarity with these comic types, as the inscriptions reference songs and stock characters. Another engraving with a Bacchic inscription, The Egg Dance (fig. 52), designed by Maerten de Vos, acts in a similar fashion. The print is prominently inscribed “has ducunt choreas , qui bacchanalia vivunt” (They lead the dance, who live the Bacchanalia) and shows a peasant dancing before a crowd of peasants and a pair of upper-class observers. The Dutch inscriptions on both Singers of Bacchus and The Egg Dance use similar names (Maes, Ghys) and adjectives (stortbier/schuerbier, drafsack/ dicsack), pointing to their common origin in either text or song.47 But de Vos’s satirical view of festive frivolity also comments on the politics of viewership; the male upperclass observer’s face and arm at upper center neatly parallel the pose of the corpulent dancing peasant. De Vos thus draws attention to the ways in which the viewer of the dance, and by implication the viewer of the print, may slide into the dissolute behavior of the dancing peasants. The Bacchic behavior of the peasantry can potentially be transmitted to those who watch such frivolity. Bruegel’s own printed images of peasant festivity, such as The Kermis at Hoboken and The Kermis of Saint George (figs. 10 and 12), lack overt inscriptions referencing Bacchus, but they do invite a parallel interpretation. In The Kermis of Saint George, a prominent Bacchic wreath, marking the entrance to a tavern in the upper left corner, hangs above a brawling group of peasants. This alignment suggests that the rule of Bacchus is not always free from harm. Seen in conjunction with the only potentially interpretative inscription in Bruegel’s design—“Let the peasants have their kermis,” on the large banner at right—it suggests that the Bacchic excesses on display belong to the peasantry. Echoing this distinction between the presumed urban viewer and the peasant subject are a pair of figures in the foreground. One of the men looks toward the viewer as he points to the scene; his companion, who wears a long sword

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Fig. 53 Pieter van der Heyden, after Pieter Bruegel, The Dirty Bride, 1570. Engraving, first state of four, published by Hieronymus Cock. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1926. Photo: www.metmuseum.org.

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

and therefore is unlikely to be a peasant himself, sports a kermis pennant in his hat. These two men are visiting the fair and are set apart from the more animated characters surrounding them. As in de Vos’s image, however, there is an anxiety about the boundaries between observation and participation. Does the sword-bearing man’s kermis pennant suggest that he is enjoying the kermis too much? The pointing man’s gesture leads the viewer’s eye to a group of sword-dancing peasants, while further along the path lie the fighting peasants beneath the Bacchic wreath. The viewer is invited to enjoy the spectacle of Bacchic spirit, but Bruegel also reminds the viewer of the dangers of being drawn into the action. Bruegel’s later design for Summer challenges the physical separation between viewer and peasant subject. Instead of a removed view from above, as in The Kermis of Saint George, the viewer is confronted directly with the peasant body. The Bacchic wreath, the ungainly squat of the drinking peasant, and the bulk of the working peasant body make clear the social distinction between viewer and subject. The protruding foot and prominent codpiece of the central drinker in Summer demand that the viewer recognize the physical presence of the peasant and his corporeal difference, while the Bacchic referents simultaneously enable a more esoteric discussion of the image. While the figures are of a much larger scale, their individual features remain indistinct or disguised, preventing the viewer from identifying with them as individual subjects.

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This is also the case in Bruegel’s only two known designs for woodcuts, The Wild Man and The Dirty Bride (which survives as a drawing on a partially cut block and was later engraved by Pieter van der Heyden, fig. 53). Both prints take as their subject popular Shrovetide plays that specifically referenced the inversion of the regular social order. The Dirty Bride is a popular vernacular version of an antique story deriving from Virgil’s eighth Eclogue. The play details the surprising marriage of Mopsus (depicted here as a slovenly rustic inhabiting a crude tent) and the youth Nisa; Cock included lines from Virgil’s text in the engraved version of the design postdating Bruegel’s death.48 All of the figures are masked or their gaze is averted; Nisa’s face is exposed but retains a masklike quality, and his eyes avoid contact with the viewer’s. The artist instead focuses the viewer’s attention on the strangeness of the actors’ costumes and the bizarre and ramshackle form of their tent. Both of these prints produce laughter but also estrange the familiar subjects and forms of popular plays in freezing and focusing the narrative action. These woodcuts, in fact, are excerpts from the earlier panel The Battle Between Carnival and Lent. While the prints allow the viewer to confront these festive actors in isolation, the 1559 painting gives the viewer a vantage point high above the action; the viewer is both literally and symbolically above the fray. Like Bruegel’s kermis prints, the panel encourages the viewer to delight in the visual survey of festive traditions, but the panel does not contain any admonitory figures like the pointing man in The Kermis of Saint George. The more expensive and elevated medium of oil on panel apparently did not necessitate such a marker between viewer and subject. Bruegel’s audience could recognize its proper role within this scene of local custom; meanwhile, references to the Bacchic or to vernacular antiquity intellectualized the visual enjoyment of carnival and peasant customs. As Walter Gibson has shown, Bruegel’s viewers were no strangers to this kind of festive occasion.49 Bruegel shows a well-off guest seated at far right in his Peasant Wedding (fig. 17); similarly, de Vos’s Egg Dance and Aertsen’s Peasant Feast (fig. 7) show urban visitors at rural festivities, recording a kind of social tourism that blurs the line between observer and participant. Contemporary costume books recommend specific attire for these jaunts outside the city walls.50 The market for both painted and printed images of kermises and other peasant events presumably was driven by a related desire to observe such practices in a mediated form. In surviving tafelspelen, or table plays, guests and actors assumed the guise of peasants for the amusement of a dinner party; these performances, coupled with the peasant imagery that often decorated dining rooms, enveloped the guest in a virtual peasant existence.51 Yet the pleasure of such plays hinged on the incongruity of peasants within an Antwerp townhouse or luxurious suburban villa; the pretense of social distinction becomes more difficult to maintain if both viewer and participant share enjoyment in the same activity in the same place at the same time.

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Fig. 54 Pieter Bruegel, The Wine of Saint Martin’s Day, ca. 1566. Glue-size tempera on linen. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Photo © Museo Nacional del Prado / Art Resource, New York.

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

Bruegel’s later peasant paintings use corporeal difference rather than scopic distance to maintain the social boundaries between learned viewer and peasant subject. Bruegel’s The Wine of Saint Martin’s Day (fig. 54), a tuchlein (glue-size tempera painting on linen), portrays a frenzied group of peasants clamoring for a taste of the season’s new wine.52 This jumble of limbs, heads, and hands form a pulsating mass of humanity. At right, largely unnoticed by the horde, is Saint Martin, the titular saint of this local festival. While there are no Bacchic wreaths or textual inscriptions, the scene clearly draws upon an image of Bacchic excess: in place of Carnival astride a barrel, Bruegel presents a throng of peasants enveloping an enormous wine barrel. At left, peasants fight and a man vomits. This image of peasant festivity is more critical of bacchanalian frenzy than much of Bruegel’s surviving printed and painted oeuvre. In the late 1560s, as Bruegel’s painted peasants grew in size and came to occupy a large proportion of his panel paintings, the artist played with the spectacle of the Bacchic Other and the viewer’s relationship to these festive peasant bodies. In Peasant

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Fig. 55 Infrared photograph of a detail from Pieter Bruegel, Peasant Wedding, 1568. Oil on panel. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna Photo: Restoration Lab, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Wedding, for example, the staid comportment of the gentleman at right, hands folded and eyes cast downward, is contrasted with the gesticulating and wide-eyed peasants around him. The artist is careful to distinguish the body and behavior of this figure from the rest of the crowd; the wedding guests, too, largely behave themselves, particularly in comparison to the disorder of The Wine of Saint Martin’s Day. Bruegel may have intended to underscore the peasant’s baser corporeal instincts in this panel; infrared photography of the painting has revealed a pair of figures embracing on top of the hayloft at left that were subsequently painted out (fig. 55). The overpainting corresponds with the rest of the painted surface, indicating that the artist (or perhaps the patron) changed his mind, perhaps in deference to maintaining the presumed respectability of the pictured urban/upper-class guest.53 Bruegel’s overpainting exhibits an anxiety similar to de Vos’s Egg Dance: does the act of viewing lower-class revelry endanger the viewer’s upper-class morality or his social distinction from the peasants being observed? While abundant eating and drinking by peasants was an acceptable subject for this large-scale painting, either Bruegel or his patron felt that this couple’s horizontal embrace went too far. The clumsy kiss at far left in Peasant Dance (fig. 56), however, was deemed acceptable—but there are no middle- or upper-class participants pictured in this kermis scene. Pictured physical distance, then, enabled the maintenance of social distinction. Bruegel’s pictures allow for the imposition of social difference while simultaneously maintaining a certain ambiguity about the viewer’s role as observer and consumer of these Bacchic scenes. Bruegel’s images depict both peasant labor (Summer, The Months) and rural celebrations (The Kermis at Hoboken, Peasant Wedding) as comparable objects for scopic enjoyment. At Ter Beke, visitors to Jonghelinck’s villa could enjoy Bruegel’s series The Months (figs. 2, 26, 41, 42) and images of kermis, as well as observe peasant customs and labor just outside the grounds of the estate. Just as Estienne’s guidebook on villa management offered practical advice distinct from the realities of contemporary agricultural demands (the installation of water features,

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Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

the planting of fruit trees),54 Bruegel’s pictures allow for the enjoyment of Bacchic spectacle without the dangers of participation. It is the image of the kermis, the observation of the peasant custom, the inhabiting of a countryside villa, that produce pleasure. Rather than reflect any desire to participate in the festive event or the agricultural reality of the countryside, these images allow for the recognition of Bacchic allusions and the historical nature of local traditions, which produce social distinctions between viewer and subject. A Bacchic exuberance of the flesh was reserved for the peasant subject; the presumed viewer of these images is a social tourist, enjoying the display of these local and familiar traditions both for their perceived historical value and as a way of reinscribing social difference. Tourism is a way of ordering the objects of the world in a new way, of making the world different. The birth of tourist practice is thus related to an incipient process of national/regional identity formation, separating foreign and familiar but also past and present.55 Visiting peasant festivities and owning images of such events, like the collecting of specifically Dutch proverbs and songs and the creation of an imagined vernacular antiquity, allowed the viewing/reading subject to understand the peasant both as an Other and as a remnant of a distinctly local past. This double movement of both cultural recognition and social distinction underpins Bruegel’s images and the creation of a touristlike viewer—figured as both socially distinct from the peasant and cognizant of the peasant’s place as an avatar of vernacular antiquity. Bruegel’s surviving peasant paintings don’t come with a set of inscriptions. Instead of dictating a singular moralizing reading, these more expensive objects required viewers to generate their own interpretations, perhaps recalling their own experience at such festive events, alongside snippets of ancient texts, recollections of rhetoricians’ performances and contemporary proverbs, and visual references to other prints and paintings. The echoes between Jonghelinck’s Bacchus, Bruegel’s Summer, and The Battle Between Carnival and Lent rely upon the rich vocabulary of the Bacchic in sixteenth-century Netherlandish culture. Bruegel used the specter of the Bacchic not solely as a classicizing device or external allegory but as a means of demonstrating the historical continuity of local experience and commenting on established social hierarchies. Bruegel’s Bacchic references do more than characterize the peasant as a festive Other; they also prompt a kind of cultural recognition, an invitation to further commentary. Viewers of Bruegel’s Battle Between Carnival and Lent could enjoy its abundant details, fitting them into various readings of the picture, teasing out the moral, social, and historical ambiguities of local carnival practice. Bruegel’s compositions offer multiple conceptual pairings and visual contrasts, encouraging multiple and repeated views as well as a visceral visual pleasure in the artist’s attention to material detail.

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Material Memories Bruegel’s symbolic evocation of the Bacchic is mirrored in his images’ own visual abundance. In Summer (fig. 43), for example, Bruegel combines a more monumental figure style with diverse renderings of texture rendered in black and white: the shorn stubs of wheat, the dappled leaves of trees in the summer sun, the blades of the scythes, the woven form of baskets and hats—all are evoked within a rich graphic language of dashes, dots, and curving lines. Bruegel’s attention to objects—from the laced shorts worn by the squatting peasant at the center of the design to the construction of the scythe lying by his side—situates these peasants in a particular moment and location familiar to his audience. This particular attention extends even to refuse: the strewn pieces of wheat at the center of Summer, and the curious array of objects at the bottom right corner of Peasant Dance (fig. 56)—a few strands of straw, and the discarded casings of a walnut, the broken handle of a ceramic jug. The ground of The Battle Between Carnival and Lent is similarly littered with such detritus, including broken eggshells and bones, mussel shells, and playing cards. This visual surfeit is part of Bacchus’s symbolic reign, encompassing the abundance of the autumnal harvest and the often destructive chaos of the wine god’s role as festive deity. While the symbolic excess of the bacchanal was often equated with wanton wastefulness (Heemskerck’s Triumph of Bacchus [fig. 45], for example, includes sculptural fragments, overturned and broken pottery), Bruegel invests this garbage with causal, material, and temporal significance. Consider the relationship between the broken eggshells that litter the ground in The Battle Between Carnival and Lent, the broken pot handle in the foreground of Peasant Dance, and Ortelius’s image of the ruins of Brittenburg, which carefully reproduces archaeological finds, like a single Roman roof tile (fig. 57). The eggshells and the pot handle are apparently just trash, perhaps relating to an established local visual tradition equating eggs with vice.56 Within the causal logic of the picture, the eggshells could be the by-product of the woman making waffles just above Carnival’s head, or the wreckage of blown-egg necklaces like the one worn by the masked figure at far left. These shells demarcate the zone of Carnival’s temporal reign, as part of an ongoing cycle of festivity and austerity. Eggs will be broken, ground into the earth, and lost—but waffles will continue to be made in the same way every year at carnival. The broken pot handle in Peasant Dance could likewise simply be the result of the peasants’ vigorous dancing or drunken disorder, hardly unsurprising at such a village festival; but Bruegel’s jug handle also stands out from the earth, a remainder and reminder of the customs of the past made visible at contemporary peasant festivals. In both cases, Bruegel’s garbage records something culturally specific and historical in origin, pointing to a specific material ephemerality and the cyclical, unchanging nature of local peasant existence. The trash heap is an indiscriminate archive, one

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Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

that renders visible what is otherwise inconspicuous, the fundamental structure and history of cultural value.57 Bruegel’s interest in detritus reveals how such fragments could be seen as both worthless and meaningful. Bruegel’s apparent garbage— eggshells, local salt-glaze pottery—are also artifacts of historical culture. Thus they have a function parallel to that of Ortelius’s roof tile, the valuable remnant of a once great fort at Brittenburg. Archaeology, in its infancy during Bruegel’s lifetime, is after all a discipline based on the study of garbage. In our encounter with the story of Brittenburg, we have seen how antiquarians used the peasantry’s discoveries of antique coins and

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Fig. 56 | opposite Pieter Bruegel, Peasant Dance, 1568. Oil on panel. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York. Fig. 57 Abraham Ortelius, Arx Britannica (Map of Brittenburg), ca. 1567– 68, detail. Engraving. British Library, London. Photo © The British Library Board (Maps C.9.d.4).

artifacts, recasting objects of unrecognized value as priceless antiquities. A 1553 engraving published by Hieronymus Cock of the antiquities collection of Andrea della Valle includes a number of classical amphorae and sculptural fragments (fig. 58). In his 1609 Batavia Illustrata, Petrus Scrivenus, or Pieter Schrijver, illustrated several pottery fragments in his overview of archaeological finds related to the ancient Netherlanders. Ortelius’s roof tile is similarly a precious relic of the past that could easily be mistaken for trash; indeed, Guicciardini complained that local peasants at Brittenburg had reused stones from the site, failing to recognize their historic value. It may be that “no one keeps old customs like a peasant,” but the peasant is also unaware of the historic nature of his traditional material culture. Bruegel depicts the world of the peasant as one where objects are used and reused by their owners, refashioned until their wholesale collapse. In Peasant Wedding, earthenware jugs are shared by revelers, barrels are recycled as stools, and a door is used as a serving tray. In Peasant Dance, the young girl at the bottom left wears clothing that has clearly been handed down. Her sleeves are turned up at the hems so that the dress will fit its new owner. Bruegel’s recycled objects give the viewer glimpses of individual object histories. While these items are specific to a place and time, they also recall a historical category of objects. A single pot may break, as in Peasant Dance, but the form of the pots (seen piled up in the basket at lower left in Peasant Wedding) will remain the same. The peasant artifact is capable of simultaneously evoking a sense of immediacy, the

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Fig. 58 Sixteenth-century Netherlandish School, after Maarten van Heemskerck, Cardinal Andrea della Valle’s Collection of Antiquities, 1553. Engraving. Published by Hieronymus Cock. Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Photo: bpk, Berlin / Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Jörg P. Anders / Art Resource, New York.

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

memory of recently observed images and events, and a deeper current of unchanging tradition. As a sixteenth-century Dutch proverb attests, “Man vindt veel gebroken potten over al” (One finds many broken pots everywhere).58 So how can one distinguish between the Roman roof tile and the peasant garbage? This problem was exacerbated by the complex temporality embedded in peasant objects like the jugs in Peasant Dance, imagined as part of a historic and unchanging local rural culture. The historical nature of the peasant’s material culture is not apparent to the peasants themselves, who are occupied in drinking and dancing. Again, it is left to the panel’s audience to recognize the complex interplay of temporal, moral, and proverbial implications inherent in the scraps of trash included in Bruegel’s scenes of peasant festivity. Like the Bacchic allusions of Summer or The Battle Between Carnival and Lent, these details require interpretation but do not dictate any singular meaning. Bruegel draws attention to material memory, the capacity of an object to embody both its own particular history and its broader formal historical lineage. Bruegel’s pots and peasant houses are not only grounded in the observation of specific details but also allude to their status as the contemporary iterations of a historical form. Bruegel himself performs a similar kind of recycling, in picturing the refashioned and reusable nature of peasant objects and in revisiting established iconographic motifs and recalling diverse stylistic modes within his work. Bruegel’s Carnival takes the pose of Bacchus; the peasant laborers in Summer become like twin bacchants. Carnival is, after all, a descendant of Bacchus, just as Plantin translates bacchanalia into the Dutch drinkfeeste. Bruegel’s Bacchic peasants and festive carnivalgoers occupy both a mythic, cyclical time and an observable present—temporally and iconographically fixed in the repetitive cycles of the seasons/labors of the months but also recognizable in their material details. Bruegel’s figures wear a Bacchic guise that is at once allegorical and

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real.59 The Bacchic referents of the jug and vine wreath in Summer, for example, allow Bacchus’s role as god of bodily celebration, pastoral idyll, and agricultural abundance to be discerned and naturalized within a scene of contemporary peasant labor. Evocative details like these, or the figure of Bruegel’s Carnival perched astride a barrel in Bacchus’s traditional pose, allow the viewer to connect the behavior of contemporary Netherlandish peasants and festivalgoers with a complex set of discourses on bodily comportment, festive excess, the generative capacity of the land, local history, and identity. This reading of Bruegel as recomposing the Bacchic into vernacular form is not new. In fact, it is precisely the interpretation offered by The Egg Dance (fig. 52), an engraving by Bruegel’s contemporary Maerten de Vos briefly discussed earlier in this chapter.60 Published roughly a decade after Bruegel’s death, the engraving is unusual in de Vos’s oeuvre. De Vos produced more than a thousand designs of religious, mythological, and historical subjects, but he rarely depicted peasants. His figural style was influenced by Italian masters, most notably Tintoretto and Veronese, as well as by his countrymen Frans Floris and Lambert Lombard. The Egg Dance is one of a small number of Bruegel-inspired prints and copies of Bruegel compositions created by de Vos in the 1570s and 1580s, the period when de Vos was arguably the most productive and successful artist in Antwerp.61 Yet in The Egg Dance and his few other Bruegelian designs, de Vos abandoned his typical elongated style, favoring a bulkier, more animated body type. The dancing peasant at the center of The Egg Dance, like the bizarre musicians at right, is indebted to Bruegel’s peasant scenes; the pose of the egg dancer directly replicates that of the bridegroom in Bruegel’s design for The Dirty Bride (fig. 53).62 De Vos’s design undoubtedly sought to capitalize on the continuing popularity of Bruegelian images, but The Egg Dance also demonstrates the complex ways in which Bruegel’s contemporaries saw his images as interacting with both classical antiquity and vernacular traditions. The print’s inscriptions liken the festivities of the contemporary peasant to the classical bacchanalia. The print itself contains few references to drinking, however, and although two couples embrace amorously, it is hardly the orgy of bodily exuberance Heemskerck gives us in his Triumph of Bacchus. In this print, de Vos deliberately deployed a Bruegelian stylistic mode of thick-set peasant figures with detailed costumes, rather than his usual Heemskerck-indebted classical figure type. As we have seen, the wine god was perhaps the one antique figure specifically associated with this alternate stylistic paradigm. Jacques Jonghelinck’s sculptural group referenced Bacchus’s stylistic alterity in picturing the wine god as a podgy, carnivalesque figure rather than a heroic nude. De Vos thus connects a Bacchic text to a scene of local peasant festivity rendered in a Bruegelian mode of artistic production.

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Nelson Goodman has stated that a picture “directly quotes another only if it both refers to and contains it.”63 In representing a Bruegelian peasant scene and deploying a rough Bruegelian style, de Vos attempted to recall what he saw as the essentials of Bruegel’s most famous works. The reference to the bacchanalia, along with the print’s comic vernacular inscriptions, is part of an attempt to contain the complexities and ambiguities of Bruegel’s peasant pictures. Although Bruegel depicts the wine god explicitly in no surviving or known work, de Vos’s print makes an explicit claim for understanding Bruegel’s peasant pictures as Bacchic. This interpretative strategy draws upon the Bacchic referents of Bruegel’s pictures and the popular associations of the wine god as a festive and rural deity. In this chapter, I have used the discursive model offered by the de Vos print, tracing the operations of the Bacchic referent through a number of Bruegel’s works. We have seen how Bruegel evokes Bacchus in a number of vernacular guises—as Carnival, god of both the festive and the laboring local peasant. Bruegel’s references to Bacchus are always discursive, relying on both classical precedent and contemporary reinterpretations of the wine god. While de Vos evokes this Bruegelian mode, the print’s multiple inscriptions in Latin, French, and Dutch offer contrasting interpretative possibilities—a reference to the classical bacchanalia, to moralizing Dutch plays and comic songs. Translating Bruegelian style and subject matter necessitates drawing on multiple temporal, social, and linguistic references in order to pin down meaning. In contrast, Bruegel’s images are largely devoid of direct textual interventions, and thus remain available to more fluid, ongoing processes of interpretation and visual pleasure.64 I began this chapter with a quotation from Jean-Luc Nancy on the conceptual relationship between country/peasant/landscape; I started this book with a sixteenthcentury dictionary entry for paganus and its multifaceted negotiation of time and cultural difference. The de Vos print suggests, as I have argued throughout this volume, that the linguistic nexus described by these two definitions demonstrates how Bruegel’s pictures operate within the wider production of a Netherlandish vernacular antiquity. The local peasant can become an avatar of antiquity because the sixteenthcentury historical imagination allowed for the simultaneous evocation of the classical past alongside local customs and traditions as comparably historical in origin. Thus Bacchus could be pictured as part of a classicizing pantheon (Jonghelinck’s statue), or used as a synonym for peasants’ carnality and their agricultural labor (Bruegel’s Summer). The de Vos print demonstrates that the Bacchic was associated not only with the peasant subjects of Bruegel’s art but also with a certain Bruegelian style. This Bacchic fleshiness can be seen in Bruegel’s Carnival and in his festive peasants, de Vos’s Egg Dance, and the Jonghelinck bronze with which this chapter opened. The aesthetics of excess— corpulent bodies and a ground littered with objects— contribute to the

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constitution of the Bacchic subject. But, as we have seen in the diverse pictures discussed thus far, depending on the subject depicted and the media used, Bruegel deployed a variety of figural idioms. In the next chapter, we shall discuss how the employment of these different stylistic modes mirrors Bruegel’s own complex approach to antique subject matter and his own views on the history of art.

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ch a p t er 4

Bruegel’s Art History

The Fall of Icarus (fig. 59), a prosaic vision of Icarus’s downfall memorialized by

ously—the building of familiar peasant cottages is shown taking place along-

About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place . . . . . . . . . . . . . In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

side the construction of a Colosseum-like Tower of Babel, and the contemporary

—w. h. auden,

W. H. Auden in the verse at right, is probably not by Bruegel himself. Given that there are two surviving closely related versions of the painting, however, it does appear likely that the design originated with Bruegel’s workshop. The canvas that now hangs in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and that inspired Auden is probably a later workshop copy.1 Today, the only known work by Bruegel’s hand that depicts an ancient subject is the comparatively understudied drawing The Calumny of Apelles (fig. 60).

Yet despite the recent deattribution of the Brussels painting, I would argue

that Auden’s words retain their perceptive insight into Bruegel’s notion of history and human subjectivity. The apparent inversion that Auden describes in Bruegel’s work—where the everyday occurrence challenges or even supersedes the historic event— can be seen throughout the artist’s oeuvre. Bruegel often depicted competing models of the historical imagination operating simultane-

“Musée des Beaux Arts”

peasant becomes an avatar of Bacchic antiquity. Auden recognized that history,

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Fig. 59 After Pieter Bruegel, The Fall of Icarus, ca. 1580 –1600. Oil on canvas. Musées Royaux des BeauxArts de Belgique, Brussels. Photo: Scala / Art Resource, New York.

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

for Bruegel, was both the res gestae, the notable events, and the longue durée of familiar customs and daily rituals. Though less renowned than the now deattributed Fall of Icarus, The Calumny of Apelles, Bruegel’s drawn version of the most famous lost painting of antiquity, presents an additional facet of the artist’s interest in the past. Thus far, I have described how Bruegel’s works reflect upon the complexities of the late sixteenth-century Netherlandish historical imagination and its articulation of vernacular antiquity. In this chapter, using The Calumny of Apelles and Bruegel’s later grisailles as central case studies, I analyze Bruegel’s profound concern with the history of artistic practice itself, and in particular the creation of a Netherlandish art history. The calumny is a quintessential Renaissance topos, the resuscitation of a lost antique model, a paragone, and a self-referential image about the status of art. The iconography comes directly from Lucian’s essay on slander. Writing two hundred years after Apelles’s death, Lucian describes the most renowned painting of classical antiquity by the Greek artist Apelles. Apelles, who was active in the fourth century b.c.e., is celebrated in Pliny’s Natural History and other ancient sources. Lucian describes how King Ptolemy had been convinced by a rival painter, Antiphilus, that Apelles had participated in a conspiracy against the king. After Apelles was cleared of wrongdoing by another witness, the chastened monarch gave him one hundred talents and a slave for his trouble. Apelles, according to Lucian, was mindful of the danger he had so narrowly escaped, and he decided to strike back at his slanderer through an ambitious painting.

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Lucian goes on to describe the painting, which he had seen, in some detail. This ekphrastic account relates the composition from right to left: On the right of it sits a man with very large ears, almost like those of Midas, extending his hand to Slander while she is still at some distance from him. Near him, on one side, stand two women, I think Ignorance and Suspicion. On the other side, Slander is coming up, a woman beautiful beyond measure, but full of malignant passion and excitement, evincing as she does fury and wrath by carrying in her left hand a blazing torch and with the other dragging by the hair a young man who stretches out his hands to heaven and calls the gods to witness his innocence. She is conducted by a pale ugly man who has a piercing eye and looks as if he had wasted away in long illness; he is supposed to represent envy. There are two women in attendance to Slander, egging her on, tiring her and tricking her out. According to the interpretation of them given to me by the guide to the picture, one was Treachery and the other Deceit. They are followed by a woman dressed in deep mourning, with black clothes all in tatters—Repentance I think her name was. At all events, she is turning back with tears in her eyes and casting a stealthy glance, full of shame, at Truth, who is slowly approaching.2

Alberti repeated this ekphrasis, or rhetorical description, of Apelles’s painting in Della pittura, his treatise on painting. “If this historia fascinates even the hearts just by narrating it,” writes Alberti, “how much beauty and seduction do you think has originated from the painting itself by the excellent painter?”3 In both descriptions, Alberti and Lucian play with the relationship between words and (now lost) image. Alberti suggests that the painting would have surpassed even Lucian’s account of the image, and he proposes it to contemporary painters as an antique topos that retained its resonance and championed the status of painting as the equal of poetry.4 As we shall see, Bruegel’s version of the calumny demonstrates his familiarity with the ancient source material and with Alberti’s promotion of the subject. The very existence of a Calumny of Apelles by Bruegel signals his desire to draw from art’s own history. The artist competes with his contemporaries’ versions of the calumny, but Bruegel also enters a lineage that originates with the ancient Greek painter Apelles and includes Botticelli, Mantegna, Dürer, and Raphael—all of whom produced their own versions of the subject. Though he probably knew only a few of these works,5 Bruegel’s drawing demonstrates the artist’s interest in picturing his own imagined artistic inheritance and in revealing history itself as a contingent representative practice. I contend that the stylistic eclecticism of Bruegel’s later grisaille panels acts in a similar fashion, underscoring the hybrid nature of Bruegel’s art history and the broader scope of his own stylistic and historical ambition. Bruegel’s Calumny and grisailles demonstrate how he conceived of his heritage beyond local or regional traditions, as something that reached back perhaps as far as Apelles.

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Bruegel’s Calumny

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

Bruegel’s Calumny of Apelles (fig. 60) first came to scholars’ attention in 1959, when it was found in a parcel of Italian drawings sold at Sotheby’s to the London dealer Colnaghi.6 Purchased by the British Museum that year, the drawing’s earlier provenance is unknown. Portions of the sheet have been somewhat abraded, and it has been cut down on all four sides. The face and left hand of Calumny, the projecting steps at bottom right, and parts of the artist’s signature have been reworked. The drawing is executed in pen, ink, and wash—an unusual technique in Bruegel’s oeuvre—and thus it has been suggested that the sheet is a preparatory study for a painting.7 There is a seventeenth-century reference to a Bruegel painting called De Calomnia, and Karel van Mander’s life of Bruegel refers to a painting he called “a picture of Truth Will Out.”8 But even if Bruegel produced a related painting, the fact that the sheet is so prominently signed and dated (1565 in Roman numerals) and that it depicts such an erudite subject suggests that the drawing was also produced as an autonomous artwork. Bruegel’s depiction of the calumny corresponds closely to Lucian’s text. The figures follow Lucian’s order, moving from right to left. Most strikingly, Bruegel has translated Lucian’s story into a representation of contemporary Dutch rhetoricians’ drama. There is a curtain behind Bruegel’s figures, suggesting that the entire scene takes place on a stage, like that seen in the background of Bruegel’s engraving Temperance (fig. 61).9 At right, Ptolemy is seated upon a dais with his hand extended; his characteristically overlarge ears (depicted here as human, though Lucian’s description of the king’s ears as Midas-like often led artists to give Ptolemy the ears of an ass) have a somewhat unnatural, costumelike appearance. Next to the king, Ignorance and Suspicion are dressed in the garb of contemporary middle- or upperclass Netherlandish women. They closely resemble sinnekens, paired characters in Dutch spelen van sinne (morality plays) who urge protagonists on to their doom.10 Furthering the allusion to contemporary drama, the figure labeled Lyvor (Envy) is positioned just along the curtain’s seam, one foot upon the dais, looking out at the viewer and breaking the performance’s “fourth wall,” another common practice in Dutch rhetorician theater.11 The frizzy-haired and capped central figure of Envy, who wears ripped clothing and one round-toed peasant shoe, recalls Boschian prototypes of the wanderer or fool, as pictured in Bruegel’s own design for The Alchemist (fig. 62).12 Calumnia, next to him, notably departs from Lucian’s description—Bruegel’s figure of Slander is hardly beautiful beyond measure. Her face has been retouched, rendering the artist’s original conception difficult to read, but her strident pose and expression seem incompatible with contemporary notions of beauty. Insidia, Fallacia, and Penitencia all wear pseudo-antique robes. In contrast, the figure of Truth at far left is shown nude,

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in accordance with classical representations of Veritas. Like Calumny, she too deviates from Lucian’s textual description of Apelles’s original; she is shown firmly seated rather than “approaching.” Bruegel’s inscriptions label each figure, repeating the particular words used in Philipp Melanchthon’s Latin translation of Lucian’s essay, printed in Frankfurt in 1543.13 Notably, this translation renders Envy in its masculine form Lyvor instead of the feminine Invidia.14 Bruegel uses this unusual masculine form, suggesting his familiarity with this version of Lucian’s text. Bruegel probably also knew Leon Battista Alberti’s description of the calumny from a 1547 Venetian edition of Della pittura (On Painting), which embellishes Lucian’s account and describes the figure of Envy as a soldier exhausted by service at the front.15 Bruegel pictures Lyvor in bedraggled clothes, a sword hanging from his waist, wearing a single piece of armor—albeit an apparently useless piece on his elbow. In this sheet, then, Bruegel displays his

Fig. 60 Pieter Bruegel, The Calumny of Apelles, 1565. Pen and brown ink with brown wash on paper. British Museum, London. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum / Art Resource, New York.

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Fig. 61 Philips Galle, after Pieter Bruegel, Temperance (Temperantia), from the series The Virtues, ca. 1559 – 60. Engraving, first state of two, published by Hieronymus Cock. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1926. Photo: www.metmuseum.org. Fig. 62 Philips Galle, after Pieter Bruegel, The Alchemist, after 1558. Engraving, first state of three, published by Hieronymus Cock. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1926. Photo: www.metmuseum.org.

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knowledge of both the foundational ancient text and its later citation by Alberti, who recommended the lost painting as a model for all artists. The sheet is thus the clearest evidence of Bruegel’s familiarity with the classical tradition and the circulation of Albertian pictorial ideals. Bruegel’s decision to depict the calumny in the guise of a rhetoricians’ play reflects the intertwined nature of so-called elite and popular cultures in the Low Countries.16 Bruegel, like his patrons, shared an interest in both classical antiquity and vernacular drama. After all, the rhetorician Cornelis van Ghistele had described Dutch rhetoricians’ drama as a direct continuation of ancient practice. Bruegel’s translation of the ancient lost painting into a Dutch play can be related to the contemporary interest in the vernacular antiquity of such familiar performances, as well as to local interest in this famous classical topos. But the calumny of Apelles is not just any old antique subject. The story of Apelles has an esteemed art-historical heritage as the subject of the most celebrated artwork of the classical past. Bruegel knew this, as he demonstrates in his general fidelity to Lucian’s text and its later gloss by Alberti. The date of the sheet compounds the significance of Bruegel’s decision to portray the calumny at this moment, for in the years around 1565 there was a resurgent local interest in the calumny of Apelles as a subject, emerging in parallel to Netherlandish artists’ written debates about the nature of local artistic style and history.

Local Calumnies Bruegel’s Calumny of Apelles is one of several versions of the iconography produced and circulated in the Low Countries in the later sixteenth century. The year the sheet was completed, 1565, was also precisely the moment that artists and authors like Domenicus Lampsonius, Lambert Lombard, and Lucas de Heere began to circulate their own accounts of the history of art and Netherlandish art theory. Bruegel’s drawing participates in this ongoing pictorial and textual debate, affirming Bruegel’s own place in local art history and proposing a unique vision of art’s own history. Bruegel not only joins an ongoing dialogue among Netherlandish artists and authors on the importance of creating a local history but also exposes the multiplicity of ways in which antiquity could be interpreted in art. The Netherlandish interest in the calumny of Apelles as a subject appears to originate with a 1560 print engraved and published by Giorgio Ghisi in Paris after a design by Luca Penni (fig. 63). Penni’s version of the calumny deviates slightly from Lucian’s text; for example, instead of a pair of women behind Calumny, there are four female figures. Again, the figure of Truth is not shown approaching; instead, Penni depicts Truth born aloft by an allegorical representation of Time.

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Fig. 63 Giorgio Ghisi, after Luca Penni, The Calumny of Apelles, 1560. Engraving. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Elisha Whittelsey Collection, Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1956. Photo: www.metmuseum.org. Fig. 64 Lambert Lombard, The Calumny of Apelles, ca. 1560 – 66. Pen and ink over red chalk on paper. Galleria degli Uffizi, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe, Fondazione Horne, Florence.

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Ghisi, the print’s publisher, had worked for Cock, Bruegel’s publisher, in the 1550s when he was based in Antwerp. Ghisi probably maintained contact with the Netherlandish art market, and his calumny print appears to have circulated in the Low Countries quite early on, as Lambert Lombard, the painter, author, and architect based in Liège, produced sketches after individual figures in this print, carefully noting each personification.17 Lombard then went on to produce an independent drawing of the calumny, possibly intending the sheet to serve as a design for a further print, as it is in reverse orientation to most other calumnies (fig. 64).18 In this version, Lombard moved away from Penni’s conception, eliminating the background and conceiving of the narrative as a friezelike procession. Lombard died in 1566, so these sheets must date from circa 1560 – 66. Like Lombard, Bruegel’s acquaintance Maerten de Vos produced a painted calumny that also responds to Penni’s design.19 Though de Vos’s painting probably postdates these other works, it offers further evidence of a broader resurgent interest in this subject among artists working in the Low Countries in the later sixteenth century. At the same time that these various artists were composing calumnies, Netherlanders were also beginning to write the first locally produced histories and theoretical texts on art. The very year that Bruegel drew his calumny, two Netherlanders directly challenged the vision of art history recently proposed by Giorgio Vasari in his 1550 Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects.20 Lombard and his friend Lampsonius, the humanist and poet also based in Liège, both wrote to Vasari in 1565, ostensibly to offer the Florentine supplementary material for the second edition of his Lives. Lombard and Lampsonius not only proposed that the history of northern art told by Vasari was incomplete; both men took issue with Vasari’s notion of art-historical progression and contemporary Italian artists’ fidelity to antiquity. The two men sent their letters in the same package to Florence, along with a manuscript copy of Lampsonius’s biography of Lombard, also published that year. This biography particularly stressed Lombard’s intellectual rigor and interest in antiquity. In the meantime, Lombard’s own letter to Vasari directly confronted the Florentine’s view of art history, complaining that the work produced between Giotto and Donatello was “too dry, not at all rich or in a good style,” and comparing the artistic production of this period to the art produced in the Low Countries before the age of Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden.21 In his letter to Vasari, Lombard not only credits the masters of antiquity alongside the Italians but also praises the Netherlanders and Germans for their contributions to modern artistic advancement. His own sketchbook and engravings reveal his diverse conception of artistic history. He studied classical coins and statuary, Frankish art of the twelfth century, and the works of Bosch and Dürer.22 Lombard’s print design for Christ Carrying the Cross (fig. 65) proposes that it reproduces a now lost Boschian original; Cock, who published the print sometime between 1556 and 1560, included

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Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

the unusual inscription “L. Lomb. restituit,” or “restored by Lombard.” This unique signature attests to Lombard’s complex ideas about the imitation of past masters and his recognition of the historic value of both classical and local art.23 Faced with the task of producing his own Calumny of Apelles (fig. 64), however, Lombard primarily evokes the forms of classical relief sculpture. Many of the figures appear to be drawn first nude and then clothed in ancient dress. There is a focus on clear outline, with little internal modeling. The diaphanous robes of Lombard’s Calumny indicate the shape of her breasts and the indentation of her belly button, but the figure of Truth is fully clothed — the only nude in Lombard’s design is the young male figure of Innocence. Despite his undoubted familiarity with the ancient source material and his own artistic ambitions as the head of the first so-called academy for art in northern Europe, Lombard did not include a female nude in his drawing.24 Perhaps most surprisingly, Bruegel, not Ghisi or Lombard, was the first northern artist to depict the Calumny of Apelles’s Truth as a nude female figure (fig. 66), demonstrating his awareness of the classical personification of Veritas as unclothed. This figure has mistakenly been called the only nude in Bruegel’s oeuvre, but there are others—for example, the female nudes in his designs for the engraving The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins (fig. 67). While the figure of Truth certainly echoes these earlier nudes in her small high breasts, rounded belly, and wide hips, the figure is given additional weight here. The contours of her arms and legs, although minimally modeled, give a sense of the musculature beneath. Bruegel’s inclusion of a nude Veritas responds directly to the classical source material, but it also echoes those monumental nudes historically produced by his fellow Netherlanders (such as Lucas van Leyden’s engraved Virtues; see fig. 68) and contemporary models from Italy known in print, such as Enea Vico’s Lucretia after a design by Parmigianino (fig. 69).25 The solidity of the bottom-heavy form and the twisting pose of Bruegel’s nude relate directly to such prototypes. In his Calumny, Bruegel is also attentive to the corporeal forms beneath his clothed figures, including even the indentation of Calumny’s navel, visible through her clothing. Both Bruegel and Lombard include this detail, treating the visible belly button covered by a diaphanous robe as an appropriate evocation of the classical female form. Despite this shared interest, Bruegel’s approach to the calumny is remarkably different from Lombard’s.26 Though not as detailed as most of his surviving drawings, Bruegel’s Calumny has a sense of materiality lacking in Lombard’s version. The artist, for example, describes Ptolemy’s costumelike ears, the brocaded fabric of Innocence’s tunic, and the ripped edges of Envy’s clothes. Bruegel’s Envy takes the form of a familiar fool rather than Lombard’s peplos-clad character. While several of the figures in Bruegel’s drawing (Insidia, for example) wear ancient robes similar to those depicted in Lombard’s Calumny, Suspicio and Ignorancia are shown in

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Fig. 65 Lambert Lombard print, after Hieronymus Bosch, Christ Carrying the Cross, ca. 1556 – 60. Engraving. Published by Hieronymus Cock. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Elisha Whittelsey Collection, Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1954. Photo: www.metmuseum.org.

Fig. 66 Pieter Bruegel, The Calumny of Apelles, 1565, detail. Pen and brown ink with brown wash on paper. British Museum, London. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum / Art Resource, New York.

Fig. 67 Philips Galle, after Pieter Bruegel, The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, ca. 1560 – 63. Engraving, first state of two, published by Hieronymus Cock. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1928. Photo: www.metmuseum.org.

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Fig. 68 Lucas van Leyden, Hope, 1530. Engraving. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Bequest of Grace M. Pugh, 1985. Photo: www.metmuseum.org. Fig. 69 Enea Vico, after Parmigianino, Lucretia, ca. 1535 – 67. Engraving. Published by Antonio Salamanca. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Bequest of Phyllis Massar, 2011. Photo: www.metmuseum.org.

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

markedly contemporary dress. Strikingly, Bruegel places these local referents alongside the nude figure of Truth, signaling his awareness of classical precedent, Dutch theatrical practice, and local and imported artistic models. For both Lombard and Bruegel to produce a Calumny of Apelles at this moment was to enter into a broader competition with artists of the past and the present, north and south of the Alps, just as the depiction of the nude figure increasingly was coming to stand for one’s artistic prowess, as advocated by Vasari. Both drawings stress their fidelity to the ancient model, competing with a classical stylistic legacy via divergent stylistic choices. Though Bruegel places his Calumny on a contemporary stage, he carefully indicates his familiarity with the antique textual source, and he cites elements of classical, Italian, and local artistic styles. Given the apparent differences between the two sheets, it is easy to forget that Bruegel shared a number of Lombard’s pictorial interests. Both artists produced designs for engravings in the style of Bosch (figs. 4, 65). Both men also looked to Dürer’s graphic oeuvre as a model (see Bruegel’s Dürer-inspired Death of the Virgin, fig. 73). While there is no evidence that Bruegel knew Lombard’s design, the stylistic differences between the two sheets are typically understood as evidence of an emerging artistic rivalry between two distinct groups of Netherlandish artists: those “Romanists” who followed classical and Italian models and those supposedly uninterested in a classicizing style, including Bruegel. Rather than viewing the stylistic

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divergences between Bruegel and Lombard’s drawings as evidence of this supposed rivalry, I would like to suggest that both artists present their own ambitious vision of a shared local art history.

Art History and Rivalry The primary historical evidence for the so-called rivalry between Netherlandish and “Romanist” schools is a poem by Lucas de Heere, the artist and poet based in Ghent and active in that city’s rhetoricians’ chamber, Jesus met dem Balsam. In 1565, the same year of Lampsonius’s and Lombard’s letters to Vasari, Lampsonius’s biography of Lombard, and Bruegel’s Calumny of Apelles, de Heere published his Den hof en boomgaerd der poësien (The Court and Orchard of Poetry).27 Included in this volume of Dutch verse is a now famous “Invective against a certain Painter who criticized the Painters of Antwerp.” The invective’s target goes unnamed, but de Heere accuses him of unfairly criticizing the works of de Heere’s former master, Frans Floris. Floris, who was himself a former student of Lombard, had traveled to Rome in his youth before returning to found a successful studio in Antwerp, known for its ambitious figural works and skillful evocations of antique iconography (see fig. 46). De Heere’s poem begins with a question and an invocation of the anonymous painter’s jealousy of Floris: “Why do you injure yourself! Are you not seeing blind / With hate and envy, as one bereft of his senses?”28 De Heere complains that this unnamed painter has called Floris’s paintings “sugary little pictures.” He strikes back with the charge that, although the anonymous accuser had “been to Rome, one cannot see [it] / In your paintings, full of wretched bad strokes, / That truly look neither Romish, nor antique.”29 Instead, de Heere offers the colorful insult “you ornament your paintings like kermis dolls”; that is, the accuser’s works resemble those dolls made by villagers and sold at local church festivals.30 The tenor of de Heere’s accusation that one couldn’t tell that the unnamed painter had been to Rome seems to echo modern art-historical efforts to search for “Roman” or “Italian” influences in Bruegel’s work, attempts to reconcile the fact that Bruegel did travel to Italy in the early 1550s yet left no drawings of antique statuary or ruins, or copies of Italian works seen on his travels.31 Additionally, de Heere’s reference to kermis dolls powerfully evokes the specter of Bruegel’s famous peasant scenes and his marked interest in the material construction of similar humble objects. The poem, first brought to the attention of Bruegel scholars by David Freedberg, has thus been read as testimony to the apparent acrimony between two rival camps of artists in the Low Countries: a so-called Romanist school represented by Floris, and those working in a vernacular idiom perhaps best represented by Bruegel.32

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Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

Seen together, de Heere’s poem and Bruegel’s drawing suggest a wider debate about northern art, art history, and professional rivalry. The story of the calumny of Apelles is, after all, a story about artistic jealousy and envy. Apelles is slandered by a fellow painter who, according to Lucian, is jealous of Apelles’s talent and favor with the king. As in de Heere’s poem, Bruegel stresses the role of envy (Lyvor). Lyvor’s left hand points to his mouth, the organ of slander, yet this gesture also recalls lines in the opening stanza of de Heere’s poem—“One might take you for seemingly wise, [but] always / The mouth speaks from an overabundance of the heart”—and de Heere’s parting line: “Could you but hold your mouth and try your best.”33 So, as Bertram Kaschek has suggested, did Bruegel draw a Calumny of Apelles to demonstrate his ability to paint “Romishly”? Is Bruegel’s Calumny of Apelles a response to de Heere’s critique, perhaps intended for the amusement of Floris’s and Bruegel’s mutual patron, Nicolaes Jonghelinck?34 However tempting, this seems unlikely. In Lucian’s tale, it is Ptolemy who is shamed; thus Apelles draws him bearing the ears of the foolish King Midas. Jonghelinck appears to have been a major patron of Bruegel’s work, making it unlikely that Bruegel would criticize the Antwerp merchant’s judgment in such a manner.35 The sophistication of the figures in Bruegel’s Calumny, and in particular the nude figure of Truth, could be the artist’s response to de Heere’s charge that his figures resemble “kermis dolls”—if we could be certain that de Heere is referring to Bruegel and that Bruegel is responding to de Heere. Given the shared contemporary interest in the calumny among artists like Lombard, de Vos, and Bruegel, it is more likely that Bruegel’s drawing found its audience among artists and authors involved in articulating a Netherlandish theory and history of art, rather than as a direct and specific response to de Heere’s accusations.36 It is worth recalling that rather than viewing “Romish” and local styles as opposed, Lombard, like many of his contemporaries, saw Netherlandish art as a complex blend of influences, encompassing Roman and Frankish antiquity but also great early sixteenth-century northern masters like Bosch and Dürer. Michiel Coxcie, a Habsburg court artist who had studied in Italy and was influenced by the works of Raphael, Michelangelo, and classical statuary, also made copies of works by Rogier van der Weyden and Jan van Eyck for his royal patrons.37 De Heere himself also celebrated local artistic heritage in his volume of poetry, including an ode to Jan and Hubert van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece, in which de Heere christened Van Eyck the Low Countries’ own Apelles. These so-called Romanists’ esteem for diverse artistic sources suggests that an appreciation of classical forms did not preclude the celebration of local painting tradition. For de Heere, Lombard, and Bruegel, then, Netherlandish art history had its own antiquity, comparable to that of the classical past. Just as the history of the Low Countries could be reconstructed from textual and physical ruins as well as surviving customs, like the building of rural religious shrines or even the making of

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kermis dolls, Netherlandish art history could draw on classical sources as well as local traditions. Seen in this light, de Heere’s comments and Bruegel’s Calumny visualize the potential of this multifaceted approach to art history. De Heere criticizes the unknown painter for insufficient knowledge of antiquity, which in this case he defines as “Romish.” But de Heere also saw the fifteenth-century local painter Van Eyck’s works as offering another kind of antiquity when he christened the artist the “Flemish Apelles.” Bruegel’s Calumny combines an archaeological approach to style (a reconstruction of classical motifs and body types) grounded in local artistic practice (in the Boschian Lyvor and the references to Dutch rhetoricians’ drama). In combining this archaeological recovery of antique iconography and references to the continuity of local artistic tradition, Bruegel reflects the methods and aims of the contemporary Netherlandish historical imagination, which sought to harmonize classical and vernacular notions of antiquity. Bruegel’s Calumny demonstrates how the ancient subject par excellence could be reimagined as the product of a vernacular art history. We may never know whether de Heere’s poem and the drawings by Bruegel and Lombard bear witness to a contemporary artistic rivalry between competing schools fought out in pen and ink. More usefully, however, these texts and images point to a powerful desire to fashion a history of northern art that validated local practices and techniques, responded to contemporary developments in Italy, and was attentive to classical models. All three men were grappling with the imagination of Netherlandish art’s own history. Evidence against any specific heated rivalry between opposing stylistic camps is the fact that all three men operated within the same social network, tied by bonds of training, friendship, and commerce. Lombard taught Floris, de Heere’s own master. Lampsonius was also de Heere’s friend— de Heere dedicated a magnificent poem to the Liège humanist in the same volume containing the invective against the unnamed painter. Lampsonius’s biography of Lombard was dedicated to Abraham Ortelius, Bruegel’s friend and patron. Lampsonius went on to produce, alongside Hieronymus Cock, Bruegel’s publisher, the 1572 Effigies of Painters from Lower Germany, a series of twenty-three engraved artist portraits and accompanying Latin poems that included portraits and poems dedicated to Bruegel, Floris, and Lombard. Lampsonius’s Effigies offers further compelling evidence that, stylistic differences aside, Bruegel’s drawing can be situated alongside Lombard’s Calumny and de Heere’s poem as part of a broader resurgent interest in celebrating local artistic history. Lampsonius singles Bruegel out as one of the key figures in the emergence of a Netherlandish canon (fig. 5).38 In fact, Lombard and Bruegel, whose two versions of the calumny appear so different, are numbers eighteen and nineteen in Lampsonius’s series.39 The artists included were all dead at the time of the publication of the Effigies, and they are assembled in a roughly chronological sequence. Despite their stylistic

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differences, Bruegel and Lombard are presented side by side in this catalogue of Netherlandish art history. In the Effigies, Lampsonius and Cock apparently sought a balance between artists seen as particularly local in their interests and those famous for bringing artistic knowledge from classical antiquity and/or Italy. Jan van Scorel, for example, is praised for having “taught by [his] example the excellent Belgians to be envious of Rome in painting.”40 But the series of twenty-three artists also includes six landscape painters, a genre Lampsonius declares, in the verses on Jan van Amstel, “the proper glory of the Belgians.”41 Lampsonius uses variations on the word Belga/Belgica in the verses on Dieric Bouts, Bernard van Orley, Jan van Amstel, Pieter Coecke van Aelst, Mathijs Cock, Joos van Cleve, Jan van Scorel, and Willem Key—artists known variously for landscapes, classical subjects, portraits, and works in the “Romanist” style. For Lampsonius, Bruegel is a key figure in an emerging Netherlandish art history linked to local styles and subjects; Lampsonius calls him a “second Bosch” and a skilled landscapist but also connects him to contemporary stylistic developments. Lampsonius’s positioning of Bruegel, then, prefigures Ortelius’s later epitaph for the artist and Van Mander’s biography, which both celebrate Bruegel as the quintessential artist of his age.42 Ultimately, Bruegel’s Calumny, like de Heere’s poem, Lombard’s drawings and letters, and Lampsonius’s verse and artist portraits in the Effigies, participates in the production of a Netherlandish art history. Like the authors of local histories and collectors of customs, all of these artists draw upon diverse sources in imagining the past. They resuscitate classical style, translating ancient prototypes like the calumny of Apelles into vernacular equivalents. As we have seen, in his scenes of religious history and contemporary traditions, Bruegel often explored tensions implicit in the project of historical imagination. He also regularly cited previous Netherlandish artists, as in the Eyckian format of Christ Carrying the Cross and Boschian works like Big Fish Eat Little Fish. Bruegel’s manipulation of artistic styles in his Calumny of Apelles can therefore be understood as emblematic of his long-standing interest in local art history and techniques and his recognition of competing historical models.

Picturing a Stylistic Heritage in Black and White

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

Christopher White first suggested that Bruegel’s Calumny of Apelles represents a preparatory drawing for a lost grisaille by the artist, citing its affinities with the artist’s late grisailles and the sheet’s unusual technical execution: a combination of pen, ink, and wash.43 White’s hypothesis, though unproven, recognizes the shared stylistic hybridity and art-historical ambition of the Calumny of Apelles and Bruegel’s known grisailles. In both the drawing and the monochrome paintings, Bruegel displays an

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ongoing interest in crafting a unique stylistic heritage, a hybrid of local, regional, Italian, and classical forms. Grisaille had a long local history. Around the middle of the fifteenth century, Netherlandish manuscript illuminators at the court of Philip the Good began using grisaille illuminations in books of hours and other luxury manuscripts, in emulation of earlier Parisian models.44 Most famously, Jan van Eyck popularized the use of grisaille painting on the exterior wings of altarpieces, so that the painted figures resembled fictive stone sculptures, a visual tradition that lasted well into the sixteenth century.45 A black-and-white exterior provided a dramatic contrast to the richly colored open view of the altarpiece, echoing the contrast between holy days and the everyday, feast days and Lenten abstinence. At the end of the fifteenth century, grisaille stained-glass medallions also grew in popularity, particularly in domestic settings. Around 1500, these various local grisaille traditions were combined, as artists like Hieronymus Bosch and Jan Gossaert used monochrome painting on altarpiece exteriors not only to suggest sculpture but also to depict fully realized narrative scenes.46 The sketchier style often employed in Bosch’s grisaille paintings was particularly indebted to the manuscript tradition, directly challenging the idea of monochrome painting as fictive stone through the manipulation of visible brushstrokes. Around 1540 in Antwerp and Brussels, there was a resurgent interest in using grisaille on altarpiece exteriors for narrative scenes rather than for faux sculptural groupings. This renewed interest in monochrome painting was led by artists like Jan Vermeyen and Pieter Coecke van Aelst.47 Art historians have not fully explored the reasons for this revival, but it was probably linked both to the long-standing local tradition in grisaille painting and to the dramatic growth of the print industry in the early decades of the sixteenth century, as monochromatic art was increasingly identified with the printed image. In 1528, the year of Albrecht Dürer’s death, Erasmus praised the German artist for his prints, calling him “the Apelles of the black lines” and dismissing those who would add color to designs by the master.48 At the same time, the increasing professionalization of the print industry meant that printerpublishers like Hieronymus Cock in Antwerp were able to build successful commercial enterprises in the international print trade, enabling the dissemination of motifs and iconographies across (and beyond) European territories. Netherlandish artists and authors, following Erasmus, particularly praised print as a monochrome medium suited to the circulation of ancient subjects and forms and the display of artistic mastery. Lombard’s academy in Liège trained artists in the skill of engraving, alongside the study of antique forms, explicitly connecting print production with an appreciation of classical antiquity. Of course, print also gave northern artists access to recent developments in Italian painting. In the 1550s and ’60s, the grisaille technique was favored by northern artists working in the so-called Romanist style, such as Floris, Lombard, and Maarten van Heemskerck (fig. 70), all of whom

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Fig. 70 Maarten van Heemskerck, Samson, from the series Twelve Strong Men, ca. 1550 – 60. Oil on panel. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

were also established print designers. These artists took inspiration from classical models as well as from contemporary Italian artists, and they made monochromatic designs in a number of different media and formats, from prints to small-scale panels and larger linen paintings.49 Floris even painted the exterior of his house in a goldtoned grisaille, in imitation of antique bronze relief sculpture.50 The identification of grisaille with ancient practice and Italian art may also be connected to Alberti’s celebration of monochrome technique: “let the prepared painters consider that the highest quality and mastery reside only in the distribution of black and white and that—in having to place accurately these two— one must devote all talent and zeal.”51 Alberti’s esteem for grisaille in turn reflects Pliny’s praise for Greek artists like Zeuxis, who, Pliny claimed, painted in black and white, and for artists like Apelles and Nicomachus of Thebes, who used a restrained palette of four colors: red, black, yellow, and white.52 Indeed, Lampsonius’s 1565 Latin biography of Lombard played on Pliny’s words in its tribute to the northern artist’s monochrome works, giving Netherlandish grisaille connotations of erudition and connecting it to the practice of classical artists.53 The identification of grisaille painting with antiquity encouraged Netherlandish painters like Floris and Heemskerck to use monochrome technique not just for the exterior of altarpieces but also for secular and allegorical subjects. Inventories of Netherlandish collections of the period use the Italian word chiaroscuro as well as the Dutch gedootwerf (dead color) to refer to grisaille works of any origin or subject matter.54 Alberti’s praise for grisaille as based on ancient practice does not mean that northern artists necessarily rejected the established methods and ambitions of fifteenth-century Netherlandish grisaille painting. Rudolf Preimesberger has suggested that Van Eyck’s use of grisaille was also a response to Pliny, and that the artist’s fictive painted sculptures proposed a paragone between media (sculpture and painting), as well as an even earlier claim to directly rival the practice of the ancients.55 De Heere’s 1565 description of Van Eyck as the Netherlandish Apelles demonstrates how Bruegel’s contemporaries viewed the local painting tradition as antique, despite its divergences from classical forms. In a similar fashion, grisaille could simultaneously be figured as both all’antica and related to local painting tradition. Bruegel’s three surviving grisailles—The Three Soldiers (fig. 71), The Death of the Virgin (fig. 73), and Christ and the Adulteress (fig. 74)— expose the conflicting historical claims for this particular medium. All are dated from the 1560s and are relatively small in size. None was apparently commissioned or intended for use in a church setting. Instead, the artist recast grisaille as a connoisseur’s medium, one in which he could compete with the great Netherlandish, German, and Italian masters of the past and present.56 Bruegel’s understudied 1568 panel The Three Soldiers (fig. 71) clearly is based on earlier printed German prototypes and their local reinterpretations.57 Bruegel

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Fig. 71 Pieter Bruegel, The Three Soldiers, 1568. Oil on panel. The Frick Collection, New York. Photo © The Frick Collection.

transfers the motif of the lansquenet, collected in prints across Europe since the later fifteenth century, into a diminutive (20.3 ∑ 17.8 cm) panel painting. Bruegel’s thin application of paint, a technical feature of linen painting that the artist carried over to his works on panel, gives the grisaille a warm tonality imparted from the still visible ground layer, and the figures are composed of discernible brushstrokes. This technique evokes the particularity of local historical painting practice (the techniques of manuscript illumination and of glue-size on linen painting) and especially the look of Bosch’s monochrome paintings, but Bruegel is also responding here to the contemporary embrace of grisaille technique as “antique.” The elegant twisting body of the

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Fig. 72 Albrecht Dürer, The Death of the Virgin, from the series The Life of the Virgin, 1510. Woodcut. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Mrs. Charles Pratt, 1957. Photo: www.metmuseum.org.

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

drummer in contrapposto, like the pronounced signature and date in Antiqua font, proclaims Bruegel’s artistic ambitions in this direction. Bruegel’s interest in competing with his artistic predecessors is even clearer in his grisaille The Death of the Virgin, owned by his friend, the geographer and antiquarian Abraham Ortelius. Here, Bruegel specifically cites prints of the same subject by Martin Schongauer and Albrecht Dürer (fig. 72).58 Bruegel’s embrace of the Germanic print tradition was echoed by many of his Netherlandish contemporaries. Dürer had traveled to the Low Countries in 1520 –21 and was fêted by Antwerp artists. Bruegel’s friend and patron Ortelius was a noted collector of Dürer prints. Lombard’s letter to Vasari had asked the Florentine specifically to consider the graphic works of Dürer and Schongauer as “leading us to the gates of perfection in art,” when revising his famous Lives of the Most Eminent Painters. For Lombard, Dürer’s work had ushered in the most recent phase in art history and the contemporary ambition to retrieve the canon of antiquity.59 Bruegel’s grisaille seems to echo this praise for Dürer, but the artist also cites more local antecedents for his work here. As in fifteenth-century Netherlandish prototypes of the scene, Bruegel sets his Death of the Virgin (fig. 73) in a familiar burgher interior, complete with canopied bed, wainscoting, and a table full of crockery. Dürer’s death scene, in contrast, is set in a barrel-vaulted room that is relatively austere. The dramatic candlelight in Bruegel’s grisaille, in which the darkness of the scene is punctuated by candles, a fire, and the supernaturally bright light surrounding Mary, may also refer to the fifteenth-century tradition of dramatically lit nighttime nativities by Hugo van der Goes and others.60 The dual reference to both German prints and painted models from the fifteenth-century Low Countries was not unusual. In 1563, Cornelis van Dalem, the Antwerp merchant and painter, installed busts of Van Eyck and Dürer on the front of his home, marking their role as the twin foundational artists of northern art history.61 In referencing both German print and fifteenth-century Netherlandish painted versions of The Death of the Virgin, Bruegel aligns himself with a similar view of northern art history. Ortelius later commissioned an engraving after The Death of the Virgin for circulation among his friends, underscoring the particular ambitions of this work. One of the recipients of the engraving was Dirck Volckertszoon Coornhert, secretary to the

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city of Haarlem, theologian, sometime engraver, and the Dutch translator of classical texts such as Homer’s Odyssey. Coornhert particularly praised Bruegel’s skill at representing the sorrow of the event, writing, “Never did I see (such is my opinion) a better drawing of the same quality.”62 Coornhert’s statement implies that Bruegel’s version, as captured by the Flemish engraver Philips Galle, was seen as surpassing the model of Dürer and earlier Netherlandish painters in its skill and naturalism. Bruegel’s painting demonstrates a familiarity with various artistic precedents and exhibits a range of natural effects for the viewer’s appreciation. This grisaille painting directly competes with northern artistic models for the pleasure of a connoisseurial audience.

Fig. 73 Pieter Bruegel, The Death of the Virgin, 1564. Oil on panel. Upton House, Banbury, England. Photo: National Trust Photo Library / Art Resource, New York (Angelo Hornak).

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Fig. 74 Pieter Bruegel, Christ and the Adulteress, 1565. Oil on panel. The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London. Photo: The Samuel Courtauld Trust.

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

Bruegel’s 1565 Christ and the Adulteress (fig. 74) most clearly demonstrates the stylistic and temporal heterogeneity of the artist’s grisailles, as well as his particular ambitions in this medium. Unlike earlier religious works like The Tower of Babel or Christ Carrying the Cross, Bruegel does not translate the New Testament story into a contemporary or familiar setting in this panel. Instead, the scene takes place in a shallow space, the mass of figures behind the central action gradually receding into blackness. The panel is packed with some thirty figures, yet only a dozen or so are clearly articulated in the foreground, recalling the Albertian ideal of restricting the number of principal figures in a work. The voluminous yet blocklike forms of these foreground figures’ historicizing garb, and in particular the delicate features of the adulteress at center, recall prints after Raphael that circulated in the Low Countries in Bruegel’s lifetime (fig. 75). Bruegel’s use of Italianate forms from about 1564 has long been noted by art historians, who have posited that the artist’s move to Brussels in 1563 may have led to the increasing monumentality of works like Peasant Wedding or The Peasant and the Nest Robber (fig. 76).63 These scholars have focused on the formal similarities between Bruegel’s later works and Italian designs of the High Renaissance seen by the artist either on his early trip to Italy, or in Brussels tapestry workshops, or known via print. In The Peasant and the Nest Robber, for example, Bruegel apparently quotes the gesture of the figure directly below Michelangelo’s Eritrean Sibyl from the Sistine Chapel,

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Fig. 75 Marcantonio Raimondi, after Marco Dente, after Raphael, Virgin and Child with the Archangel Michael, Tobias, and Saint Jerome, ca. 1520 –50. Engraving. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

perhaps seen in person or known through prints like that by Ghisi (fig. 77). Bruegel’s citation of figures and motifs from Italian compositions proclaims his ambitions as an artist, as he pointedly adapts the model to his own figural and painterly language. Michelangelo’s nude is transformed into a bulky peasant wearing a prominent codpiece; in this figure, Bruegel’s brushwork varies from the broad (the thin layers of paint modeling the peasant’s costume), to the finely detailed (the horn at his waist), to the wet-on-wet expressiveness of the figure’s face. I see these alterations not as a deflation of or satirical challenge to the Italian model; rather, Bruegel supplements the figural citation with his own painterly aesthetic, which is indebted to local painting traditions.64 For example, in Christ and the Adulteress, while painted on a much smaller scale than Bruegel’s peasant scenes from the later 1560s, there is also an interest in simplified, weighty forms indebted to Italian models. Bruegel’s figures are somewhat flat

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and are set within a shallow space, which could be the result of Bruegel’s reliance primarily on printed models. The gentle features and elongated limbs of the adulteress, inspired by Raphaelesque prints, offer a marked contrast to the bulky form of the backward-glancing peasant behind her and the crowd of elders to the right. These figures recall the artist’s standard corporeal formula and facial types, suggesting that Bruegel did not see the imposition of a more Italianate adulteress, or the use of reduced volumetric drapery forms, as incompatible with his own established aesthetic idiom. He allows various figural and stylistic references to stand side by side. Bruegel juxtaposes the delicate features of the adulteress with the kneeling figure of Christ, who traces, with one gracefully elongated finger on the ground, the beginning of the phrase “Die sonder sonde is / die . . .” (He that is without sin among you, let him . . . [cast the first stone]), the Dutch translation of the words from the Gospel of John. The insertion of Dutch here can be aligned with contemporary religious reformers’ use of the vernacular in preaching and text in order to reach a broader audience. Again, however, what we know about the painting’s provenance suggests that its original viewers did not necessarily share Protestant sympathies.65 I would suggest that the inclusion of Dutch here also recalls the contemporary debates about the historical and therefore valuable character of the vernacular as a language worthy of translation. Just as Bruegel translates the Latin of the Bible into contemporary Dutch, he pictures his own translation of pictorial models in the various figure types on display within the painting. Bruegel signals his awareness of multiple stylistic languages, exposing the act of translation by juxtaposing figures drawn from diverse stylistic idioms. In a similar fashion, we have seen how Bruegel translated the classical Calumny of Apelles into the familiar forms of Dutch rhetoricians’ drama, rendering antiquity as vernacular performance while simultaneously retaining a classical nude figure of Truth. The Calumny and Christ and the Adulteress date from the same year, and in both cases classical and competing vernacular stylistic histories intersect to present a complicated representation of the past. There is some evidence that this grisaille, like The Death of the Virgin, was meant to address a knowledgeable artistic circle and thus represented Bruegel’s particular ambitions as an artist: it was the only painting by the elder

Fig. 76 | opposite Pieter Bruegel, The Peasant and the Nest Robber, 1568. Oil on panel. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York. Fig. 77 Giorgio Ghisi, after Michelangelo, The Eritrean Sibyl, ca. early 1570s, detail. Engraving, first state. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Elisha Whittelsey Collection, Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1984. Photo: www.metmuseum.org.

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Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

Bruegel left in the family’s possession when Cardinal Federico Borromeo wrote to Pieter’s son Jan in 1609 requesting works by the elder Pieter.66 Bruegel uses Christ and the Adulteress, a religious scene about the sin of judgment, to experiment with his own translation of pictorial models—from Italy via print, from the local grisaille tradition, and from his own painting practice—for the aesthetic judgment of the informed viewer. Bruegel’s interest in local art history was noted by the earliest commentators on his art. When compiling his list of the painters of Antwerp as part of his 1567 description of the city, Guicciardini described Bruegel as the “second Hieronymus Bosch.”67 Lampsonius used the same appellation in his 1572 Effigies. Although Bruegel’s imitation of Bosch can certainly be connected to a surge in the market for Boschian imagery after Bosch’s death, and to his early career as an imitator of Bosch (see fig. 4), the repeated invocations of Bruegel as a second Bosch also functioned as a historical mooring for Bruegel’s innovative work.68 While Bruegel’s early print designs and the devils in panels like Dulle Griet and The Fall of the Rebel Angels were certainly inspired by Bosch’s fantastic hellscapes, Bruegel’s debt to the earlier artist extended beyond these early years of his career, as Matthijs Ilsink has recently documented. Bruegel’s later move to peasant subjects, and his particular embrace of painting on linen, may also relate to Boschian prototypes. Numerous sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sources refer to watercolor paintings on linen by Bosch depicting peasant weddings and festivals, though none survive today.69 Crucially, however, Bruegel’s interest in local art history went beyond Bosch. Comparisons of Bruegel to Bosch, particularly by Lampsonius in the Effigies, is part of a broader strategy to situate the artist within a wider Netherlandish artistic tradition. Indeed, in emulating Bosch, Bruegel became versed in local art history. Bruegel was able to reproduce Boschian grotesques, but he could also distinguish these monsters from the elongated limbs and complex draperies of other earlier fifteenth-century masters, like Rogier van der Weyden (see the holy figures in Christ Carrying the Cross, fig. 34). Bruegel also drew on compositional models by Dürer in The Death of the Virgin, and on Eyckian prototypes in Christ Carrying the Cross. Just how the artist may have accomplished this stylistic fluency is evident in a sheet in the Louvre, tentatively attributed to Bruegel.70 The iconographic source of The Damned (fig. 78) is clearly from the fifteenth century (note the bowl-like hairstyles of the men, and the relationship of the mouth of hell to works by Dieric Bouts and Jan van Eyck). Yet the sheet uses Bruegel’s graphic language (see, for example, The Kermis at Hoboken, fig. 9); the artist’s characteristic combination of dashes, dots, and squiggles is used to render diverse textures: wings, hair, scales, and spikes. Careful reinforcements are also made in ink for details like eyes and mouths, another feature of Bruegel’s drawings.71 Bruegel imitates the figure style and subject matter of earlier artists here, yet retains his own methods of

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Fig. 78 Pieter Bruegel, The Damned, ca. 1562. Pen and brown ink, black chalk on paper. Musée de Louvre, Paris. Photo © RMN–Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York (Michele Bellot).

drawing. The Damned thus displays how Bruegel took on past artistic models, digesting their stylistic features and using the model as an opportunity to display his own artistic prowess. The various iconographic and stylistic sources emulated in Bruegel’s grisailles— early and contemporary Netherlandish paintings, German and Italian prints—must have been the product of studies like The Damned, exercises in assimilating style and motifs of earlier or foreign art.72 Bruegel’s grisailles demonstrate the lessons Bruegel learned as a student of art history, and they mark his self-conscious entry into the emerging pantheon of northern artists. In the grisailles, Bruegel demonstrates his knowledge of the breadth of northern artistic traditions: from Schongauer to Van der Weyden, Van Eyck to Bosch. In addition, The Death of the Virgin evinces Bruegel’s broader interest in Italianate figural models, while The Calumny of Apelles indicates his specific ambitions vis-à-vis the classical past. Bruegel was interested in art’s ancient past, its local history, and contemporary developments, north and south of the Alps. He saw himself as more than

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a second Bosch—as an artist who was interested in classical, Italian, and German styles and subjects, as well as the continuation of Netherlandish pictorial traditions. If access to vernacular antiquity could be gained via both local tradition and the salvage of the classical past, then Bruegel’s knowing return to diverse artistic masters, past and present, proposed a similar possibility for Netherlandish art history. Bruegel’s emulation of works by earlier artists is both an archaeological recovery of historical styles and techniques and an insistence on the historic status of continuing local artistic traditions.

The Subjectivity of Historical Imagination

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

Bruegel’s grisailles and The Calumny of Apelles show the artist grappling with two related questions: How do we imagine history? And what is art’s own history? In drawing on multiple stylistic models, as well as on diverse methods of historical imagination, Bruegel produces an image of history and art history as subjective experiences, where narratives are produced by individual choices. This returns us to Auden’s verses on the Bruegelian Fall of Icarus, quoted at the start of this chapter. The poet suggests that Bruegel’s design exposes our nearsightedness for the historic event amid the sights and demands of the everyday; the dramatic fall of Icarus, the boy who flew too close to the sun, would be dismissed by those who “had somewhere to get to.” While Ovid’s narrative suggests that a ploughman or an angler would be astonished to see men flying like gods,73 Bruegel’s design instead shows both men as apparently ignorant of Icarus’s fate, their view restricted to their respective tasks. Bruegel’s ploughman remains unaware of the significance of Icarus’s history. For Bruegel, then, any history is the product of a particular view, as well as of individual subjective choices.74 Underscoring the contingency of the historical record, Bruegel provides a parallel to Icarus’s famous demise, including an image of a half-hidden corpse of an unknown man in the bushes at left. This juxtaposition asks the viewer: what deaths are worth remembering? Bruegel’s images often contrast various methods of historical reconstruction, while also citing multiple stylistic legacies and technical traditions. Bruegel mines the richness of Netherlandish art history and its potential for the representation of the historical imagination, rather than advocating a single method or style for the representation of history or the creation of art. The variety of iconographic and stylistic choices Bruegel draws upon document his ambitions as an artist, but they also demonstrate the instability of history as the product of the present moment. This is perhaps clearest in The Calumny of Apelles, which is, after all, a story about the power of art and its historical endurance. Bruegel’s re-creation of Apelles’s lost masterpiece allows him to demonstrate his own art-historical significance. But The Calumny of Apelles is also a paradoxical topos, a painting intended to illustrate the

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unique power of images that survives only in Lucian’s text. Apelles’s lost painting, as described by Lucian, acts as an indeterminate screen, allowing artists throughout history to imagine the figures in dramatically different ways, to use the calumny as a vehicle for the expression of an individual or regional stylistic idiom. Even in the originary description of the picture, Lucian himself isn’t sure how to describe what he is seeing, enlisting a guide to explain it and repeatedly inserting qualifiers such as “I think.” In his Calumny, Bruegel recognizes the power of the image to evade clear comprehension and the ultimately impossible task of reconstructing the lost painting. The transformation of the literary source into the recollection of local rhetoricians’ drama marks Bruegel’s image as subversive in its paradoxical referentiality.75 That is, Bruegel turns the famous painting, an allegory of a historical event known only through textual traces, into a pictured performance of an allegory. The figure of Lyvor and the curtain behind him encourage the viewer to recognize Bruegel’s image as a singular, iterative performance rather than a fixed representation of the lost masterpiece. This is a Calumny of Apelles rather than the Calumny of Apelles. Bruegel’s Calumny thus draws attention to the subjectivity of his own artistic performance and any project of historical re-creation. Lyvor’s pointed breaking of the fourth wall and his direct gaze at the viewer recall the common use of sudden swings of perspective in contemporary Dutch dramaturgy, where unexpected revelations often forced the audience to cast their minds backward and reevaluate previously held suppositions, a kind of reverse dramatic irony.76 In many of his pictures, Bruegel similarly alludes to the problem of assigning truth to what we see. In an excellent example of this problem, Bruegel’s figure Truth departs significantly from Lucian’s text. While Bruegel’s Truth is nude in accordance with classical precedents, she turns away from the viewer. Where Truth is supposed to be shown approaching in order to illuminate the fact that Ptolemy has been fooled, Bruegel’s Truth, her face averted, offers no such consolation. As if to underscore the futility of revealing truth in his own reconstruction of the lost painting, Bruegel’s signature is placed at bottom right, beneath the throne of the foolish king, rather than aligned with Veritas at left. The theatrical setting of Bruegel’s Calumny and the inaccessibility of truth remind the viewer that Apelles’s original is irrecoverably lost, and that this version is but one possible visual reenactment of the source text, which itself only partially records the missing original. Bruegel’s Calumny of Apelles is a picture of an antique subject that offers space to meditate on the historical distance between the lost original and its later re-presentation and re-performance, on the gaps between text and image, history and the present. Bruegel thus exposes the anxiety underlying the contemporary historical imagination while proclaiming his own place in an emerging history of art. Bruegel’s Art History 143

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co n c l u s i o n

Bruegel as History

By the early seventeenth century and Van Mander’s biography of Bruegel, the nuances of the late sixteenth-century Netherlandish attitude toward history

In his will he left his wife a piece with a magpie on the gallows; by the magpie he

and identity had ossified. During the roughly forty years of Bruegel’s short life,

meant gossiping tongues,

Netherlandish identity was not fixed homogeneously around any single focal

gallows.

point. Instead, as we have seen, it was characterized by its perpetual motion. In the second half of the sixteenth century, natie (the Dutch translation of the Latin natio, root of the English nation) was conceptually equated with a shared

which he committed to the

—karel van mander, Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters

language and culture, even a vague social-psychological character, rather than political or state rights; patria, as a geographical correspondent to natie, meant one’s physical birthplace.1 However, when Susato wrote about the need to celebrate “onse vaderlandsche musycke,” or Van Ghistele wrote about “onse moeders talen,” they used the more emotive and less quantifiable terms “fatherland” and “mother tongue.”

The Low Countries of Bruegel’s day were increasingly represented as a

geographically, historically, and linguistically unified entity, particularly after 1550. Maps were more likely to focus specifically on the Low Countries as a geographical entity (“Nederlanden,” “Pays bas,” “Germania inferioris,” “Gallia belgica”) with defined borders.2 The rhetoric of later sixteenth-century political

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and religious dissidents stressed the historically independent Netherlandish ad-

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

ministrative privileges that bound the Habsburg Crown to the territory (even in cases, such as in Gelderland [conquered by Charles V in 1543], where territory was a relatively recent addition to the “historic” Burgundian provinces). William of Orange would write that these privileges “have always been observed there and were obtained in former times from emperors, kings, dukes, counts and seigniors by the inhabitants of the country.”3 Thus the historical imagination increasingly took on a political dimension in the latter 1560s. After 1566, for example, there was a marked increase in the use of the term “Nederlandt” in prose publications.4 Bruegel’s death in 1569 came at a time of increasing nationalism. In the 1570s and ’80s, the drawn-out war between those loyal to the Habsburgs and the various nobles and religious dissidents aligned against the Spanish Crown solidified and codified this sense of a Dutch national identity. In 1609, forty years after Bruegel’s death, the Twelve Years’ Truce formally established two states in the embattled Low Countries: the Catholic Southern Netherlands, under Habsburg control, and the newly independent Dutch Republic. At this moment, there was a boom in Bruegelian images— copies of paintings, prints, pastiches, and works reattributed to Bruegel. Bruegel’s role as a unique conjurer of the later sixteenth-century Netherlandish historical imagination was recognized at the precise moment when historical identity, both north and south of the newly defined border with the Dutch Republic, was being reanimated in the wake of the war. Acknowledging Bruegel’s importance as a picturer of local history, Bruegelian imagery was recycled and reused to new purpose, but in the process, the nuance of Bruegel’s original historical imagination was often lost or diminished. South of the newly established border in Antwerp, where Bruegel had lived in the 1550s, his sons unsurprisingly turned to their father’s works as source material. Small children when their father died, Pieter Brueghel the Younger and Jan Brueghel both produced numerous copies after their father’s works in the early part of the seventeenth century; Brueghel the Younger operated a prodigiously productive workshop, churning out a high volume of a limited number of his father’s compositions. He also painted versions of subjects by then associated with Bruegel: egg dances and peasant festivals, religious images set in the familiar local countryside.5 Brueghel the Younger was not as skilled as his father, but he built a successful career at the middle and lower end of the market, attesting to the continued demand for Bruegelian peasant imagery in Habsburg-ruled Antwerp at the turn of the seventeenth century. In the new Dutch Republic to the north, Bruegel also remained popular and largely synonymous with Netherlandish landscape imagery. Claes Jansz. Visscher’s 1612 copies of the so-called Small Landscapes (fig. 79), for example, attribute the etchings of the Brabantine landscape to Bruegel. These prints are based on a series that was not designed by Bruegel but was published more than fifty years earlier in Antwerp

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Fig. 79 Claes Jansz. Visscher, title page from Regiunculae et Villae aliquot Ducatus Brabantiae, 1612. Etching. Published by Claes Jansz. Visscher. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1933. Photo: www.metmuseum.org.

by Bruegel’s publisher, Hieronymus Cock.6 On the newly designed frontispiece, the Dutch publisher inserted a robustly built bagpiper, evocative of one of the performers at Bruegel’s Peasant Wedding (fig. 17), resting against a rural domicile. The Latin text of the title page is rendered as if printed on a piece of curling paper affixed to the wall of this structure. Bruegel’s name was not attached to these original designs, but in assigning them to Bruegel and inserting a Bruegelian peasant figure, Visscher capitalized on Bruegel’s posthumous fame and his association with Netherlandish (now Dutch) identity. Visscher’s turn to Bruegel also provides crucial recognition of the artist’s interest in history. Published in Amsterdam more than forty years after Bruegel’s death, the landscapes are largely of Brabant, a Netherlandish region that remained mostly under Spanish sovereignty (only the northernmost part of the Low Countries fell under newly established independent Dutch rule). In the early years of the seventeenth century, thousands of Flemish émigrés established themselves in the northern Netherlands. Visscher’s prints thus offer a nostalgic recollection of the prewar Flemish countryside and the Netherlandish peasant. The Dutch publisher targets these displaced people, offering them a recycled series of views reattributed to Bruegel, an artist, as I have argued, who pictured the complexities of the Netherlandish historical imagination in the 1550s and ’60s. For Visscher, Bruegelian imagery is Netherlandish (now Dutch) history. Although the print series’ frontispiece proudly proclaims the year and place of publication (1612, Amsterdam), Visscher’s prints present images of the recent past, a Flemish landscape now in large part lost to his Dutch audience. The publisher thus

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creates visual continuity between Flemish history and the Dutch present. When the new Dutch state, the first postclassical republican nation-state in Europe, had to fashion its own history in the early seventeenth century, Bruegel himself became part of the new Dutch historical imagination.

The Instability of Historical Imagination

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

In Bruegel’s lifetime, however, “Netherlandish” identity remained in flux, in competition with associations, trade guilds, social groups, fraternities, and city and regional loyalties. I have cited a range of materials from this period, ranging from Dutch lexicons and translations to histories and poetry, which all claimed to celebrate a distinctly Netherlandish character. Political independence was not at the forefront of these authors’ minds, yet the collection and celebration of vernacular culture does point to an interest in local identity, which eventually contributed to a sense of political unity. It is important, however, not to read this burgeoning sense of cultural nationality in the 1550s and 1560s solely as an incipient form of political nationalism. Although Batavian “freedom” was mobilized after the Dutch Revolt as a historical antecedent and a validation for throwing off Habsburg authority, in Bruegel’s lifetime the political implications of the Batavian myth were by no means protorevolutionary.7 Netherlandish ethnic identity would only solidify as an emblematic tool in the political and military struggles to come in the decades following Bruegel’s death in 1569. Bruegel’s images of local identity are more fluid in their imagined history. As we have seen, history and cultural identity are disjointed in Bruegel’s work, fractured and manifold in nature. Bruegel took part in a more diffuse contemporary practice of collecting and documenting Netherlandish vernacular culture, participating in a collective process of making and consecrating communal memory, what I have called the imagination of Netherlandish history.8 Contemporary historians, collectors of customs, dictionary compilers, authors, and artists like Bruegel all grappled with forging a distinctly Netherlandish history from a limited corpus of antique texts and archaeological remains, alongside a renewed investigation of local traditions. As philologists and dictionary compilers struggled with issues of linguistic drift, historians debated the authenticity of archaeological remains. Ortelius’s map of Brittenburg (fig. 6) reproduces coins and a roof tile from the site but pointedly omits reference to an inscribed stone described by his predecessor, Cornelis Aurelius, that supposedly testified to Batavian friendship with Rome. Ortelius probably excludes this evidence because later sixteenth-century antiquarians considered it of dubious historical origin. Bruegel’s contemporaries thus recognized the slipperiness of historical imagination, the problem of using objects

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from the present to imagine the distant past. As we have seen, Bruegel’s images refrain from promoting any singular model for the imagining of history. In fact, Bruegel makes uncertainty central to his pictures. This is perhaps most evident in one of Bruegel’s final works, The Magpie on the Gallows (fig. 80). According to Van Mander, the panel was left to the artist’s wife upon Bruegel’s death, as an explicit condemnation of gossiping tongues. The interpretation and evocative title Van Mander offers has encouraged art historians to explore contemporary literary and proverbial references to the magpie, as well as to other proverbs (“to dance on the gallows,” “to shit on the gallows”) as apparently pictured by Bruegel.9 The visual dominance of the gallows, at the center of the panel, appears also to refer directly to the deteriorating political situation in 1568, the date of Bruegel’s painting. The Magpie on the Gallows illustrates the fluidity and unpredictability of Bruegel’s particular historical moment, the mid-1550s to late 1560s. The first stirrings of the Dutch Revolt had begun in the early 1560s, when sections of the Netherlandish nobility disputed the imposition of Spanish religious edicts. When, in the spring of 1566, nobles presented to Margaret of Parma, regent of the Low Countries, their petition to stop religious persecution, they depicted themselves as defenders of liberty.10 But the explosion of Protestant violence in the summer of 1566 in the iconoclasm, or Beeldenstorm, shocked many who were otherwise sympathetic to reformist concerns. The duke of Alva was dispatched north to deal with the rebellious nobles and image-breaking mobs, but he arrived only in 1567. In 1568, in the earliest days of the fighting, there was tremendous uncertainty about what was happening. In the absence of ready access to printed or confirmable news reports, incredible rumors (that the Spanish had built a secret jail for torture at the castle in Vilvoorde, that the rebels had guns with bullets the size of apples) circulated throughout the country.11 Van Mander’s anecdote about Bruegel’s condemnation of gossiping tongues aligns with the picture’s exposure of the instability of sight and knowledge. At the time of Bruegel’s death in 1569, no one yet knew what the outcome of this insurrection would be. Bruegel’s Magpie on the Gallows reflects the uncertainty of this tense climate. Bruegel paints a wooden cross just behind the gallows; at the foot of this cross is a jumbled pile of bricks, often interpreted as a symbol of the social, political, and religious disorder of this moment. The pair of pointing figures at left, rather than elucidating the picture’s narrative, gesture in a maddeningly imprecise way. Are they pointing at the dancing peasants? The gallows? The cross farther down the hill? Any certainty the viewer invests in these observers as substitute interpreters is immediately undercut by the revelation that there is a crouching figure behind them, his pants around his ankles, apparently defecating, in the lower left corner of the panel. Painted in shadow, this figure is easily missed at first glance; the pointing figure and his companion seem unaware of his presence. Bruegel reminds the viewer: if these pointing figures cannot see the man behind them, how do we know that what

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we are seeing is the full picture? The Magpie on the Gallows suggests the impossibility of knowing just how history will record the present moment, or which rumors will prove true and which will be forgotten. The presence of the cross in the landscape reminds the viewer of the eschatological scale of Christian history, the only historical certainty. Yet, as pictured by Bruegel, not even the presence of the cross is immediately clear to the casual viewer, nor is it clear that the pair of onlookers at left have seen the cross. While The Magpie on the Gallows demonstrates the impossibility of total selfawareness, this is not a topos particular to the political situation of 1568. We have seen this kind of tension in The Flight into Egypt, Summer, and The Calumny of Apelles.12 The Flight into Egypt, through the inclusion of tiny details like the broken column and the hybrid tree shrine as falling idol, presents contrasting models for historical imagination. Summer portrays the Netherlandish peasant both as an avatar of Bacchic antiquity and as a comic local figure. The Calumny depicts a paradoxical restaging of the greatest painting of antiquity that meditates on the subjectivity of any historical reconstruction. Each work questions the viewer’s ability to see, at once disguising and revealing contrary models for interpreting Bruegel’s pictures.13 All of Bruegel’s art encourages repeated viewing: the recognition of details and of visual, textual, and verbal citations enables a continual unfolding of interpretive possibilities and historical allusions. As an artist, Bruegel was an iconographic innovator, but he was also keenly aware of local and regional artistic traditions and the classical inheritance, which he quoted and manipulated throughout his oeuvre. While Van Mander claims that the artist condemned “gossiping tongues,” Bruegel’s pictures themselves produce a dialogic response of multiple speculative interpretations. Bruegel does not simply illustrate Dutch proverbs or visualize classical satire in a vernacular guise. His works operate within a complex and evolving discourse about the unique nature of Netherlandish history and identity, reflecting growing tensions between perceived imperial, national, and religious identities. Bruegel represents the complex relations between classical antiquity, vernacular tradition, and art history, playing with the boundaries of the familiar and the foreign, history and the present, all the while uniquely encouraging continuous reengagement with and reevaluation of these terms. The deliberate interpretative openness of his works reflects the fluid discourse about history and identity in the Low Countries of Bruegel’s lifetime, before a mythic Dutchness was mobilized at the turn of the seventeenth century. In Bruegel’s lifetime, Netherlandish history was in the process of being imagined; after his death, his works would come to stand for “Dutchness” in a way the artist himself could not have foreseen.

Fig. 80 Pieter Bruegel, The Magpie on the Gallows, 1568. Oil on panel. Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt. Photo: Scala / Art Resource, New York.

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Notes

Introduction 1. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “pagan.” The postclassical semantic development of the Latin paganus to encompass the sense of non-Christian is not clear. It has been posited, not without controversy, that an early example might be suggested in Tertullian De corona militis 11 (“Apud, hunc [sc. Christum] tam miles est paganus fidelis quam paganus est miles infedils”), though this is by no means certain. The equivalent term in German and Dutch, heide, derives from the Greek άγρός but is also connected to the Latin paganus, or rustic. See Groot Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal, 12th ed., s.v. “heide”; and Grimm and Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, s.v. “heide.” 2. Dictionarium Tetraglotton, s.v. “paganus.” 3. Barfield, Rediscovery of Meaning, 238. The importance of historical imagination in art-historical writing is explored in Holly, Past Looking. 4. Two articles by Svetlana Alpers and a rebuttal by Hessel Miedema, published in the pages of Simiolus in the 1970s, ignited this debate. See Alpers, “Bruegel’s Festive Peasants” and “Realism as a Comic Mode”; and Miedema, “Realism and Comic Mode.” Some of the more recent attempts to bridge the gap between an understanding of Bruegel’s pictures as comic or moralizing include Vandenbroeck, Beeld van de andere; Kavaler, Pieter Bruegel; Ramakers, “Kinderen van Saturnus”; Silver, Peasant Scenes and Landscapes; and Richardson, Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

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5. Honig, “Place of Style,” 417. 6. Seznec, Survival of the Pagan Gods, 215. Seznec echoes Oswald Spengler’s description, in Der Untergang des Abendlandes, of Blut und Boden (blood and soil) as the primary determinants of culture. See also Larry Silver’s foundational article “Forest Primeval” on the hybrid nature of Germanic antiquity as pictured by sixteenthcentury German artists. 7. On Ortelius’s interest in classical and local history, see Meganck, “Erudite Eyes”; and Imhof, Abraham Ortelius. 8. I explore the emergence of historical writing in the Low Countries in the following chapters, but the foundational study of this development is Kampinga, Opvattingen over onze oudere vaderlandsche gescheidenis. More recent literature includes Mout, “‘Bataafse Oor’”; Tilmans, “National Consciousness”; Bejczy, “Drie humanisten”; Mulier, “Bataafse mythe opnieuw bekeken”; and Regan, “Cartography, Chorography, and Patriotic Sentiment.” 9. Tellier, Urban World History, 308. 10. On Schoonbeke, see Soly, Urbanisme en kapitalisme. 11. On this problem, see the opening chapters in Schama, Embarrassment of Riches. 12. Köstlin, “Passion for the Whole,” 265, 272. Köstlin uses the example of a modern Swiss newspaper reporting on an Alpine procession, describing the custom as having unknown “pagan origins.” 13. In this game, Bruegel’s art was not new. The religious art of the fifteenth-century Low Countries had established a complex temporal and symbolic relationship

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Notes to Pages 10 –15

between the age of biblical history and the everyday world of the contemporary moment—thus the foundational art-historical debate about the “disguised symbolism” of these pictures. See Panofsky, “Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait”; and Schapiro, “‘Muscipula Diaboli.’” 14. Snow, Inside Bruegel, 156. 15. Erasmus, “Playing of Cock-all.” 16. See, most recently, Sullivan, Bruegel and the Creative Process, 70 –100. 17. Orrock, “Homo ludens.” 18. For example, see Abraham Ortelius’s description and Pieter van der Borcht’s illustrations of the childhood games of the ancient Belgo-Germans (including tumbling) in Aurei saeculi imago, A4. 19. Panofsky, “Renaissance and Renascences,” 228. 20. Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, 44– 49. Nagel and Wood also discuss Panofsky’s vision of historical lucidity in the essay “Father Time,” from the 1939 Studies in Iconology, as a departure from his previous schema (and a prefiguration of their own methodology, in querying how works of art address the question of historical time). 21. Wolf, review of Anachronic Renaissance, 137. 22. Panofsky, of course, was also concerned with the spatial dimensions of historical distance as discussed in Melville, “Attachments of Art History.” 23. These numbers are derived from the most recent catalogue raisonné, Sellink, Bruegel. 24. Bruegel’s guild registration can be found in the register of the Guild of Saint Luke in Antwerp, 1551, Archief Nationaal Hoger Instituut en Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten; his work on the Mechelen altarpiece for the glove makers’ guild (Mechelen Stadsarchief, DD51, no. 32) was published in Monballieu, “P. Bruegel en het altaar”; the artist’s marriage is recorded in the 1563 marriage register, Brussels City Archives, Church of NotreDame-de-la-Chapelle, fol. 5. Most recently, Jean Bastiaensen discovered records of Bruegel’s betrothal in Antwerp; see Bastiaensen, “Verloving van Pieter Bruegel de Oude.” 25. “petro brvegel, pictori. / Quis novus hic Hieronymus Orbi / Boschius?

ingeniosa magistri / Somnia peniculoque, styloque / Tanta imitarier arte peritus. / Ut superet tamen interim et illum? / Macte animo, Petre, mactus ut arte / Namque tuo, veterisque magistri / Ridiculo, salibusque referto / In graphices genere inclita laudum / Praemia ubique, et ab omnibus ullo / Artifice haud leviora mereris.” Lampsonius and Cock, Pictorum aliquot celebrium Germaniae inferioris effigies, plate 19. Translation by Daniel Hadas, in Courtauld Institute of Art, Picturing the Netherlandish Canon. 26. On the structure of the Cock series, see Becker, “Zur niederländischen Kunstliteratur”; Meiers, “Portraits in Print”; and Woodall, “Dem Dry Bones.” 27. Ilsink argues that the date of the epitaph must be after 1584, as the inscription on the recto is from that year. Ilsink, Bosch en Bruegel als Bosch, 156. 28. “petrvm brvegelivm pictorem fuisse sui saeculi absolutissimum, nemo nisi invidus, aemulus aut eius artis ignarus, umquam negabit. . . . Eupompus pictor interrogatus quem sequeretur antecedentium, demonstrata hominum multitudine, dixisse fertur, naturam ipsam imitandam esse, non artificem. Congruet nostro Brugelio hoc, cuius picturas ego minime artificiosas, at naturales appelare soleam.” Album amicorum Abraham Ortelius, fols. 12v–13r. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. 29. “In omnibus eius operibus intelligitur plus semper quam pingitur.” Ibid., fol. 13r. Pliny’s description of Timanthes painting a veil over Agamemnon, as a way of suggesting his unimaginable grief, can be found in Historia naturalis 35.36.73. The ancient sources for Ortelius’s epitaph are discussed at length in Muylle, “Pieter Bruegel en Abraham Ortelius”; Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon, 173– 82; Meadow, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “Netherlandish Proverbs,” 108 –17. 30. See Pliny Historia naturalis 35.36.75. 31. Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon, 177–79. 32. “De Natuer heeft wonder wel haren Man ghevonden en ghetroffen, / om weder van hem heerlijck ghetroffen te worden, / doe sy in Brabant in een onbekent Dorp onder den Boeren, om Boeren met den Pinceel nae te / bootsen, heeft uyt gaen picken,

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en tot de Schilder-const verwecken, onsen ghe/ duerighen Nederlandtschen roem, den seer gheestighen en bootsighen Pieter / Brueghel.” English translation in Van Mander, Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, 1:190 –91, fol. 233r. 33. See the parallels between Van Mander’s biography of Bruegel and Vasari’s life of Giotto, in which Vasari claims that Giotto was a shepherd and was spotted by Cimabue drawing sheep on a rock. See Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, 1:370. On the emerging tropes of artistic genius, see Kris and Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic. 34. “Al die berghen en rotsen had in gheswolghen, en t’huys ghecomen op doecken en Penneelen uytghespogen hadde.” Van Mander, Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, 1:190 –91, fol. 233r. 35. Lomazzo, Trattato dell’arte, 2.106 –7. See the discussion by Hessel Miedema in Van Mander, Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, 3:260. 36. Van Mander, Schilder-boeck, fols. 23r, 27r, 45v, 46r. See also Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon, 179. 37. Van Mander described Bruegel as “a quiet and pleasant man who spoke little, but [was] very comic in company” (een seer stille en gheschickt Man, niet veel van woorden, dan wel bootsigh in’t gheselschap). Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, 1:192 –93, fol. 233v. 38. On Bruegel and contemporary theories of imitation, see Ilsink, Bosch en Bruegel als Bosch, 231– 44. 39. Woodall, “Lost in Translation,” 3. 40. Boekholt and de Booy, Geschiedenis van de school in Nederland. Church schools in Antwerp had a monopoly on the teaching of Latin, though the so-called free schools taught short Latin psalms and prayers alongside modern European languages. 41. Guicciardini, Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi, 27. 42. Bouwsma, Waning of the Renaissance, 37. 43. Johannes Goropius Becanus, for example, argued in Origines Antwerpianae that Diets, the dialect of Antwerp, was one of the oldest languages on earth. See also Claude Tolomei’s 1555 work on the history of Italian, Il Cesano.

44. Hermans, “Translating ‘Rhetorijckelijck’ or ‘Ghetrouwelijck.’” 45. Eco, Mouse or Rat, 6. 46. Wood, Forgery, Replica, Fiction, 63– 64.

Chapter 1 1. Aurelius, Cronycke van Hollandt, chap. 13 (first division), discusses the site (“the tower of Calla”) and the links to Britain. 2. A summary of current archaeology on Katwijk can be found in Boomgaard et al., Uitwateringssluizen van Katwijk; and Parleviet, “Brittenburg voorgoed verloren.” Because the site is now inaccessible, there is still debate about the building’s function. Two of the most popular hypotheses are that Brittenburg operated as a granary or lighthouse. 3. British Library, C.9.d.4. On Ortelius’s map, see Meganck, “Abraham Ortelius.” 4. On May 8, 1566, Guido Laurinus wrote to Ortelius about the site, referring to inscriptions that Hubertus Goltzius gave Ortelius, as having been copied from “oude marmeren steen van de Arx Britannica” (an old marble stone from the Arx Britannica). See Ortelius, Abrahami Ortelii epistulae, 34–36. Meganck has argued, therefore, that all three were working on the map in the period 1566 to 1568, when the archive of the Plantin publisher records payment for the printing of a map of the Arx Britannica to take to the Frankfurt fair. See Meganck, “Abraham Ortelius.” The Plantin record, referring to “In Martio 1568. Francofordiae. ‘Arx Britannica’ st. 7,” can be found in Denucé, Oud-nederlandsche kaartmakers, 2:161. See also Meganck, “Erudite Eyes,” on Ortelius’s relationships with antiquarians. 5. De La Fontaine, “History of Guicciardini’s Description.” 6. Guicciardini, Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi, 192 –93. 7. Langereis has pointed out that nonagricultural work like the building of new roads and waterworks also led to such finds. “Van bote boeren tot beschaafde burgers,” 77. 8. Haskell, History and Its Images, 111. 9. Guicciardini, Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi, 193.

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Notes to Pages 24–30

10. In the preface to William Camden’s Britannia, the author credits Ortelius with chiding him to complete the project: “ut Britanniam nostram antiquam illam illustrarem: hoc est ut Britanniae antiquitatem et suae antiquitati Britanniam restituerem.” 11. Schnapp, Discovery of the Past, 132. 12. On this earlier interest in the particular antiquity of Zeeland fostered at the court of Philip of Burgundy, see Bass, “Jan Gossaert’s ‘Neptune and Amphitrite.’” 13. Tacitus, Agricola and the Germania, 109, 25. 14. On the antique sources for the Batavians, see Teiler, “Romeinen en Bataven.” 15. On Aurelius’s contribution to Netherlandish history, see Tilmans, Historiography and Humanism. 16. See Geldenhauer’s discussion of the inscription: “dis manibus g iulio clau pudenti meoma vet leg x g gan l et iunio f eius hf * c.” Historia Batavica, fol. 5v. See the Dutch translation in Historische werken, 53. 17. See Barkan’s Unearthing the Past, a crucial study of sixteenth-century archaeology as a kind of poetics. 18. Wood, Forgery, Replica, Fiction, 118. On textual sources and their drift, see Greene, Light in Troy. 19. Grotius, Antiquity of the Batavian Republic, 78. 20. Junius discusses the giant legends (Batavia, 9 –13) and describes the Arx Britannica (107–22) with numerous illustrations of artifacts found at the site. 21. See, for example, the 1550 Nederlandsche spellynghe, published in Ghent by Joas Lambrecht, and Anton t’Sestich’s 1576 Orthographia Linguae Belgicae. For a compendium of Dutch dictionaries of the period, see Claes, Lijst van Nederlandse woordenlijsten. See also Van den Branden, Streven naar verheerlijking. 22. “Menich constich gheest daerduere hem ontsiet ende grouwelt yet in onser Dutyscher talen over te settene.” Van Ghistele, Deerste sesse boecken van Aeneas, fol. π4r. 23. Van Ghistele was responsible for translations of the Heroides (1553), Aeneid (1554), Comedies (1555), and Satires (1569). See Vinck-van Caekenberghe, Onderzoek naar het leven. The Metamorphoses was translated

by Johannes Floriaanus in 1552, while Dirck Volckertszoon Coornhert translated The Odyssey in 1561. 24. See Boekholt and de Booy, Geschiedenis van de school in Nederland. 25. Vinck-van Caekenberghe, Onderzoek naar het leven, 359. See also Hemelaar, “For the Illustration of Rhetoric,” 140 – 42. 26. See his translation of Terentius Comedie, fol. 5r. 27. See Vinck-van Caekenberghe, Onderzoek naar het leven, 384. 28. “De geode inuentien, en fraey materien, die t’al der tijt onder eenighe van / ons vlaemsche Poëten ghefloreert hebben . . . / . . . Ende bouen al behooren vvy ons eyghen tale meer te ghebruy / cken om die ende ons lande te vercieren.” De Heere, Hof en boomgaerd der poësien, poem no. IV, lines 42 – 45. Bart Ramakers reviews the development of Netherlandish literary culture’s self-awareness in “As Many Lands, as Many Customs.” 29. The poem on the Ghent Altarpiece is no. XI in de Heere, Hof en boomgaerd der poësien, pp. 29 –32. 30. “Helpt my ons moeders tal (die ghelijck goudt onder d’eerde / leyt verborghen) wederom so brenghen op de beene, dat sy / aen andere talen geen onderstant en behoeft te versoecken.” Van der Werve, Tresoor der Duytsscher talen, author’s foreword, 3. 31. See the discussion of the etymology of various Dutch towns, as well as of the language itself, in Becanus, Origines Antwerpianae, 1.25–52. See also Divaeus, De galliae beligicae antiquitatibus, on the etymology of Netherlandish place-names, as well as the text on the verso sheets of Ortelius’s maps for the Theatrum orbis terrarium—for example, the elaborate discussion of the etymology of Belgium on the verso of the map of Belgii Veteris (1584). This phenomenon was not limited to the Dutch but was experienced across Europe. See Margolin, “Science et nationalisme linguistique.” 32. See de Glas, “Context, Conception, and Content,” 76. 33. Jansen, “Purity and the Language of the Court,” 166 –70. 34. Bono, Word of God, 53. 35. See Becanus, Origines Antwerpianae. On the early linguistic histories of the period, see Van Hal, Moedertalen en taalmoeders.

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36. See, for example, Claude Tolomei’s 1555 work on the history of Italian, Il Cesano. Lipsius’s letter to Hendrik Schotti, in Lipsius, Epistolarum selectarum, disputes such an attempt to reconstruct a speculative history of the Dutch language. Scaliger’s attack on Becanus was even more direct: “Never have I read greater nonsense, never have I seen or heard greater irresponsibility” (Nunquam legi maiores nugas, nunquam insigniorem temeritatem vidi neque audivi). See “Castigationes,” in Scaliger, M. Verrii Flacci quae extant, xvi. 37. This lineage is surveyed in Mori, “‘She Hangs the Blue Cloak,’” 80 – 84. 38. “Quaelijck salmen connen die blauwe heuck omhangen / haer.” Van Ghistele, “Van Eneas en Dido,” p. 212, lines 1658 –59. 39. See Meadow, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “Netherlandish Proverbs”; Gibson, Figures of Speech. 40. “En waeroome en soude men datt coortane niet also wel met gelycker konst ende soeticheit in onser moederr spraken connen gedoen, als men tot nu toe in latynsche walshe ende italieaensche sprake dedaen heeft? . . . Laet ons dan voortane alle neersticheyt doen, om onse vaderlandsche musycke, die nit van minder konst ende soeticheit en is dan andere.” The first two books are reproduced in Riemsdijk, “Twee eerste musyckboekskens.” 41. See Susato, Musyck boexken, xvii. 42. Grijp, “Tielman Susato’s vaterlandsche musijcke,” 270 –71. 43. On The Kermis at Hoboken, see Monballieu, “‘Kermis van Hoboken’”; Mielke, Pieter Bruegel, no. 44; Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, no. 80. 44. “Die boeren verblyen hun in sulken feesten Te dansen springhen en dronckendrincken als beesten / Sy moeten die kermissen onderhouwen Al souwen sy vasten en sterven van kauwen.” 45. See Kelley, “Altera Natur.” In the fifthcentury b.c.e. Histories, Herodotus singled out for discussion particular types of customs and practices: religious rites, burial practices, marriage customs, and diet. Early collections of customs, like Joannes Boemus’s Omnium gentium mores, leges & ritus of 1520 and Sebastian Münster’s popular Cosmographiae universalis (1550), followed Herodotus’s dictums in

their chorographic descriptions of regions, blending accounts of local geography, history, custom, and tradition. See Burke, Renaissance Sense of the Past, 105. 46. “Troppo loquaci, tengono poco conto dell’interesse del prossimo, dimenticansi presto i benefici, & per consequeza hanno altrui poco amore, benche all’incontro si diimenticano ache tosto le ingiurie & portano poco odio, ritenendo ancora in tali effetti, conforme a quello che ne scrive Cesare, l’antica costuma, come porge lor’questa aria & questo Cielo” (too talkative, take little account of the interests of others, soon forget favors, and consequently have little love of others, although upon meeting soon forget any insults and carry little hatred, still feeling the effects of the particular air and climate, conforming to what Caesar writes was the ancient custom). Guicciardini, Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi, 29. 47. Nadine Orenstein suggests that the two prints should be understood as a pair, with The Kermis of Saint George, published by Hieronymus Cock, Bruegel’s usual publisher, preceding The Kermis at Hoboken. Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 198. 48. “Laet die boeren haer kermis houuen.” 49. Monballieu, “‘Kermis van Hoboken’”; and most recently Gibson, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 81– 85. 50. Here, I am indebted to Margaret D. Carroll’s foundational article “Peasant Festivity and Political Identity.” 51. On the intersections between Bruegel’s landscapes and chorographic production of his age, see Büttner, Erfindung der Landschaft. 52. “Hanno poi per la maggior’ parte quel’ vitio del ber troppo, di che essi prendono estremo diletto . . . qualche parte scusabili, perche essendo l’aria del paese il piu del tempo humida & malinchonica . . . in tanto che non recusano talhora, d’andar venticinque, trenta & quaranta miglia lontani & molto piu per trovarsi a qualche festa, come sono di State le processioni piu solenni, che si fanno per il paese, chiamate da loro Caramesse, a nozze di parenti, & d’amici, & a simili cose.” Guicciardini, Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi, 29 –30. 53. See Meganck, “Erudite Eyes,” 119. On Bruegel's engraving, dating from

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Notes to Pages 39 –52

approximately 1555–56, see Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, no. 30. 54. Ovid paraphrased this proverb: “Ista vetus pietas, aevo moritura futuro, / Rustica saturno regna tenente fuit.” Epistulae 4.131–32. On the particular history of this proverb in the medieval Low Countries, see Obrán, “Spreekwoordelijke beeld,” 75. 55. Mann Phillips, “Adages” of Erasmus, 211. 56. “Goede weiden vol van beesten ende . . . seer vruchtbar ende wasbaer van saeylant.” Aurelius, Cronycke van Hollandt, fol. 91r. 57. “Maiorem partem victus in lacte, carne, & caseo consistere, docet Caesar.” Ortelius, Aurei saeculi imago, B3. 58. Guicciardini, Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi, 30. 59. Ibid., 30, 195. 60. See the entry on the print by Manfred Sellink in Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 204–7. 61. On Van Dalem, see the summary of literature in Allart, “Paysagiste à découvrir”; Büttner, “Cornelis van Dalem.” For the primary sources, see Van de Velde, “Archivalia over Cornelis van Dalem.” 62. On rijstpap, a kind of rice pudding served on festive occasions, see Gibson, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 88. 63. The text describes a curdled milk (“lac concretum”) that Van der Borcht compares to rijstpap. Ortelius, Aurei saeculi imago, B3. See also Carroll, “Peasant Festivity and Political Identity.” 64. See Guicciardini’s note to the reader (“investigare personalmente le cose occorrenti”). Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi, “Al lettore,” fol. 10v. 65. Kavaler, Pieter Bruegel, 171– 83. 66. Koselleck, Futures Past, 165. 67. The painting, now in Rotterdam, is discussed in Grossmann, “Notes on Some Dutch and Flemish Paintings.” 68. Kemp, Estrangement of the Past, 157. As Anthony Pagden has pointed out, it was indigenous Americans’ lack of complex agriculture and cities that confirmed the European belief that Native Americans were “natural slaves.” See Pagden, Fall of Natural Man, 57–108. On the triangular relationship between European peasants, Europe’s pagan past, and the exotic peoples of the New World, see Ryan, “Assimilating New Worlds,” 537. On early modern knowledge production as the search for

resemblance, see Foucault, Order of Things, 19 –50. 69. See Fabian, Time and the Other. Serge Gruzinski has recently complicated this argument by arguing that all modernities are formed in contact with other bodies of knowledge. Gruzinski, What Time Is It There?, 34–35. 70. On the relative social mobility of the rural Flemish populace, see Limberger, Sixteenth-Century Antwerp, 46. On the rural industries of textile production, brewing, and brickmaking, see especially 121– 45. 71. On the development and construction of the rural suburbs and the Nieuwstad of Antwerp in the period, see Soly, Urbanisme en kapitalisme. On land reclamation of the period, see Lindemans, Geschiedenis van de landbouw; and Lambert, Making of the Dutch Landscape. 72. Limberger, Sixteenth-Century Antwerp, 120 –21. 73. Van Mander, Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, 1:192 –93, fol. 233v. 74. On Luilekkerland, see Pleij, Dreaming of Cockaigne. 75. Bhabha, “DissemiNation,” 297. 76. On the rise of the peasant genre in Antwerp and Bruegel’s place in the more tolerant tone of these images, see Silver, Peasant Scenes and Landscapes, chap. 6. 77. “Welck handtwerck, oirboirlijcste is van doene, en eerlijcste nochtans seer cleyn gheacht?”All of the competing chambers answered landwinnighe or landbouwinghe. See Spelen van sinne. 78. Guicciardini, Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi, 26 –27. 79. Hodgen, Early Anthropology, 257. 80. See note 4 in the introduction on the dominance of the moralizing versus comedic dialectic in Bruegel’s scholarship and recent attempts to bridge this divide. 81. See Mann Phillips, “Adages” of Erasmus, 211. Ortelius also describes the ancient German people’s hospitality (“hospitijs auc convictibus”) along with their propensity for excessive drinking (“continuare potando nulli probrum”). Ortelius, Aurei saeculi imago, B3. 82. See n. 46 above. 83. See the facties of the rhetoricians’ chambers from ’s-Hertogenbosch and Van

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Berchem in the Spelen van sinne, which used peasant types as examples of crude behavior.

Chapter 2 1. There are two partial exceptions: Bruegel’s documented contribution to the shutters of an altarpiece in Mechelen in 1551 under the direction of Pieter Baltens (see Monballieu, “P. Bruegel en het altaar”), and a later commission by the Brussels city authorities to paint the excavation of a canal linking Antwerp and Brussels, which Karel van Mander mentions as one of the master’s unfinished works. Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, 1:192 –93, fol. 233v. 2. On pictures by Bruegel in Noirot’s collection, see Smolderen, “Tableaux de Jérôme Bosch.” On Bruegel’s paintings in Jonghelinck’s collection, see Buchanan, “Collection of Niclaes Jongelinck II.” For Ortelius’s ownership of The Death of the Virgin, see Popham, “Pieter Bruegel and Abraham Ortelius.” 3. On the painting market in Antwerp, see Vermeylen, Painting for the Market; and Ewing, “Marketing Art in Antwerp,” 558 – 64. 4. This move must have taken place in August or September of 1563 at the earliest, as Bruegel still resided in Antwerp in July, when his betrothal took place. See Bastiaensen, “Verloving van Pieter Bruegel de Oude.” 5. There is voluminous literature on the historia, summarized in English in Grafton, “On the Historia and Istoria”; Puttfarken, Discovery of Pictorial Composition. 6. Alberti, On Painting, 2.35– 41, pp. 55– 62. 7. Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti, 128 –33. 8. Kelley, “Between History and System.” See also Grafton, What Was History? 9. Bodin, Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem. 10. The Protoevangelium of James was probably written about 150 c.e. and is also known as one of the apocryphal infancy gospels. See Elliott, Synopsis of the Apocryphal Nativity. 11. On earlier images of the flight into Egypt with a pagan idol, see Camille, Gothic Idol, 1–9, 197–203. See also Reindert

Falkenburg’s study of Joachim Patinir’s many versions of this subject and the connection between the landscape, subsidiary narratives, and the meditative function of these images. Falkenburg, Joachim Patinir. 12. Gibson, Mirror of the Earth, 94n6. Outside of the iconography of the flight into Egypt, gabled shrines also turn up in a variety of paintings executed by the same circle of artists: in genre scenes (Lucas Gassel, Landscape with Shepherds, De PretRoose Collection, Vordenstein); Old Testament and New Testament scenes (Gassel’s Judith and Thamar, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna); and in images from the lives of the saints (Cornelis Massys, Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp). 13. Haymaking (Lobkowicz Collection, Prague) is part of the six-panel series The Months, originally owned by Nicolaes Jonghelinck, representing early summer, probably the months of May and June. On the series, see Buchanan, “Collection of Niclaes Jongelinck II”; Tijs, “Twaalfmaandencyclus over het land”; and, most recently, Kaschek, Weltzeit und Endzeit. On Wooded Landscape (Maida and George Abrams Collection, Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Mass., 1999.132), see Mielke, Pieter Bruegel, nos. 5 and 7a; and Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, no. 14. 14. A recent bibliography on the drawing and print can be found in Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, nos. 70 and 71. 15. On architectural style in the period, see de Jonge, “Antiquity Assimilated,” 55. 16. For the complicated question of these shrines’ survival, maintenance, and development, see Giraldo, Volksdevotie in West-Vlaanderen, 65–71. 17. On the uses of such rural shrines, see Timmermann, “Highways to Heaven (and Hell)”; and Van Dülmen, Kultur und Alltag, 3:57. 18. On the history of sacred trees in Belgium and their continued appeal in the nineteenth century, see Chalon, Arbres fétiches de la Belgique; Van Gennep, Folklore de la Flandre, 2:476; Giraldo, Volksdevotie in West-Vlaanderen, 65–71. 19. Toussaert, Sentiment religieux en Flandre, 15, 76, 216, 42. Hugo van der Velden also includes a list of tree-related

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Notes to Pages 62 – 68

fifteenth-century Marian shrines in “Petrus Christus’s ‘Our Lady of the Day Tree,’” 98. 20. For example, see Sullivan, Bruegel’s Peasants, 137. 21. See Luther’s 1520 publication “An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation,” which included a criticism of “die wilden Capellen und Feldkirchen” (wild chapels and field churches), 168. Luther also objected to the cult of the Schönen Maria in Regensburg, a pilgrimage site famously represented in a woodcut by Michael Ostendorfer; he compared the contemporary practice of dance, procession, and worship directed at the standing statue of the Virgin to that of pagans dancing around an idol. 22. Hodgen, Early Anthropology, 327. 23. Indeed, the first martyr of the Reformation, Klaus Hottinger, was exiled, tried for blasphemy, and eventually burned at the stake after destroying a wayside cross in Stadelhofen near Zurich in 1523. Joseph Koerner tells the story of Hottinger in Reformation of the Image, 129. 24. Pasquier de Le Barre of Tournai recorded his view of the gatherings of 1566: “The number of assemblies and field sermons held in Flanders grows every day. They even occurred in the fields adjacent to Lille, Ghent and Antwerp.” Le Barre, Time of Troubles, 97. 25. Gustav Glück was the first modern scholar to discuss the painting; see his “Paysage avec la Fuite en Egypte.” The panel entered the Courtauld Institute of Art in 1978 as a bequest from the collection of Count Antoine Seilern and has received little scholarly attention since. See Braham, Princes Gate Collection, no. 8. 26. On the extent and ambition of Granvelle’s collection, see Banz, Höfisches Mäzenatentum in Brüssel, 31–73; and Piquard, “Cardinal Granvelle.” 27. The Flight into Egypt is listed in the 1607 inventory by Granvelle’s heirs. For a discussion of Bruegel’s paintings at Granvelle’s palace in Brussels, see Wauters, “Pierre Bruegel et Cardinal Granvelle.” 28. On this point I agree with Walter Gibson, who criticizes Sullivan’s reading of the panel as having a secret reformist agenda (Sullivan, Bruegel’s Peasants, 137): “We can only hope that if Ortelius or his friends

ever viewed this painting, they refrained from blurting out its ‘secret’ meaning in the cardinal’s presence.” Gibson, Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter, 190n28. This is not to say that Bruegel and Ortelius necessarily agreed with the archbishop’s political decisions— only that the work, which appealed to Granvelle, is not likely to have been specifically intended to criticize orthodox church policies. 29. Zupnick, “Bruegel and the Revolt of the Netherlands,” 283. 30. Mann Phillips, “Adages” of Erasmus, 32; Jensen, “Humanist Reform of Latin,” 75–76; and Pigman, “Imitation and the Renaissance Sense of the Past.” 31. Such shrines, for example, appear in Altdorfer’s 1522 watercolor Landscape with Woodcutter (Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin), in one of the woodcuts in Holbein’s 1523–26 series Dance of Death, and in the background of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Wayfarer, on the outer wings of the Haywain triptych (Prado, Madrid). 32. For a discussion of the vast literature on Peasant Dance (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), see Gibson, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 69 –72, 102 –3, 117–22. 33. In addition to these agricultural rites, Stephen Wilson mentions the use of rural field crosses in a number of fertility and marriage rituals. Magical Universe, 14, 46. 34. Nagel and Wood explain that an artwork is “anachronic” “when it is late, when it repeats, when it hesitates, when it remembers, but also when it projects a future or an ideal.” See their Anachronic Renaissance, 13. 35. Ibid., 30. See the authors’ earlier formulation of the substitutional model in “Interventions,” 407. 36. Fig. 29 was etched and engraved by Joannes and Lucas van Doetecum. See Nalis, Van Doetecum Family, vol. 1, nos. 22 – 47. 37. Christopher Wood’s account of the German Renaissance describes how early archaeological theory contained a similar tension between the exploitation and the outright destruction of notional thinking about the artifact. See his Forgery, Replica, Fiction, 269. 38. On The Tower of Babel, see Klamt, “Anmerkungen zu Pieter Bruegels Babel-Darstellungen”; Mansbach, “Pieter

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Bruegel’s Towers of Babel”; Snow, “Language of Contradiction”; Demus, “Pictures of Pieter Bruegel,” 56 –57; Morra, “Utopia Lost”; and Carroll, Painters and Politics, 83. 39. The drawing, in the duke of Devonshire’s collection at Chatsworth (inv. 841), is signed “bruegel” and inscribed “a rypa” and is usually dated to around 1553. Manfred Sellink has argued compellingly that this sheet should be dated to the later 1550s, when Bruegel revisited now lost drawings done in situ and recast them for the Large Landscape engravings. See Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, no. 8; Sellink “Dating of Pieter Bruegel’s Landscape Drawings,” 303. 40. Augustine, City of God, 16.17. 41. Carroll, Painters and Politics, 83– 85. 42. See particularly Mansbach, “Pieter Bruegel’s Towers of Babel”; Carroll, Painters and Politics, 83. 43. Buchanan, “Collection of Niclaes Jongelinck II.” “Sesthien stucken van Bruegel sulx de welke is den Thoren van Babilonyen, Eenen Cruysdrager, De Twelff maenden,” Stadsarchief, Antwerp, Tresorij 1711, no. 1551, February 21, 1565, partly transcribed and published in Denucé, Antwerpsche “Konstkamers,” 5. 44. Bloom, “Pictorial Babel,” 328 –36. 45. Morra, “Utopia Lost,” 209. For example, Barbara Kaminska has recently argued for a more localized interpretation of this painting as reflecting concerns about civic rule and community cohesion in Antwerp. Kaminska, “‘Come, Let Us Make a City.’” 46. Parshall, “Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Tower of Babel,” 77. This is also the ultimate conclusion of Koenraad Jonckheere in “Allegory of Artistic Choice,” which unfortunately appeared too late for me to fully digest here. While these assessments resonate with Jürgen Müller’s description of Bruegel’s works as “subversive” in the disconnect between their esoteric and exoteric messages, I do not share Müller’s view of such works as “coded” and as open to unlocking via a specific interpretative key (textual or otherwise). See Müller, “Of Churches, Heretics, and Other Guides.” 47. My thanks to Elizabeth Honig, who first suggested this similarity to me. 48. Van Tussenbroeck, “Changes in the Organisation,” 304. 49. In “Antiquity Made from Wood,” Hans Hubach has traced the early and

mid-fifteenth-century use of astwerk, or stonework, carved to appear like tree branches, prior to the rediscovery of Tacitus in Germany. 50. Junius, Nomenclator, 208. For a more general history of the association of wooden architecture with primitive man, see also Rykwert, On Adam’s House in Paradise. 51. Demus, “Pictures of Pieter Bruegel,” 57. 52. Most recently, this lineage has been summarized in Silver, Pieter Bruegel, 24–31. 53. Adoration of the Magi, 1567, oil on panel, Oskar Reinhart Collection, Winterthur; Census at Bethlehem, 1566, oil on panel, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels; Massacre of the Innocents, ca. 1567, Royal Collection, United Kingdom. 54. Falkenburg, “Pieter Bruegels Kruisdraging.” 55. Müller, Paradox als Bildform, 137; Stridbeck, Bruegelstudien, 250. 56. Falkenburg argues in “Pieter Bruegels Kruisdraging” that spiritual blindness is the key message of Christ Carrying the Cross, as it encourages a dynamic process of viewing and reflection, rather than producing interpretative clarity. Literature on The Blind Leading the Blind (1568, glue-size tempera on linen, Museo di Capodimonte, Naples) has recently been surveyed in Richardson, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 155. See also Bret Rothstein’s recent discussion of Bruegel’s play with notions of visuality, in “Problem with Looking,” 145. 57. See Kahane, “Kreuz mit der Distanz.” This view contrasts with Kaschek’s recent reading of the Months in Weltzeit und Endzeit; Kaschek sees the painted cycle as embedded in an eschatological view of history, apocalyptic rather than cyclical. 58. While I agree with Falkenburg’s apt characterization of “seeing through (doorzien)” as the primary aesthetic experience of Bruegel’s landscapes, I would also emphasize that the artist encourages diversions and distractions more than his contemporaries or predecessors did. See Falkenburg, “Doorzien als esthetische ervaring,” 64. Similarly, Tanja Michalsky describes how Bruegel and early modern Netherlandish landscape painters made the act of looking a metaphor for the viewer’s own act of interpretation. See Michalsky, Projektion und Imagination, 14.

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59. Meadow, “Bruegel’s Procession to Calvary.” 60. This point echoes Joseph Koerner’s characterization of Bruegel’s interest in contingency. See Koerner, “Unmasking the World,” 247. 61. Moxey, Visual Time, 91. 62. See Müller-Hofstede’s foundational article “Zur Interpretation von Bruegel’s Landschaft.” 63. Bakker, Landscape and Religion, 156. 64. Snow, “Language of Contradiction,” 44. 65. For a recent summary of the literature on Bruegel’s paintings as conversation pieces, see Richardson, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 105– 6.

Chapter 3

Notes to Pages 76 – 84

1. On Gilbert van Schoonbeke’s suburban development schemes, see Soly, Urbanisme en kapitalisme. Leases on these properties included clauses stipulating that trees be planted at regular intervals (“op conditien die van hem erven cochten om huysen ende speelhvens te maekcen, dat die elck 20 voeten coor sijn huys oft hof eenen hoom moest planten”). State Archives of Antwerp, document SAA 1B 2179, fol. 126. 2. On the spelhuizen surrounding Antwerp, see Baetens, “‘Belezza’ et la ‘Magnificenza’”; and Baetens, “‘Villa rustica’ phénomène,” 177. On the artisan classes buying rural land, see de Vries, Dutch Rural Economy, 43. 3. See Ackerman, Villa, 108. 4. Estienne, Agriculture et maison rustique, iii. 5. On the invention of leisure as a conceptual category, see Burke, “Invention of Leisure.” On spelhuizen as places for recreation and recuperation, see Baetens, “‘Belezza’ et la ‘Magnificenza,’” 160. 6. The notary who listed the works Jonghelinck owned, pledged as security to the city of Antwerp on February 21, 1565, described them as “te wetene thien stucken vande historie van hercules, acht stucken vanden slapenden Conste, het ordeel van Paris, Een zee Triumphe, Een Bancket vande goeden, Een stuck van spes fides et Caritas al gemaect by franchoijs floris, Een stuck van Albordura, Sesthien stucken van Bruegel sulx de welke is den Thoren van Babilonyen, Eenen Cruysdrager, De Twelff maenden” (ten pieces of

the history of Hercules, eight pieces of the slumbering arts, the Judgment of Paris, a sea triumph, a banquet of the gods, a work of hope, faith, and charity—all painted by Frans Floris; a piece by Albrecht Dürer; sixteen works by Bruegel, such as the Tower of Babel, Christ Carrying the Cross, the Twelve Months). State Archives of Antwerp, Tresorij 1711, no. 1551, transcribed in part and published in Denucé, Antwerpsche “Konstkamers,” 5. 7. Buchanan, “Collection of Niclaes Jongelinck I,” 108, 111; Smolderen, Jacques Jonghelinck, 101. The idea of using the figure of Bacchus on a barrel as a fountain had been suggested by Hans Vredeman de Vries in his 1568 illustration of just such a fountain in the Artes perspectivae plurium generum elegantissima formulae, engraved by the Doetecum brothers. 8. See Emmerling-Skala, Bacchus in der Renaissance, 1:382 – 85. 9. Ibid., 1:33–39, 149; Bober, “Appropriation Contexts,” 231. 10. Bolgar, Classical Heritage, 181. 11. The illustration for the Haagspel from the rederijker chamber from Diest, called De Lelie, is in the Spelen van sinne, fol. Tt ii v. 12. The example of the exploding Bacchus is cited in Bull, Mirror of the Gods, 47. On Bacchus in table decorations of the period, see Raupp, Bauernsatiren, 128; and Goldstein, Pieter Bruegel, 26, 29 –31, 48. 13. A 1554 engraving designed by Maarten van Heemskerck, titled the Allegory of Good and Bad Music, also depicts Bacchus sitting atop a barrel; see Veldman and Luijten, Maarten van Heemskerck, 22, cat. no. 1418. In Johannes Sambucus’s 1564 Emblemata, published by Christopher Plantin, the emblem “De oblivione & ferula Baccho dicata. Odi memorem compotorem” (On forgetfulness, dedicated to Bacchus. I hate a drinking companion who remembers) is illustrated by an image of Bacchus leaning on a barrel, possibly designed by Lucas de Heere. The emblem and illustration are repeated in the 1566 Dutch and the 1567 French translations, also published by Plantin. 14. The print is mentioned in Ilsink, Bosch en Bruegel als Bosch, n. 564. The print is no. 223 in Riggs, Hieronymus Cock. 15. Geyskens, “Beelden en plaketten,” 41.

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16. Mahé, Mythe de Bacchus, 79; EmmerlingSkala, Bacchus in der Renaissance, 1:361. There was, of course, also a strong Italian tradition linking Ceres, Bacchus, and occasionally Venus with the fruits of the earth, perhaps most famously in Paolo Veronese’s frescoes at the Palladian Villa Barbaro. See Cocke, “Veronese and Daniele Barbaro,” 234. 17. Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult, 153. 18. See Spelen van sinne, fols. Oo ii v–OO iii r. For discussion of this play, see Ryckaert, “‘Nu comt hier boven op dessen weghem staen,’” 311. 19. Gesing, Triumph des Bacchus, 112. See also Emmerling-Skala, Bacchus in der Renaissance, 1:160; Bull, Mirror of the Gods, 46; and Lageirse, “Joyeuse entrée du Prince Philippe.” 20. Lombard’s print series, as well as a number of representations of Bacchus as Autumn, are discussed in Meetz, “Tempora Triumphant.” Floris designed two series of engravings called De Landelijke Goden (Rural Gods) that were engraved by Cornelis Cort and published by Hieronymus Cock’s widow. See Van de Velde, Frans Floris, 57– 62, 411. A generation earlier, Bernard van Orley produced a tapestry series of the months with ancient gods, including a tapestry with the figure of September/Bacchus, now in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, The William Hood Dunwoody Fund, 38.40. 21. Barbara Butts notes this in “Humanism and Faith,” 14. 22. See Veldman, Images for the Eye and Soul, 197–99. 23. On the Italian influence in this figure, see de Tolnay, Drawings of Pieter Bruegel, 76, no. 68. On the relation between the scything figure and a figure in a Heemskerck design (Veldman and Luijten, New Hollstein Dutch and Flemish Etchings, cat. no. 500), see Michel C. Plomp’s entry on the drawing Summer in Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, nos. 109 –10n3. In this footnote, Plomp writes that Nadine Orenstein suggested the resemblance between the mower and the Heemskerck figure. 24. Richardson, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 124–31. Scholars since Stridbeck’s Bruegelstudien have sought to connect Bruegel’s later works to Italian prototypes, such as Raphael’s cartoons for the Sistine Chapel

in the Brussels tapestry workshop of Pieter Coecke van Aelst in the 1520s. 25. Jürgen Müller argues that Dürer’s 1514–19 peasant prints embody a related knowing aesthetic subversion of classical corporeal ideals. See Müller, “Albrecht Dürer’s Peasant Engravings.” 26. Erasmus, Praise of Folly, 25. 27. On Bacchus as liber pater, see Warners and Rank, Bacchus, 1:95. Becanus also connects the etymology of the word liberi to Bacchus in Origines Antwerpianae, 4.519. 28. Guicciardini, Description de tout le PaïsBas, 109. The full verse reads: “Car s’ils sont orguilleux, injustes, deceueurs / A Bacchus addonnez, de l’autruy rauisseurs, / Briefue auras vie (helas) & fortune en ce monde” (For if they are proud, unjust deceivers / Given to Bacchus or ravishers of others, / Brief (alas) will be their life and fortune in this world). 29. “Hoort alle die zyt van Bachus bende / Ende hu naer vastenavendt dwynght / Eer datmen hu de zomer zende / Doch hu ghelt niet gheel verdrynct / . . . Moorghen moet ghy sober wesen.” Reprinted in Komrij, Nederlandse poësie, 949. 30. Franck, Weltbuch, fol. 131r. 31. Pleij, Gilde van de Blauwe Schuit, 47. 32. There is considerable literature on The Battle Between Carnival and Lent. A selection of recent and foundational literature includes Friedländer, Pieter Bruegel, 77– 82; Swarzenski, “Battle Between Carnival and Lent”; Stridbeck, “Combat Between Carnival and Lent”; Gaignebet, “Combat de Carnaval et de Carême”; Demus, “Pictures of Pieter Bruegel”; and Kavaler, Pieter Bruegel, 111–34. On Hogenberg’s print, see Hollstein, Hollstein’s Dutch and Flemish Etchings, vol. 9, cat. no. 40. 33. The scholarly discourse on carnival and authority is extensive but can be broadly broken into camps, as summarized in Burke, “Festivals Through the Ages”: those who follow Mikhail Bakhtin in seeing carnival as a subversive uncrowning of traditional authority figures/ structures; those like Emile Durkheim, Victor Turner, and Natalie Zemon Davis, who see carnival as a “safety valve” ultimately reinforcing the status quo; and followers of Clifford Geertz, who see both pomp and power in service of each other. See Bakhtin, Rabelais and His

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Notes to Pages 96 –107

World; Durkheim, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life; Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors; Zemon Davis, “Reasons of Misrule”; and Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures. My point is that regardless of whether carnival allowed any actual social or political subversion, it was represented as a time of freedom from and playing with authority. 34. See the survey of these texts in Van Kampen et al., Zal koud zijn. 35. Verhuyck and Kisling, Mandement van Bacchus, 7, 97–98. 36. Colleman, “Waer met nu meest elck Rymer soo pronckelyk pracht,” 103. 37. Spelen van sinne, fols. Do 2v–3v. 38. Koerner, “Unmasking the World,” 240. 39. For literature on the drawing and the print, see Mielke, Pieter Bruegel, no. 46, and Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, no. 66, respectively. 40. For a related view of taverns and their place in the Augsburg social order, see Tlusty, Bacchus and Civic Order. 41. In this, I am following Koerner, “Unmasking the World,” 238, and Kavaler’s masterly reading of what he calls “the middle way” in Pieter Bruegel, 144– 48. 42. On Bruegel’s work as encouraging a kind of game playing, see Kavaler, Pieter Bruegel, 211. Meadow’s Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “Netherlandish Proverbs” likens the structural complexity of Bruegel’s encyclopedic paintings to rhetorical composition books. 43. See the introduction, n. 4. 44. See, for example, Sullivan, Bruegel’s Peasants, 15–22, 46, 62 – 63. 45. Hollstein, Hollstein’s Dutch and Flemish Etchings, vol. 3, cat. no. 32; and Bass and Wycoff, Beyond Bosch, no. 21, 168 –73. The print bears three separate inscriptions. On the rear wall: “Compt al ter feesten, Bachus scholieren ient, Tot inden ent / Minst metten meesten, Singt me maect vruecht beket, Uvrolijk wet / Helpt dese geesten, singhen haer note blet, Zy zyn content.” Below the scene are two inscriptions, in Dutch and French. The French reads: “sus chantres de bachus, je tiens ma partie / ut, re, mi, he aydez moy je vous supplie / toy babeillarde, et maroye gelinotte / robin biberon, avecq bigle jeannotte / guiot pensard, et jaqvot le renardon, / car la mesure nous frappe, chaneu

piercon.” The Dutch reads: “Singet Bachus sanghers, ick hou mijn partie / Fa, Sol, La, Ey helpt doch, ick bidts U sonder beraen / Ghy Tandeloose beffe, en Maey hoenkens als de blye / Rubbeken schuerbier, met scheel Ianneken zijn amye / Gueken Dicsack, en Coppen de braker laet u lel, gaen / Cael Pierken ons sangmeester sal de mate wel slain.” 46. On this kind of social distinction, see Vandenbroeck, Beeld van de andere. 47. The Dutch inscription reads: “Ghÿs bollaert, bouwen blaupype, en mancken claes / Teunen stortbier, Roeltken drafsack, en diel fransen / Moenen slodderbroeck, heyn droochbroot, en huyben maes / Ick beroep U allen ouer deÿ te danßen” (Windbag Ghijs, squeezing [the] bagpipe, and crippled Claes / Teunen the beer slopper, fat Roelken, and [?] Fransen; Moenen sloppypants, Heyn drybread and hooded Maes / I call on you all to dance). This is very similar to one of the Dutch inscriptions in the Boschian print; see n. 45 above. 48. Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel, 246 – 48. 49. Gibson, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 86 –98. 50. An image of a woman’s costume labeled “Mulier Antwerpiana extra muros prodeambulans” is included in de Bruyn, Omnium pene Europae, no. 19. De Bruyn shows the woman clutching a basket and a cloak; she is accompanied by a finely dressed Brabant merchant, whose hand rests on her basket. 51. See Buchanan, “Collection of Niclaes Jongelinck II,” 547; Tijs, “Twaalfmaandencyclus over het land”; Goldstein, Pieter Bruegel, 79 – 83. 52. On the painting, which was rediscovered only recently, see Sellink and Silva Maroto, “Rediscovery of Pieter Bruegel.” 53. Richardson discusses this detail, as well as the originally much larger codpiece on the bagpiper, in Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 85– 87. 54. First published as L’agriculture et maison rustique (Paris: Du Puys, 1565), it was later published in French and in a Dutch edition by Christopher Plantin as De lantwinninghe, ende hoeve (Antwerp, 1566). 55. Franklin, “Tourism as Ordering,” 279 – 80, 289. 56. See, for example, the engraving Vuyl Sauce, published by Cock around 1560,

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in Riggs, Hieronymus Cock, no. 230; and Bass and Wyckoff, Beyond Bosch, no. 22, 174–79. The print’s iconography is discussed in Gibson, “Some Flemish Popular Prints.” 57. Assmann, “Beyond the Archive,” 72. 58. See Goedthals, Proverbes anciens flamengs. 59. I am indebted here to Joseph Koerner’s description of the relationship between allegory and reality in The Battle Between Carnival and Lent and to further discussions with the author. See his “Unmasking the World,” 234. 60. First states of the print are in Paris, New York, and Rotterdam. On the practice of egg dancing in the Low Countries, see Meertens, “Ostereier und Ostergebäcke.” De Vos was not just an artist of the same generation as Bruegel; both artists also shared a circle of friends and acquaintances in Antwerp and abroad. The two artists may even have traveled to Italy together in the early 1550s. This is suggested in letters written by Scipio Fabius to Abraham Ortelius in 1561 and 1565, reading: “Tantum dolui quod de Martino Vulpe pictor excellentissimo mihique ecque ac frater meus carissimo nihil ex tuis litteris intellexi, de quo ac de Petro Bruochl [sic] itidem mihi dellecto quid agat scire cupio, quos ambos et meo et Oltaviani fratris mei nomine te salvere percupio, eosque utrisque nomine fratrne deosculabens.” Scipio Fabius implies here that both de Vos (Martino Vulpe) and Bruegel (Petro Bruochl) are as dear to him as brothers. The second letter mentions in passing that “Martino vulpi ac Petro Brouchel [sic] nostro omnium nomine plurimam salutem impartito.” Letters numbered 11 and 15, dated June 16, 1561, and April 14, 1565, respectively, in Ortelius, Abrahami Ortelii epistulae. The originals are held in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin, HRC 55, letters 11 and 15. 61. Of the roughly sixteen hundred extant print designs by de Vos, perhaps ten to fifteen relate to Bruegel’s work. Direct copies of Bruegel’s prints include Big Fish Eat Little Fish (Schuckman and Scheffer, Hollstein’s Dutch and Flemish Etchings, vol. 44, cat. no. 1291), The Poor Kitchen and The Rich Kitchen (cat. nos. 1288 and 1289), and The Stone Operation (cat. no. 1290), to name a few. De Vos’s designs for

the Seasons (cat. nos. 1412 –13) use figures excerpted from Bruegel’s Spring and Summer, while The Age of Ten (cat. no. 1468) redeploys elements of Bruegel’s Children’s Games. De Vos’s The Good Household and The Bad Household (cat. nos. 1286 and 1287) have a similar relationship to Bruegel’s earlier engravings The Poor Kitchen and The Rich Kitchen. 62. See Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, no. 112. Indeed, a later state of The Egg Dance (listed as a copy of Schuckman and Scheffer, Hollstein’s Dutch and Flemish Etchings, vol. 44, no. 1283, used in Johann Theodoor de Bry’s Emblemata saecularia [Frankfurt: de Bry, 1596]) has the inscription “cum mopso bona nisa suo desultat ad ovum,” which relates to the Dirty Bride’s inscription: “mopso nisa datvr, qvid non speremvs amantes.” De Bry may have believed that de Vos and Bruegel represented the same subject. 63. Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 47. 64. Moxey, Visual Time, 83– 84.

Chapter 4 1. Recent technical investigations have dated the canvas support of the Brussels painting to around 1600. The other version of the painting is on panel and is in the D. M. van Buuren Collection, Brussels. See Currie and Allart, Brueg(H)el Phenomenon, 3:844–75. 2. Lucian, Collected Works, 1:365– 66. 3. Alberti, On Painting, 3.53, p. 76. 4. Cast, Calumny of Apelles, 37–39. 5. Given the uncertainty surrounding the itinerary and duration of Bruegel’s Italian journey, it is impossible to know with certainty which Italian artworks Bruegel may have seen. The Botticelli painting was not well known until the eighteenth century, but Mantegna’s drawing of the calumny was reproduced in a sixteenthcentury engraving that circulated widely (ibid., 67). The version by Raphael, though the original is no longer extant, was also copied widely, and it is possible that Bruegel saw one of the numerous drawings or paintings after this composition. Closer to Bruegel, the subject is also well represented in both book illustrations (like Ambrosius Holbein’s woodcuts in the 1523

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Notes to Pages 118 –127

Basel edition of Erasmus’s Adagia) and Italo-French court art of the mid-sixteenth century (Cast, Calumny of Apelles, 77– 81), exemplified by Penni’s design, discussed below. 6. The first publication on the drawing was White, “Pieter Bruegel the Elder,” 336 – 41. Most recently, see Mielke, Pieter Bruegel, no. 63; and Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, no. 104. 7. Bruegel uses this technique in The Resurrection of Christ, a sheet from around 1562 (see Mielke, Pieter Bruegel, no. 56) most thoroughly discussed in Grossman, “Drawings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder,” which suggested that the drawing was pasted on wood in order to act in a fashion similar to an independent panel. 8. Gustav Glück first suggested the existence of a related panel, citing the mention of a “De Calomnia” painted by Bruegel in a letter from Gilliam Fourchoudt, dated October 10, 1670, to his son in Vienna. See Glück, Large Bruegel Book, no. 10; Van Mander, Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, 1:194–95, fol. 234r. 9. See Ramakers, “Bruegel en de rederijkers.” 10. Ibid., 85. On sinnekens, see Hummelen, Sinnekens in het Rederijkersdrama; Strietman, “God, Gods, Humans, and Sinnekens.” 11. Ramakers, “Bruegel en de rederijkers,” 90. 12. I want to thank Larry Silver for this observation. On the connection between Lyvor, the garb of the alchemist, and the clothing of the painter in the drawing The Painter and the Connoisseur, see Silver, Pieter Bruegel, 385. 13. Massing, Du texte à l’image, 61. 14. This was first noted in Winner, Pieter Brueghel d. Ä., no. 98. On the use of the masculine term in depictions of the calumny, see Cast, Calumny of Apelles, 63. 15. Alberti, On Painting, 3.53, p. 76; this is also noted in Ramakers, “Bruegel en de rederijkers,” 91. 16. See Ramakers, “Bruegel en de rederijkers.” 17. The sketches after Ghisi are in the Arenberg Album (Liège, Cab. Est. & Dessins). See Denhaene, Lambert Lombard: Peintre de la Renaissance, no. 62a–d.

18. The sheet is in Collection Horne, Florence, inv. no. 5932. See Denhaene, Lambert Lombard: Renaissance et humanisme, no. 36. Here, too, Lombard may have been responding to a printed model—an engraving by Girolamo Mocetto after Andrea Mantegna. 19. Formerly attributed to Frans Floris and sold at Christie’s in London (July 9, 1993, lot 29), the de Vos panel quotes Penni in numerous details, such as the king’s scalloped dais and the inclusion of the antique male statue in the background between Ptolemy and Calumny. 20. On the Lives, see Rubin, Giorgio Vasari. 21. Lombard’s letter to Vasari is reproduced in Vasari, Literarische Nachlass, 2:158 – 63. The English translation is from Stechow, Northern Renaissance Art, 42. 22. Kemp and Kemp, “Lambert Lombards antiquarische Theorie.” 23. The most recent and thorough summary of Lombard’s interest in the past can be found in Wouk, “Reclaiming the Antiquities of Gaul.” 24. On Lombard’s “academy,” see Denhaene, Lambert Lombard: Renaissance et humanisme, 217. 25. Grimm, Pieter Bruegel d. Ä, 89, no. 11. 26. The two sheets were first briefly compared in Denhaene, Lambert Lombard: Renaissance et humanisme, 159 – 63. 27. The link between de Heere’s text and Bruegel’s drawing was first noted in Kaschek, “‘Weder römisch, noch antik?’” 28. “Waerom quetst ghi u seluen? wane siende blent / Deur haet ende nijt, als de beroofde van sinnen?” See poem no. LXVI, “Invective, an eenen Quidam schilder: De welcke beschimpte de Schilders van Handwerpen,” in de Heere, Hof en boomgaerd der poësien, p. 80, lines 1–2. English translation in Meadow, “Bruegel’s Procession to Calvary,” 181. 29. “Dat ghi te Room’ hebt geweest, en merctmen toch niet / An u schilderye, vul lamme, quade treken, / Die voorwaer noch Roomachtig, noch ooc antijcx en siet.” Ibid., p. 82, lines 43– 45. English translation in Meadow, “Bruegel’s Procession to Calvary,” 182. 30. “Als kaeremespoppen ghi u beelden verciert.” Ibid., p. 81, line 21. 31. See Ten Brink Goldsmith, “Pieter Bruegel the Elder.”

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32. See Freedberg, “Allusion and Topicality.” See also Meadow, “Bruegel’s Procession to Calvary.” For an earlier, less oppositional view of Bruegel’s relation to Romanist painting, see Stridbeck, Bruegelstudien, 285– 86, recently taken up in Richardson, Pieter Bruegel the Elder. 33. “Men moght u voor wijsachtigh hauden, t’alder stont / Wt ouervloedicheit des herten spreect den mont” (poem no. LXVI, p. 80, lines 6 –7); “Const ghi uwen mont hauwen, en doen u beste” (p. 82, line 49). English translations in Meadow, “Bruegel’s Procession to Calvary,” 181– 82. 34. Kaschek, “‘Weder römisch, noch antik,’” 171. 35. Kaschek sees both the Calumny and The Painter and the Connoisseur as directed at Jonghelinck, with a healthy dose of selfirony. Ibid., 176. I think that an image of a short-sighted patron would have cut a little too close to the bone for Jonghelinck, and we have no evidence that Jonghelinck collected drawings, still a relatively limited activity. 36. Todd Richardson also concludes that de Heere’s poem does not represent such a stylistic polemic, by complicating the notion of Bruegel’s style as being opposed to Italian artistic ideals. See Richardson, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 37. 37. See the recent reassessment of Coxcie in Jonckheere, Michiel Coxcie and the Giants of His Age. 38. Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon, 143– 44. 39. Numbers sixteen to twenty-three in the series are Pieter Coecke van Aelst (d. 1550), Jan van Scorel (d. 1562), Lambert Lombard (d. 1566), Pieter Bruegel (d. 1569), Willem Key (d. 1568), Lucas Gassel (d. 1570), Frans Floris (d. 1570), and Hieronymus Cock (d. 1570). 40. “Primus ego egregios pictura invisere Romam / Exemplo docuisse meo per secula Belgas / Cuncta ferar; . . .” Translation by Daniel Hadas, in Courtauld Institute of Art, “Picturing the Netherlandish Canon.” 41. “Propria Belgarum laus est bene pingere rura.” Translation by Hadas, ibid. 42. See Melion’s discussion of this later moment in Shaping the Netherlandish Canon, 173– 82. 43. White, “Pieter Bruegel the Elder,” 341; see also Mielke, Pieter Bruegel, no. 56.

44. See, for example, the illuminations for Philip the Good’s Book of Hours, ca. 1440 – 60, by Jean Le Tavernier from Oudenaarde. See Renger, “Netherlandish Grisaille Miniatures,” and the history of peintre en camaieu in Krieger, Grisaille als Metapher. 45. This was first suggested in Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, 1:162, and most recently explored in Täube, Monochrome gemalte Plastik, and Grams-Thieme, Lebendige Steine. 46. On grisaille around 1500, see Prottas, “Survival and Revival.” 47. See Vermeyen’s grisaille exterior wings of the Micault triptych depicting Christ visiting the house of Mary and Martha, ca. 1548 –50 (Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels), and Coecke van Aelst’s Conversion of Saint Paul in grisaille on the exterior wings of the Lisbon Triptych of the Life of Christ (Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon, inv. no. 38828), ca. 1540 –50. Philippot described this midcentury shift away from using grisaille to depict faux statuary and toward an embrace of monochrome painting in “Grisailles et les ‘degrés de la réalité,’” 239. 48. See the recent discussion of Erasmus’s encomium to Dürer in Bubenik, Reframing Albrecht Dürer, 15. 49. On the “Romanist” interest in grisaille, the linen painting tradition, and Cornelis van Cleve’s grisailles as possible predecessors to Bruegel, see Grossmann, “Bruegel’s ‘Woman Taken in Adultery,’” 223. 50. King, “Artes Liberales and the Mural Decoration.” 51. “Sed sic velim pictores eruditi existiment summam industriam atque in albo tantum in nigro disponendo versari, inque his duobus probe locandis omne ingenium et diligentiam consummandam.” Latin text from Alberti, On Painting and on Sculpture, 88 – 89; English translation from On Painting, 2.46, p. 68. 52. See Pliny Historia naturalis 35.64 on Zeuxis, and 35.499 –500 on Apelles’s and Nicomachus’s use of only four colors. 53. Bert, “‘In monochromatis [ . . . ], quid non exprimit,’” 107–9. 54. Grossmann, “Bruegel’s ‘Woman Taken in Adultery,’” 223. 55. Preimesberger, Paragons and Paragone, 23–51.

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Notes to Pages 132 –141

56. In this I follow Grossmann’s suggestion in “Bruegel’s ‘Woman Taken in Adultery,’” 224. 57. See, for example, engravings of similarly costumed standard-bearers by Dürer (1502), Lucas van Leyden (1510), Sebald Beham (1543), and Virgil Solis (ca. 1530 –50). Most similar to Bruegel’s design is a circular engraving from ca. 1550 by Allaert Claesz (Hollstein, Hollstein’s Dutch and Flemish Etchings, vol. 4, cat. no. 166), which depicts a standard-bearer, piper, and drummer in poses similar to those in Bruegel’s grisaille. 58. Meticulously catalogued in Urbach, “Notes on Bruegel’s Archaism,” 237–56. 59. See Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon, 148. 60. Urbach, “Notes on Bruegel’s Archaism,” 242. 61. King, Representing Renaissance Art, 294–95. 62. “Noyt zach ic (dunct my) tekening bequamere noch gelyken snee.” The letter is dated July 15, 1578, and is transcribed in Ortelius, Abrahami Ortelii epistulae, 175–76. See also Melion, “Ego enim quasi obdormivi,” 42 – 43. 63. On Bruegel’s citation/manipulation of figures from sixteenth-century Italian figural art, see Dvor^ák, History of Art, 70 –96; Stridbeck, Bruegelstudien; Grossmann, “Bruegels Verhältnis zu Raffael”; White, “Raphael and Bruegel”; Grimm, Pieter Bruegel d. Ä.; and, most recently, Richardson, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 23–34, 88 –104, 124–36. 64. I am hesitant to ascribe a parodic intent to this quotation, as Levine argues in “Parody, Proverb, and Paradox” and de Tolnay suggests in “Bruegel et l’Italie.” Instead, I would point to the synthesis of Italian and Netherlandish models seen in works like the The Calumny of Apelles or the 1564 Adoration of the Kings as evidence of Bruegel’s artistic ambition and awareness of art history. On the diverse references in the Adoration of the Kings—including those to Michelangelo, Bosch, Quentin Massys, and Hugo van der Goes—see Silver, Pieter Bruegel, 241– 44. 65. A copy of the painting was commissioned by Cardinal Federico Borromeo in 1625. There are numerous copies of the composition by Pieter Brueghel the Younger and

Jan Brueghel, both working in Catholic Flanders in the early seventeenth century; all of the copies I know of keep the original use of the Dutch, which suggests that the picture was not seen as solely aligning with the Protestant embrace of the vernacular. 66. See the history of the panel, summarized in Grossmann, “Bruegel’s ‘Woman Taken in Adultery,’” 228 –29. 67. Guicciardini, Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi, 99. 68. Most recently explored in Ilsink, Bosch en Bruegel als Bosch; Bass and Wyckoff, Beyond Bosch. 69. See the reference to a painting of a wedding in watercolor on canvas in the inventory of the Casa Real del Pardo, executed by Xaques Lemuchos on January 21, 1614: “Otro lienzo pintado al fresco de Geronimo Bosco que lllaman las bodas con su marco de oro y negro” (another canvas, done in watercolor by Hieronymus Bosch, known as the wedding, in gold and black frames). Madrid, Archivo del Palacio Real, quoted in Vandenbroeck, “Verbeeck’s Peasant Weddings,” n. 7. 70. Otto Benesch first discussed the drawing, and Friedrich Winkler first attributed it to Bruegel in “Wiener Kreuztragung,” 105– 6, followed by Lugt, Inventaire général des dessins, no. 66. Hans Mielke remained unsure about the drawing’s authorship (Pieter Bruegel, no. 4), but Matthijs Ilsink and Manfred Sellink have argued persuasively for its attribution to Bruegel. See Ilsink, Bosch en Bruegel als Bosch, 258 – 65; the debate is summarized in Sellink, “Dating of Pieter Bruegel’s Landscape Drawings,” 292 –93. 71. See Orenstein’s entry on the drawing in Pieter Bruegel, no. 118. 72. Of course, this process would not have been limited to the grisailles. Gerald Völker Grimm has recently traced the complex variety of Italian and ancient sources he sees in the 1564 Adoration of the Kings. While I do not agree with all of Grimm’s identifications of antique or Italian motifs, the panel is clearly the result of Bruegel’s consultation of various models—from Michelangelo’s Madonna of Bruges to Bosch’s Adoration paintings. See Grimm, Pieter Bruegel d. Ä., and on the broader sources (both Italian and Netherlandish) for

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Bruegel’s panel, see Silver, Pieter Bruegel, 241– 44. 73. “Hos aliquis tremula dum captat harundine pisces, / aut pastor baculo stivave innixus arator / vidit et obstipuit, quique aethera carpere possent, credidit esse deos.” Ovid Metamorphoses 8.183–235, lines 217–19. 74. This parallels Koerner’s description of Bruegel and contemporary neo-Stoics’ constitution of the world as a view. “Unmasking the World,” 221–23. 75. On notions of theatricality as a marker of subversive self-referentiality, see Weber, Theatricality as Medium, 37. On paradox as a central motif in Bruegel’s work, see Müller, Paradox als Bildform, though I do not follow this author’s identification of Bruegel as a strict follower of Sebastian Brant’s theology. 76. Hummelen, “Dramatic Structure of the Dutch Morality”; Ramakers, “Dutch Allegorical Theatre,” 137.

Conclusion 1. Van Leuvensteijn, “Vroegnieuwnederlands (circa 1550 –1650),” 229. 2. Regan, “Cartography, Chorography, and Patriotic Sentiment,” 61– 64. Regan cites only two surviving maps before 1550 that specifically represent the Low Countries. Forty-seven maps explicitly depicting the region as a single geographical entity remain from the latter half of the century. Regan estimates that around thirty-five hundred maps of the Low Countries passed through Plantin’s shop alone in the latter part of the sixteenth century, indicating the popularity of such maps.

3. William of Orange’s warning to the inhabitants and subjects of the Netherlands, dated September 1, 1568, reprinted and translated in Kossmann and Mellink, Texts Concerning the Revolt, doc. 11. 4. See the examples collected in Fredericq, Nederlandsch proza. 5. See Van den Brink, “Art of Copying,” 41. On Jan Brueghel’s immense output, see www.janbrueghel.net. 6. On the reprinting, see Onuf, “Envisioning Netherlandish Unity.” 7. The Batavian past, as formulated in the early and mid-sixteenth century, was not seen as a precedent for revolt, nor was it neutral territory. See Kampinga, Opvattingen over onze oudere vaderlandsche gescheidenis, 70 –71. 8. On manufactured memories as a collective projection into the past by a community that wants to remember, see Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory, 7– 8. 9. Kavaler brilliantly surveys this material in Pieter Bruegel, 217–33. 10. Duke, “Dissident Propaganda,” 154. 11. Van Nierop, “‘And Ye Shall Hear of Wars, and Rumours of Wars,’” 78. 12. While I largely agree with Kavaler’s reading of the subject of The Magpie on the Gallows as the problems of viewership, I believe that this is a central motif in Bruegel’s works and is not limited to the later works and the deteriorating social order of 1568 – 69. See Kavaler, Pieter Bruegel, 233. 13. See Michalsky’s discussion of Bruegel’s landscapes in these terms in “Imitation und Imagination,” 387.

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Index

Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations. Endnotes are referenced with “n” followed by the endnote number. All works are by/after Pieter Bruegel unless otherwise attributed. Adagia (Erasmus), 30, 39, 46 Adoration of the Kings, 168n72 Adoration of the Kings in the Snow, 74 Aeneas and Dido (Van Ghistele), 31 Aeneid (Virgil/ Van Ghistele, trans.), 28 Aertsen, Pieter Christ Carrying the Cross, 74 Peasant Feast, 23, 23–24, 37, 50, 52 L’agriculture et maison rustique (Estienne), 82, 105–6, 164n54 Alberti, Leon Battista Apelles references, 117, 119, 121 Della pittura (On Painting), 55, 56, 117, 119 on historia as painting genre, 55, 56, 117, 136 painting techniques celebrated by, 132 Album amicorum (Ortelius), 3, 12–13, 14, 15, 16 The Alchemist, 118, 120 Allegory of Good and Bad Music (Heemskerck), 162n13 Alssens, Heynrick, 30 Altdorfer, Albrecht images of rural religious markers, 65 Landscape with Woodcutter, 160n31 Amstel, Jan van, 57, 59, 64, 74, 130 anachronism, 66, 72, 74, 75, 88, 90 Andriessoon, Symon, Duytsche adagia ofte spreecwoorden, 30 Antiphilus, 116 antiquities. See archaeological artifacts; classical antiquity; ruins; vernacular antiquity

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Antwerp (Belgium) acquisition of Bacchus (Jonghelinck), 82 art market of, 8, 55 Bacchic-themed booklets from, 96–97 festive descriptions of, 93–94 free schools in, 28 grisaille resurgence in, 131 Schilderspand art market, 8, 55 socioeconomic development and growth, 8–9 town hall reconstruction, 60 Apelles, 14, 116–17, 119, 121, 128, 132 Apollo (Galle after Jonghelinck, J.), 84, 85 archaeological artifacts. See also ruins architectural fragments, 22, 65–67, 79, 107–8, 109, 148–49 sixteenth-century interest in, 5–7, 28 as the study of historical garbage, 108–10 archaeology, 7, 108 of style, 73–79, 129 Aristotle, 35 art collections, 63, 70, 81–82, 109, 132 art history Bruegel’s interest in, 139–43 Netherlandish artistic rivalries, 126–30 Netherlandish artistic theory and practice, 116, 117, 121–27 Northern, 134 popular painting subjects in, 130–31 Arx Britannica (Map of Brittenburg) (Ortelius) artifact imagery and, 22, 107–8, 109, 109 (detail), 148–49 audience for, 25–26 classical texts and inscriptions, 27, 28 descriptions, 22, 22, 23–24 as evidence of vernacular antiquity, 27 peasant figures, 22, 23, 24, 53 publication of, 7, 28 visitor figures, 46

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Auden, W. H., The Fall of Icarus, 115, 142 Augustine, Saint, 68 Aurei saeculi imago (Mirror of the Golden Age) (Ortelius) contents and format, 37 description of diet and feasting, 40, 44, 45–46 description of peasant temperament, 46, 52 illustration of childhood games, 154n18 illustration of wagons, 37, 39 Aurelius, Cornelis, 21, 26, 29, 40, 148–49 Die cronycke van Hollandt, 26, 40 Autumn, (Collaert after Vos), 88, 89, 90 Aux Quatre Vents. See The Four Winds (Aux Quatre Vents) publishing house

Index

Bacchic abundance and fertility associations, 88–93 bacchanalia, 94, 101, 104, 110–12 Bruegelian style as, 111–12 festivity, 93–99 figural representations of, 83, 83–85, 90, 96, 96, 99 imagery and symbolism, 81–83 Italian iconography of, 91 mythological associations, 83, 85, 88 peasant figures as vernacular avatars of, 84–86, 88 popularity of iconography, 82–83 social distinction and, 100–106 as symbol of political power, 88 wastefulness and destruction, 107 Bacchus (god) characteristics and associations of, 83, 85, 88 representations of, 83, 83–85, 90, 96, 96, 99 Baltens, Pieter, 159n1 Banquet of the Gods (Floris, F.), 92, 93 Barfield, Owen, 2 Batavia (Junius), 26–27, 29, 40 Batavia Illustrata (Scrivenus/Schrijver), 109 Batavians, 7, 22, 26, 40, 51–52, 97 The Battle Between Carnival and Lent Bacchic figures in, 84, 95–96 composition and description, 95, 95–97, 99 as a collection of customs, 97 drinking in, 98 (detail), 99 material culture and wastefulness in, 107 woodcut excerpts from, 102, 103 The Battle Between Carnival and Lent (Hogenberg), 95, 96, 99 Becanus, Johannes Goropius (Jan van Gorp van der Beke), 17, 29, 30 Beeldenstorm, 9, 10, 149

beer, 40, 45, 96–97 Beham, Sebald, 168n57 The Belgian Wagon, from The Large Landscapes series, 37, 38 Belgica, 26, 130 Bening, Simon, The Flight into Egypt, 58–59, 59, 65 Bessemers, Mayken Verhulst, 12 Bhabha, Homi K., 50 Big Fish Eat Little Fish, 6, 31, 165n61 Bles, Henri met de, 57, 74 Blind Leading the Blind, 74 blindness metaphors, 74–75 Den Bloeyenden Wijngaert (Berchem), 88 blue ship, 95, 97 Bodin, Jean, 56 Boemus, Joannes, Omnium gentium mores, leges & ritus, 157n45 Borcht, Pieter van der Frugalitas & Gula, from Aurei saeculi imago, 44, 45–46 illustration of childhood games, from Aurei saeculi imago, 154n18 Peasant Kermis, 33, 34, 50 Peasant Wedding, 45, 45–46, 50 Vita Familiaris, from Aurei saeculi imago, 37, 39 Borromeo, Cardinal Federico, 140, 168n65 Bosch, Hieronymus artistic influence of, 2, 15, 126, 140 Bruegel comparisons, 13, 14–15, 140 Christ Carrying the Cross, Lombard after, 74, 123, 125 images of rural religious markers in the work of, 65 painting techniques of, 131 Singers of Bacchus, Netherlandish School after, 100, 101 The Wayfarer, 160n31 Botticelli, Sandro, The Calumny of Apelles, 117 Brabo, Silvius, 26 Brittenburg ruins, 7, 21, 24, 25–27, 46, 53, 67, 107–10, 148. See also Arx Britannica Bruegel, Pieter, overview art-historical comparisons, 13, 14–15, 140 artwork as source material for later artists, 146 associates of, 14, 27, 42–43, 165n60 audience demographics, 43–44, 50, 53, 106, 139 biographical records of, 12 Brussels residency, 43, 63circularity as a topos, 75, 99 death and burial, 9, 12 early descriptions of, 12–16, 14, 129, 140

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epitaphs of, 3, 12–13, 14, 15, 16 influences on, 91, 127, 136–37, 138 inscription usage, 112 marriage, 12 modern art-historical reputation, 2, 4–5, 7 museum collections of, 11 nationalism and popularity of, 146–47 oeuvre and surviving works, 12, 55 patronage, 55, 63, 69, 82, 159n13 pictorial strategies, 18, 67, 79, 107, 142, 151 relation to Granvelle 63 subjects depicted, 42, 56 viewership, 11, 12, 50, 78, 105–106, 110, 142 Brueghel, Jan (son), 15, 140, 146 Brueghel, Pieter, the Younger (son), 15, 146 Brussels, 12, 49, 63, 131, 136 Caesar, Julius, 26 De Calomnia (Lucian), 117 The Calumny of Apelles as art historical topos, 7, 115, 117, 121, 129, 142–43, 151 iconographic sources, 116–19 inscriptions, 119–20 provenance and condition, 118 as response to De Heere, 128–30 The Calumny of Apelles (Botticelli), 117 The Calumny of Apelles (Ghisi after Penni), 121, 122, 123 The Calumny of Apelles (Mantegna), 117 The Calumny of Apelles (Raphael), 117 The Calumny of Apelles (Vos), 123 Camden, William, 24 Cardinal Andrea della Valle’s Collection of Antiquities (Netherlandish School after Heemskerck), 109–10, 110 carnival (festival), 85, 93–99 Carnival (personification), 95, 96, 96, 99 Carroll, Margaret, 68 Census at Bethlehem, 74 Ceres (goddess), 83, 85, 88 chambers of rhetoric See rhetoricians charity, 99 Charity (Charitas), from The Virtues series, 98, 99 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain, 9, 88, 146 chiaroscuro, 132 Children’s Games, 2, 5, 10–11, 165n61 Choul, Guillaume du, 23 Christ and the Adulteress, 132, 136, 136–37, 139–40 Christ Carrying the Cross, 73–79, 75, 82, 140 iconographic precedents, 73–79, 123–24

Christ Carrying the Cross (after van Eyck), 74, 76 Christ Carrying the Cross (Lombard after Bosch), 74, 123–24, 125 Cicero, 30, 35, 64 De officiis, 30 Ciceronianus (Erasmus), 64 Claesz, Allaert, 168n57 classical antiquity. See also archaeological artifacts; ruins architectural imagery representing, 59, 65–67, 68, 71–72 classical source translations, 28–29 in early references to Bruegel, 13–16 female nude figural prototypes, 124 languages associated with, 13, 16, 17, 28 mythological themes associated with (see Bacchic themes) Netherlandish ancient history as, 24–26, 27 pagan traditions as part of, 6–7 painting techniques associated with, 131–34 Renaissance revival and study of, 5–7 Cleve, Cornelis van, 167n49 Cock, Hieronymus antiquities collection publications, 109, 110 associates, 42–43, 129 Operum antiquorum Romanorum 25, 67 prints depicting classical ruins published by, 24, 25, 67, 67 Pictorum aliquot celebrium Germaniae inferioris effigies, 13, 14, 14–15, 129–30, 167n39 print publications, 123–24, 146–47 Coecke, Mayken, 12 Coecke van Aelst, Pieter Conversion of Saint Paul, from Triptych of the Life of Christ, 167n47 Italian influences on workshop of, 163n24 in Pictorum aliquot celebrium Germaniae inferioris effigies, 167n39 painting techniques of, 131 relation to Bruegel, 12 Collaert, Adriaen, Autumn, after Vos, 88, 89, 90 Colloquies (Erasmus), 10 Colosseum, 68, 71, 72, 73 columns, classical, 59, 65–67 comedy, 16, 91, 97, 99, 103 Comedies (Terence/Van Ghistele, trans.), 28–29 contrapposto figures, 91, 134 Conversion of Saint Paul, from Triptych of the Life of Christ (Coecke van Aelst), 167n47 Coornhert, Dirck Volckertszoon, 29–30, 134–35 De officiis (translator) 30

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Cort, Cornelis, 84, 163 Cosmographiae universalis (Münster), 21, 157n45 costumes, 31, 35, 42, 46, 76, 103, 109 Coxcie, Michiel, 128 crosses, 62, 149, 151 Crucifixion with the Virgin and Saint John the Evangelist Mourning (van der Weyden), 76, 77 customs. See also drinking; feasting; festivals classical writings on, 35 collections and studies of, 25, 31–33, 43–44 definitions, 35 Dutch identity and historical sense of, 35 as etymological evidence of ancient history, 46, 64 festival imagery illustrating traditional, 97 history books on, 36–37, 157n45 longue durée, historical value of, 50, 65, 94, 116 the peasantry as a keeper of, 107–11 temporality of, 40, 61, 81, 109 viewership and knowledge of, 50, 79, 97, 103, 105

Index

Dalem, Cornelis van bibliographical information, 41 busts of Albrecht Dürer and Jan van Eyck, 134 Landscape with Farm, 41, 41, 47 Landscape with the Dawn of Civilisation, 47, 48 View of the Reggio di Calabria, with Bruegel, 40–41 The Damned, 140–41, 141 dancing egg, 101, 111 peasant, 24, 33, 52, 84, 107 songs, 32, 94, 97 sword, 102 Dance of Death series (Holbein, H.), 160n31 De antiquitate reipublicae Batavae (Grotius), 26 The Death of the Virgin, 42, 126, 134–35, 135, 140, 141 The Death of the Virgin (Dürer), 134, 134 The Death of the Virgin (Galle after Bruegel), 135 De constantia (Lipsius), 78 Della pittura (On Painting) (Alberti), 55, 56, 117, 119 Dene, Eduard de, 94 Dente, Marco, Virgin and Child with the Archangel Michel, Tobias, and Saint Jerome, Raimondi after, after Raphael, 136, 137 De Officiis (Cicero/Coornhert, trans.), 30 De rerum natura (Lucretius), 88

Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi (Description de tout le Païs-Bas) (Guicciardini) archaeological site maps in, 22, 28 Batavians physical description and moral discipline, 51–52 Bruegel, 140 characteristics of the Netherlander, 17, 35 contents and description, overview, 22 diet and feasting customs, 39, 40 landscape as cultural artifact, 36–37 lists of details, 46 peasant descriptions, 35, 52 peasants and archaeological discoveries, 22–23, 109 publication and editions of, 22 warning to Antwerp against Bacchic excess, 93–94 Dictionarium Tetraglotton (Plantin), 1–2, 9, 17, 27–28 Die cronycke van Hollandt (Aurelius), 26, 40 Diericx, Volcxken, 13 The Dirty Bride, 102, 103, 111 Divaeus, Petrus, 29 Divieskroniek (Aurelius) See Die cronycke van Hollant Doetecum, Joannes van, the Elder The Kermis of Saint George, with L. van Doetecum after Bruegel, 35–36, 36, 37, 101 Pagus Nemorosus (Wooded Landscape), with L. van Doetecum after Bruegel, 37, 38, 59 Plaustrum Belgicum (The Belgian Wagon), with L. van Doetecum after Bruegel, 37, 38 View of Ruins, with L. van Doetecum after Cock, 25, 67 Doetecum, Lucas van The Kermis of Saint George, with J. van Doetecum the Elder after Bruegel, 35–36, 36, 37, 101 Pagus Nemorosus (Wooded Landscape), with J. van Doetecum the Elder after Bruegel, 37, 38, 59 Plaustrum Belgicum (The Belgian Wagon), with J. van Doetecum the Elder after Bruegel, 37, 38 View of Ruins, with J. van Doetecum the Elder after Cock, 25, 67 drama. See rhetoricians drinking association with abundance and fertility, 90–91 beer and national identity, 96–97 feasting traditions and popularity of, 40, 45

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moral warnings against, 94, 99, 104 mythological personifications of, 83, 83–85, 90, 96, 96, 99 overindulgence, 83, 94, 96–97, 99, 104 wine/vine symbolism, 88 Druon Antigoon (mythological giant), 26, 27 Dulle Griet, 140 Dürer, Albrecht as artistic influence, 126, 140, 168n57 The Death of the Virgin, 134, 134 painting techniques of, 131 as representative of Northern art history, 134 work in the Jonghelinck collection i, 82 Dutch identity. See national identity Dutch language. See vernacular language Dutch Republic, 146–47 Dutch Revolt, 9, 149 Duytsche adagia ofte spreecwoorden (Andriessoon), 30 Eclogue (Virgil), 103 Eco, Umberto, 17 Effigies of Painters from Lower Germany See Pictorum aliquot celebrium Germaniae inferioris effigies (Lampsonius and Cock) The Egg Dance (Netherlandish School after Vos), 100, 101, 103, 111–12 Emblemata (Sambucus), 162n13 Erasmus Adagia, 30, 39, 46 Bacchus and festive associations, 93 Batavian feasting customs, 39–40, 45, 97 Ciceronianus, 64 Colloquies, 10 children’s games descriptions, 10 imitation, correct, 64 Northern artists and, 131 peasant descriptions, 52 Praise of Folly, 93 proverb collections, 30–31, 46 The Eritrean Sibyl (Ghisi after Michelangelo), 91, 136–37, 139 Estienne, Charles, 82, 105–6 L’agriculture et maison rustique (De lantwinninghe, ende hoeve) 82, 105–6, 164n54 ethnography, 4, 42 etymology, 1–2, 18, 29, 156 n31 Eupompus, 14, 16 Euripides, 83 excess, aesthetic of, 83, 86, 88, 90, 93–99, 107–10 experience, direct, 46, 68

Eyck, Jan van as Apelles, 29,128, 129, 132 artistic influence of, 140 Christ Carrying the Cross, after, 74, 76 painting techniques of, 131, 132 as representative of Northern art history, 134 Fabian, Johannes, 48 Fabius, Scipio, 165n60 facelessness, 91, 102, 143 The Fall of Icarus (Auden), 115, 142 The Fall of Icarus (after Bruegel), 115, 116, 142 The Fall of the Rebel Angels, 140 Farnese, Alessandro, 82 feasting. See also drinking allegorical representations of, 83, 93–99 as cultural tradition, 39–40, 44–46 medieval fantasies featuring, 49 as vernacular antiquity, 40 fertility, 44, 65, 90–91, 93 Festival of the Longbowmen, 32–33 festivals and festivities. See also Bacchic themes carnival, 85, 93–99 church village (kermis), 32–37, 49, 101–2, 103 legislation restricting, 71–72 wedding traditions, 45–46, 94 The Flight into Egypt, 57, 57–67, 59 (detail), 151 The Flight into Egypt (Bening), 58–59, 59, 65 The Flight into Egypt (Gassel), 57, 58, 59, 64 Florence, 18, 123 Floris, Frans as artistic influence, 111 associated artistic style, 127, 130–31 associates, 129 Bacchic themes, 82, 88 Banquet of the Gods, 92, 93 biographical information, 127 De Landelijke Goden series, 163n20 painting techniques of, 131–32 in Pictorum aliquot celebrium Germaniae inferioris effigies, 129, 167 n39 Floris de Vriendt, Cornelis, 60 fool, folly, 35, 75, 84, 93, 97, 99, 18, 124, forgeries, 26, 148 The Four Winds (Aux Quatre Vents) publishing firm, 13 France, and vernacular history, 24 Franck, Sebastian, Weltbuch, 94 Freedberg, David, 127 Frugalitas & Gula (Borcht), 44, 45–46 Galle, Philips The Alchemist, after Bruegel, 118, 120

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Galle, Philips (continued) Apollo (Sol), after Jonghelinck, J., 84, 85 Bacchus, after Jonghelinck, J., 84, 85 Charity (Charitas), after Bruegel, 98, 99 The Death of the Virgin, after Bruegel, 135 Hope (Spes), after Bruegel, 59–60, 61, 61 (detail) The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, after Bruegel, 124, 125 Temperance (Temperantia), after Bruegel, 118, 120 game-playing knucklebones, 10 garbage, and material culture, 107–10 Gassel, Lucas The Flight into Egypt, 57, 58, 59, 64 Judith and Thamar, 159n12 Landscape with Shepherds, 159n12 in Pictorum aliquot celebrium Germaniae inferioris effigies, 167n39 gedootwerf, 132 Geldenhauer, Gerard, 26 Georgics (Virgil), 88 Germania (Tacitus), 22, 26, 27, 72 Ghisi, Giorgio The Calumny of Apelles, after Penni, 121, 122, 123 The Eritrean Sibyl, after Michelangelo, 91, 136–37, 139 Ghistele, Cornelis van, 28, 31, 121 Aeneas and Dido, 31 Aeneid (as translator), 28 Comedies (as translator), 28–29 Gibson, Walter, 103, 160n28 Giotto, 155n33 globalization, 8–9, 28 The Gloomy Day, from The Months series, 11, 84, 86 ’t Goed ter Beke (Jonghelinck estate), 70, 77, 82, 84, 105 Goes, Hugo van der, 134 Goltzius, Hubertus, 22 Goodman, Nelson, 112 Gorp van der Beke, Jan (Johannes Goropius Becanus), 17, 29, 30 Gossaert, Jan, 131 Granvelle, Antoine Perrenot de, archbishop of Mechelen, 55, 63, 70 Grimm, Gerald Völker, 168n72 grisaille, 130–37, 139–42 Grotius, Hugo, De antiquitate reipublicae Batavae, 26 Guicciardini, Lodovico, 22. See also Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi Index

Haagspel (1561 Antwerp Landjuweel), 51. See also Spelen van sinne Habsburg government, 8, 9, 36, 69, 70–71, 146, 148, 149 The Harvesters, from The Months series, 84, 87 Haymaking, from The Months series, 49, 59, 60, 60, 65 Heemskerck, Maarten van Allegory of Good and Bad Music, 162n13 Cardinal Andrea della Valle’s Collection of Antiquities, Netherlandish School after, 109–10, 110 painting techniques and style of, 131–32 Samson, from Twelve Strong Men series, 131–32, 132 Self-Portrait with Colosseum, 68, 70 Triumph of Bacchus, 91, 92, 107 Heere, Lucas de associates, 129 Bacchic emblem designs attributed to, 162n13 Den hof en boomgaerd der poësien, 29, 127–30 Netherlandish art history and artists praised by, 29, 121, 128, 129, 132 Netherlandish artistic rivalries, 29, 127–30 praise of the Dutch language, 29 Herodotus, 157n45 Heyden, Pieter van der Big Fish Eat Little Fish, after Bruegel, 2, 6, 15, 31, 154n61 The Dirty Bride, after Bruegel, 102, 103, 111 Summer, from The Seasons series, after Bruegel, 89 Historia naturalis (Pliny), 14 historia. See history historical imagination, overview art history and, 116, 117, 121–29 definition, 2 limitations of, 79, 142–3, 151 modern conceptualization of, 9–10, 11–12 Netherlandish-Renaissance obsession with, 2–3 past and present themes, 3–4, 18, 25–27, 41–42 sixteenth-century perception of, 56, 115–16, 148–49 Histories (Herodotus), 157n45 history (historia), as painting genre, 55–56, 117 Den hof en boomgaerd der poësien (Heere), 29, 127–30 Hogenberg, Frans The Battle Between Carnival and Lent, 95, 96, 99 The Kermis at Hoboken, after Bruegel, 33, 34

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Holbein, Ambrosius, 165n5 Holbein, Hans Dance of Death series, 160n31 rural religious marker imagery, 65 Honig, Elizabeth, 6 Hope, from Virtues series (Leyden), 124, 126 Hope (Spes), from The Virtues series, 59–60, 61, 61 (detail) Hottinger, Klaus, 160n23 humanism, 5–6, 30, 31, 43, 53 Hunters in the Snow, from The Months series, 2, 4, 11, 49 Ice Skating Before the Gate of Saint George, 37 iconoclasm, 9, 10, 62, 149. See also Beeldenstorm idols, falling, 58–67, 59 Ilsink, Matthijs, 140 imitation, 14, 15–16, 64, 124 inscriptions Bruegel’s lack of, 106 classical fonts, 119, 134 as historical evidence, 25, 26 signatures acknowledging imitation, 124 Italian art influences figural composition, 91, 134 monumentality of figures, 91, 136–37, 139, 141 Romanist style, 126–30, 131–32 Jonckheere, Koenraad, 161n46 Jonghelinck, Jacques patrons of, 70 Statues of Bacchus and the Seven Planets sculpture series: Apollo (Sol), 84, 85; Bacchus, 82, 83, 83, 84, 85, 91, 93 studio of, 63 Jonghelinck, Nicolaes biographical information, 69–70, 82 country villa (’t Goed ter Beke) , 70, 77, 82, 84, 105 patronage of Bruegel, 55, 69, 73, 84, 159n13 relationship to Habsburgs 70 Judith and Thamar (Gassel), 159n12 Junius, Hadrianus, 26–27, 29, 40, 42–43, 72–73 Batavia, 26–27, 29, 40 Nomenclator, 72–73 kermis (festival), 32–37, 49, 101–2, 103 The Kermis at Hoboken, 32–33, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 101 The Kermis at Hoboken (Hogenberg after Bruegel), 33, 34

The Kermis of Saint George, 35–36, 36, 37, 101 Key, William, 167n39 Koerner, Joseph, 97 Koselleck, Reinhart, 47, 48, 50 Köstlin, Konrad, 9–10 Kunsthistorisches Museum (Vienna), 11 Lampsonius, Domenicus artistic rivalries, 129–30 associates, 129 Bruegel’s biography and portrait, 13, 14, 14–15, 140 early Netherlandish art history, 121, 123 Latinization of name for publication, 13, 17 Pictorum aliquot celebrium Germaniae inferioris effigies , 13, 14, 14–15, 129–30 De Landelijke Goden series (Floris, F.), 163n20 Landjuweel (1561 Antwerp), 51, 83, 88, 97 The Land of Cockaigne, 49–50, 51, 52 landscape classical gods and, 74, 88, 90 country, peasant and, 81, 91 as cultural artifact, 36–37 custom, local history and, 44 fertility of, 44 sixteenth-century Netherlandish formulas for, 57 Landscape with Farm (Dalem), 41, 41, 47 Landscape with Shepherds (Gassel), 159n12 Landscape with the Dawn of Civilisation (Dalem), 47, 48 Landscape with Woodcutter (Altdorfer), 160n31 languages. See also vernacular (Dutch) language classical fonts and inscriptions, 119, 134 globalization and knowledge of multiple, 17 linguistic studies of, 27, 29 popularity and use of classical, 13, 16, 17, 28 for publication, 7, 13, 17 De lantwinninghe, ende hoeve See L’agriculture et maison rustique (Estienne) The Large Landscape series, 37, 38, 59 Latin (language), 13, 16, 17, 28 laughter. See comedy Laurinus, Guido, 22 leisure, 24, 82, 103, 106 De Lelie (Diest) Haagspel (Netherlandish School) from Spelen van Sinne, 83, 84 Lent (personification), 99 Leonardo da Vinci, 15 Leyden, Lucas van Hope, from Virtues series, 124, 126 standard-bearer figures, 168n57

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liber pater (father of freedom), 93 Lipsius, Justus, 30, 78 De constantia, 78 Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (Vasari), 15, 123 Lomazzo, Gian Paolo, 15 Lombard, Lambert academy curriculum and print production, 131 as artistic influence, 111 artistic style and painting techniques of, 131–32 associates, 129 Bacchic subjects, 88 The Calumny of Apelles, 121, 122, 123, 124, 126 Christ Carrying the Cross, after Bosch, 74, 123–24, 125 Netherlandish art history and theory, 121, 123, 128 in Pictorum aliquot celebrium Germaniae inferioris effigies, 123, 129 students of, 127 Low Countries (Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands). See also national identity artworks as history of, 10 classical antiquities, popularity of, 28 classical history and vernacular studies, 7 early names for, 26, 130, 145 education and language, 28 education and proverbs, 43 historical studies of, early, 22–23, 26–28, 35, 39–40 language and translation, 17 political conflict, 9, 146, 148, 149 religious conflict, 9, 10, 62, 63, 66, 69, 94, 139, 149 socioeconomic growth, 8–9 Lucian, 116–19, 128 De Calomnia, 117 Lucretia (Vico after Parmigianino), 124, 126 Lucretius, De rerum natura, 88 Luilekkerland, 49–50, 51 Luther, Martin, 62 Lyvor (figural personification), 118, 119, 128, 143

Index

The Magpie on the Gallows, 149–51, 150 Mandement van Bacchus (booklet), 96–97 Mander, Karel van, Het Schilder-boeck 12–13, 15–16, 49, 118, 149, 151 Mantegna, Andrea, The Calumny of Apelles, 117 manuscript illumination, 58, 59, 131–32, 133 Map of Brittenburg. See Arx Britannica Margaret of Parma, regent of the Low Countries, 149 Marian cults, 62

Martial, 39 Massacre of the Innocents, 74 Massys, Cornelis, Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, 159n12 Massys, Quentin, 13, 16, 168n64 master-apprentice rhetoric, 13, 127, 140 material culture, 107–11 Mausoleum of Constantia (Rome), 83 Meadow, Mark, 76–77 Mechelen, 12, 60 Melanchthon, Philipp, 119 Michelangelo The Eritrean Sibyl, Ghisi after, 91, 136–37, 139 Madonna of Bruges, 168n72 Mirror of the Golden Age. See Aurei saeculi imago (Ortelius) Mitchell, W. J. T., 78 modernity, 9–11 Mompere, Bartholomeus de, 33 The Months series The Gloomy Day, 11, 84, 86 The Harvesters, 84, 87 Haymaking, 49, 59, 60, 60, 65 Hunters in the Snow, 2, 4, 11, 49 patron and ownership, 82, 159n13 social distinctions between viewer and subject, 47, 50, 103, 105–6 Mont Saint-Michel, 71, 71 monumentality of figures, 91, 104, 107, 134, 136–37 morality of gossip, 149, 151 of overindulgence, 97, 99 physical characteristics as an indication of, 51–52 social distinctions , 101, 102, 105 “mother tongue,” 29, 145. See also vernacular language Moxey, Keith, 78 Münster, Sebastian, Cosmographiae universalis, 21, 157n45 Nagel, Alexander, 11–12, 66 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 81, 91 national identity. See also Belgica, Low Countries, vernacular language Brugelian imagery supporting, 146–48 development of the concept of, 145–46 customs as evidence of, 7, 8, 9, 35, 46, 86 sixteenth-century perception of, 148 social distinctions between peasants and urban classes and, 46–47, 106 Native Americans, 48 Natural History (Pliny), See Historia naturalis (Pliny)

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nature and naturalism, 14, 15–16, 88 neo-Stoicism, 78 Netherlandish art history See also Pictorum aliquot celebrium Germaniae inferioris effigies (Lampsonius and Cock) artistic tradition of , 74, 121, 123–27 Bruegel as key figure in, 129–30 perception of, 128–29 rivalries between artists, 126–30 Netherlandish history, 22–23, 26–28, 35, 39–40,145–48 Netherlandish identity. See national identity Netherlandish Proverbs, 2, 3, 30–31 Netherlandish School Cardinal Andrea della Valle’s Collection of Antiquities, after Heemskerck, 109–10, 110 The Egg Dance, after Vos, 100, 101, 103, 111–12 illustration of De Lelie (Diest) Haagspel, from Spelen van sinne, 83, 84 Singers of Bacchus, after Bosch, 100, 101 Netherlands. See Low Countries Nicomachus of Thebes, 132 Nijmegen (Noviomagus) ruins, 26 Nimrod, 68, 70 Noirot, Jean, 55 Nomenclator (Junius), 72–73 nudes, female, 124 Omnium gentium mores, leges & ritus (Boemus), 157n45 On Painting (Della pittura) (Alberti), 55, 56, 117, 119 Operum antiquorum Romanorum (Cock), 25, 67 Orley, Bernard van, 130, 163n20 Ortelius, Abraham. See also Album amicorum (Ortelius), Arx Britannica (Ortelius); Aurei saeculi imago (Ortelius) associates, 129 as Bruegel’s friend and patron, 14, 42, 55 Death of the Virgin engraving commission, 134–35 epitaphs and description of Bruegel, 3, 12–13, 14, 15, 16 linguistic research, 29 Netherlandish cultural scholarship, 7 philosophical outlook of, 78 Ostendorfer, Michael, 160n21 “Other,” 47–48, 50, 103, 106. See also peasants pagan (word origins and definitions), 1 paganalia, 1–2. See also festivals and festivities paganus, 1, 3–4, 17. See also peasants

Pagus Nemorosus (Wooded Landscape), from The Large Landscapes series, 37, 38, 59 The Painter and the Connoisseur, 167n35 The Painter’s Book See Het Schilder-boeck (Van Mander) Panofsky, Erwin, 11 The Parable of the Good Shepherd, 27, 42–43 The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, 124, 125 Parmigianino, Lucretia, Vico after, 124, 126 Parshall, Peter, 71 Paul II, Pope, 68 The Peasant and the Nest Robber, 91, 92, 136, 138 Peasant Dance description of, 42, 108 feasting imagery in, 40 figural style of, 52, 93, 136 material culture and temporality, 107, 109–10 religious markers, 65 sexual imagery and social distinctions, 105 Peasant Feast (Aertsen), 23, 23–24, 37, 50, 52 Peasant Kermis (Borcht), 33, 34, 50 peasants archaeological discoveries and roles of, 22–23 architectural styles of, 41–42, 71–72 Bacchic themes and, 84–85, 88–91 Brittenburg maps featuring, 23, 24 church festivals with, 32–37, 101–2 comparisons to Native Americans, 48 descriptions of, 33, 35, 40, 45–48, 52 diet and feasting customs of, 39–40, 44–46 impact of urbanization, 8–9, 49 material culture of, 107–11 physical characteristics and associations, 51–52 proverbs on customs and, 39 roles of, 7, 51, 52, 53, 66 social class interactions, 23–24 social distinctions between viewers and, 46–47, 52, 64, 100–106 temporality of rural life, 47, 48, 49–52, 53 terminology etymology and evolution, 1–2 traditional labors, 49 Peasant Wedding customs depicted in, 40, 44–45 influences on, 136 material culture and wastefulness, 109 minutiae of, 46 peasant temperament, 45–46 print publications and figures borrowed from, 147

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Peasant Wedding (continued) sexual imagery in, 105, 105 social distinctions in, 103, 104–5, 105 (detail) Peasant Wedding (Borcht), 45, 45–46, 50 Penni, Luca, The Calumny of Apells, Ghisi after, 121, 122 Philip II of Spain, 9, 70, 88 Philip the Good, 131 philology, 27, 148 Pictorum aliquot celebrium Germaniae inferioris effigies (Lampsonius and Cock), 13, 14, 14–15, 129–30 place-names, etymological studies of, 29 Plantin, Christopher Bacchic emblems in publications of, 162n13 Dictionarium Tetraglotton, 1–2, 9, 17, 27–28 Dutch dictionaries and language codification, 1–2, 9, 17, 27–28 Thesaurus Theutonicae linguae, 94 villa management guidebooks published by, 164n54 plaquettes, 84 Plaustrum Belicum, from The Large Landscapes series, 37, 38 Pliny, 14, 116, 132 Historia naturalis, 14, 154n29, 167n52 The Poor Kitchen, 165n61 Portrait of Pieter Bruegel (Wierix), 13, 14 Praise of Folly (Erasmus), 93 preachers, hedge, 62, 63 Preimesberger, Rudolf, 132 Proclus, 83 Protoevangelium of James, 58 proverbs, 30–31, 39, 149 Quintilian, 35

Index

The Rabbit Hunt, 84 Raimondi, Marcantonio, Virgin and Child with the Archangel Michel, Tobias, and Saint Jerome, after Dente after Raphael, 136, 137 Raphael The Calumny of Apelles, 117 influence on Bruegel, 139, 163n24 Virgin and Child with the Archangel Michel, Tobias, and Saint Jerome, Raimondi after Dente and, 136, 137 recycling, 109–11 rederijkers. See rhetoricians Reformation, 62, 63, 66, 69, 94, 139, 149 Regiunculae et Villae aliquot Ducatus Brabantiae (Visscher), 146–47, 147

religious practices Carnival, 85, 93–99 church festivals, 32–37, 49, 101–2, 103 fertility of fields rituals, 65 open-air sermons, 62 religious markers, 58–67 religious reformation, See Reformation religious themes biblical imagery in contemporary settings, 74 blindness metaphors, 74–78 Christian history, certainty of, 151 classical vs. contemporary architectural imagery in, 72 figural style and, 74–79 replicas, 26 The Resurrection of Christ, 166n7 rhetoricians (rederijker) dramas, 28, 29, 31, 97, 121, 139, 143 The Rich Kitchen, 165n61 rijstpap (peasant dish), 44–45 Ripa Grande (Rome) drawing, 68 Romanists, 126–32 Rome. See also classical antiquity; Italian art influences Babylon associations, 68 classical architecture of, 68, 71, 72, 73, 83 contemporary architecture and urban development of, 68 historical/cultural studies on, 5–7 mythological subjects popular in, 82–83 travels to, 68, 91, 127 Rubens, Peter Paul, 63 ruins classical architectural fragments referencing, 66–67 peasant village imagery and, 41–42 Roman, 68, 71, 72, 73 temporality of, 25–27, 40 as vernacular antiquity, 7, 21, 24, 25–27 (see also Arx Britannica) rural society. See also customs; drinking; feasting; festivals and festivities; peasants architectural traditions, 71–73 festivals for reunions of, 49 religious practices, 62, 63 sociocultural boundaries between urban and, 49 socioeconomic growth impacting, 8–9, 48–49 temporal perspective of, 47, 48, 49–52, 53 Saint Jerome in the Wilderness (Massys), 159n12 Sambucus, Johannes, Emblemata,162n13 Samson, from Twelve Strong Men series (Heemskerck), 131–32, 132

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satire, 4, 52, 71, 96–97, 101, 137 Scaliger, Joseph Justus, 30 Schetz, Balthazar, 36 Het Schilder-boeck (Van Mander), 12–13, 15–16 Schilderspand (Antwerp) art market, 8, 55 Schoonbeke, Gilbert van, 8 Schrijver, Pieter, 109 Scorel, Jan van, 130, 167n39 Scrivenus, Petrus (Pieter Schrijver), Batavia Illustrata, 109 The Seasons series, 165n61. See also Summer, from The Seasons series Self-Portrait with Colosseum (Heemskerck), 68, 70 Sellink, Manfred, 161n39 sexuality, 90, 105, 111 Seznec, Jean, 6 shrines, 58–67 Singers of Bacchus (Netherlandish School after Bosch), 100, 101 Small Landscapes, 146–47 social class distinctions, 23–24, 46–47, 52, 64, 71–72, 100–106 Sol (Apollo) (Galle after Jonghelinck, J.), 84, 85 Solis, Virgil, 168n57 songs, 32–33, 43–44, 46, 94, 97,101 Spelen van sinne (Silvius, publ.), 83, 84 See also Landjuweel (Antwerp 1561), Haagspel spelhuizen, 8, 12, 49, 70, 82 Spes (Hope), from The Virtues series, 59–60, 61, 61 (detail) Spring, from The Seasons series, 165n61 Statues of Bacchus and the Seven Planets series (Jonghelinck, J.), 82–85, 83, 85, 91, 93 Stevens, Pieter, 63 Strabo, 26, 83 suburban developments, 8, 9, 82 Summer, from The Seasons series description and themes, 88, 90, 93, 107 figures excerpted from, 165n61 Van der Heyden engraving of, 89 peasant depictions, contrasts, 151 social distinctions, 102 The Survival of the Pagan Gods (Seznec), 6 Susato, Tielman, 32, 33, 35, 43–44 Tacitus, Germania, 22, 26, 27, 72 tafelspelen (table plays), 103 Temperance (Temperantia), from The Virtues series, 118, 120 temporality anachronism and multiple constructs of, 66, 72, 74, 75, 88, 90 cycles and circularity, 75, 99, 110 of customs, 40

destruction as theme of, 58–67, 73 juxtapositions of, 11, 47, 58–67, 73 material culture and recycling, 107–11 rural life and peasants, perceptions of, 47, 48, 49–52, 53 Terence, 28 thatched-roof architecture, 71–72 Thesaurus Theutonicae linguae (Plantin), 94 The Three Soldiers, 132–33, 133 Timanthes, 14 Tintoretto, 111 tourism, social, 100–106 The Tower of Babel, 68–73, 69, 72 (detail), 82 translation of classical texts, 28–29 historical value of vernacular and, 139 overview, 16–18 as pictorial strategy, 64, 121, 139, 143 tree shrines, 58–67, 59, 62 Het tresoor der Duytsscher talen (Van der Werve), 29 Triptych of the Life of Christ (Coecke van Aelst), 167n47 Triumph of Bacchus (Heemskerck), 91, 92, 107 Truth/Veritas (personifications), 118–19, 121, 124, 125 (detail), 126, 143 The Twelve Proverbs, 31 Twelve Years’ Truce, 146 urban classes architectural style of, 71–72 social distinctions, 8–9, 23–24, 49, 100–106 viewers belonging to, 25–26, 43–44, 46, 52, 64, 79, 100–106 as visitors to ruins, 46 Valkhof ruins (Nijmegen), 26 Valle, Cardinal Andrea della, 109–10, 110 Vasari, Giorgio, 15, 123 “Vastenavend Dansliedeken” (De Dene), 94 Vermeyen, Jan, 131 vernacular, defined, 27 vernacular antiquity. See also customs; vernacular language classicist revival and pagan traditions as, 6–7 descriptions of Bruegel’s art and, 13–16 Dutch rhetorician dramas as, 29 factors supporting interest in, 8–9, 146, 148, 149 local ruins as evidence of, 7, 21, 24–27 peasant figures as embodiment of, 88 popularity of, 43

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vernacular (Dutch) language antiquarian research, 29 bible verse translations to, 139 classical text translations to, 28–29 dictionaries and codification of, 1–2, 9, 17, 27–28 education and, 28 historical value of, 29–30 proverb studies in, 30–31 publications and translations to, 7, 17 song collections celebrating, 32 Veronese, Paolo, 111, 163n16 Vico, Enea, Lucretia, after Parmigianino, 124, 126 violence, 10, 33, 149 viewership Brittenburg map and visitor figures as, 46 demographic descriptions, 25–26, 43–44, 79 social distinctions between peasant subjects and urban, 52, 64, 100–106 View of the Reggio di Calabria (Bruegel and Van Dalem), 40–41 villas, country, 8, 12, 49, 70, 82 manuals on management of, 82, 105–6, 164n54 Virgil, 28, 88, 103 Aeneid (Van Ghistele, trans.), 28 Eclogue, 103 Georgics, 88 Virgin and Child with the Archangel Michel, Tobias, and Saint Jerome (Raimondi after Dente after Raphael), 136, 137 The Virtues series Charity, 98, 99 Hope (Spes), 59–60, 61, 61 (detail) Temperance, 118, 120 vision, spiritual vs. physical, 76 Visscher, Claes Jansz., Regiunculae et Villae aliquot Ducatus Brabantiae, 146–47, 147 Vita Familiaris (Borcht), 37, 39 vita voluptaria, 83 Vos, Maerten de associates of, 165n60 Autumn, Collaert after, 88, 89, 90 Bruegel-related print designs, 165n61 The Calumny of Apelles, 123 The Egg Dance, Netherlandish School after, 100, 101, 103, 111–12

Index

Weyden, Rogier van der Crucifixion with the Virgin and Saint John the Evangelist Mourning, 76, 77 Netherlandish art history and, 123, 140 Wierix, Johannes, Portrait of Pieter Bruegel, 13, 14 The Wild Man, 103 William of Orange, 146 Wilson, Stephen, 160n33 The Wine of Saint Martin’s Day, 104, 104, 105 wine/vine, 83, 83–84, 88, 90, 104, 105. See also Bacchic themes Wolf, Gerhard, 11 Wood, Christopher, 11–12, 26, 66 Woodall, Joanna, 16–17 Wooded Landscape (Pagus Nemorosus), from The Large Landscape series, 37, 38, 59 wreaths, Bacchic, 90, 91, 95, 97, 101, 102 Zeuxis, 132 zotte liedekens, 32 Zwingli, Ulrich, 62

wastefulness, 107 The Wayfarer (Bosch), 160n31 wedding traditions, 45–46, 94 Weltbuch (Franck), 94 Werve, Jan van der, Het tresoor der Duytusscher talen, 29

200

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Typeset by Regina Starace Printed and bound by Oceanic Graphics International Composed in Scala and Scala Sans Printed on FSC HI-Q Matt Bound in JHT

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