The exhibit of a copy of Pieter Bruegel’s “The Netherlandish Proverbs” painted by his son Pieter Brueghel the Younger, at the Fleming Museum in Burlington, Vermont, in 2004, brought several scholars together for a two-day international symposium on the two Flemish artists and on proverbs [1]. In fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Flanders proverbs were used as didactic tools and as part of legal rhetorical discourse. Many scholars also collected them.
The symposium presented as many different viewpoints as there were presenters, not surprisingly since no other painting has ever received the amount of scholarly attention as “this remarkable translation of verbal idioms into striking vignettes” (17).
Folklorist Alan Dundes delivered the keynote address. In characteristic fashion, Dundes rejects an objective reading of Brueg(h)els’ paintings and sees the works as “psychic products or reflections of the artists’ personality” (41, quoting Spitz). In comparing the works of father and son, Dundes points out the Oedipal and scatological tendencies in Brueghel’s paintings, evidences of the ambivalence the son might have developed towards his father, particularly in light of having to copy his father’s work to make a living (32).
Margaret Sullivan compares Pieter Bruegel’s 1559 painting, containing approximately eight-five proverbs, to the possible sixteen copies made by Pieter Brueghel the Younger or by his workshop. Proverb collecting had become fashionable and prestigious; Bruegel’s knowledge of proverbs was probably attractive to his patrons in mid-sixteenth-century Antwerp. When Brueghel the Younger started working, proverbs had lost some of their cultural attraction and a number of variations show up in some of the copies of the original (55). The author postulates that intrusive elements were perhaps the result of patrons’ wishes, a common tendency then as earlier (56).
Also using a comparative method is Malcolm Jones, who dwells on the work of David Teniers the Younger; Teniers was in fact related to Bruegel, having married Bruegel’s granddaughter Anna. Teniers’ painting exhibits several changes from the original and is accompanied by an identification “key.”
More detail-oriented, Yoko Mori focuses on the appearance of Flemish wives and husbands in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s work, and particularly on a proverb referred to as the “Blue Cloak” (73). She analyzes its antecedents in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Flemish art world, including the varying symbolism of the color blue and of blue cloaks, as well as the unequal portrayal, in age or appearance, of couples.
Mark Meadow, an eminent Bruegel scholar, argues that Pieter the Elder’s “The
Netherlandish Proverbs” (titled by scholars “The World Upside Down”) is a pictorial
proverb collection, raw materials subject to a “range of statements” (105). In addition
to his painting, Pieter Bruegel also produced prints, a more popular art form, which he
filled with messages. According to Meadow, in Bruegel’s time, proverbs were multivalent;
the painting is a “cumulative moral statement” (111). Juxtaposed proverbs enhance each
other and interconnected proverbs form clusters around concepts, paralleling the
collections of written proverbs of the times. Focusing again on the iconographic
elements, David Kunzle states that Bruegel avoided the simple inversions found in the
literary proverbs of the times; instead the painter “shows deep opposition and distress
at the violent repression and war the Spanish administration brought to the Nederlands”
(134). He depicts Bruegel as a socially engaged artist (an opinion shared by Meadow),
not unlike Erasmus with the anti-militaristic references found in his
Mieder, who convoked this symposium, delivered the final lecture. He appropriately chose to summarize the scholarly interest that “The Netherlandish Proverbs” has generated over five centuries and the continuous use of visual proverbs in contemporary art works, including in the mass media.
This collection of articles offers the critical thinking of scholars from several fields, some adopting a broader perspective, some focusing on details. Though abundantly illustrated, the printed version of the symposium’s lectures lacks much of the visual material that accompanied the lectures. The selection of visual samples does, however, give us sufficient material to connect the images with the theoretical interpretations of the various symposium scholars. From a concrete illustration to an abstract interpretation, the reader is brought into some of the theoretical frameworks developed by contemporary proverb scholarship. Each presentation is accompanied by a good bibliography. The collection thus offers an interesting, though incomplete, introduction to visual proverbs and to interpretive scholarship. It will be of interest to proverb scholars, particularly those focusing on cultural contexts that depend on visual communication.
[1] The younger Pieter Brueghel added the “h” to his name; it has thus become accepted to spell Bruegel for the Elder and Brueghel for his son.
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[Review length: 757 words • Review posted on June 7, 2006]