3.

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Pieter Bruegel as an Interpreter

of Ultimate Reality and Meaning
G len n Jacobs, University of Massachusetts, Boston, U.S.A.

I. INTRODU CT I ON

Pieter Bruegel the Elde r ( 1525-1569) represents an iconoclastic as well as

iconographic development in Northe rn European painting: his a rt is and was
both old and new. He rejected the mimicry of immediately post-Renaissance
developments in Italian painting (i.e . , mannerism) by his contemporaries, a l-
though he himselffelt no qualms about eclecticall y borrowing these elements for
his own work. In effect. he was, accord ing to many texts, a virtual ·one-man
Northern Renaissance' in his synthesis of traditional Flemish elements (e.g.
iconic metaphors and symbols, genre motifs - even in religious painting - and
the socio-culturally evolved style of F lemish-Gothic super-realist drafts man-
ship) with borrowed and invented ones.
Few authenticated biographica l documents exist. They inc lude: a listing re-
cording Bruegel's acceptance into the painters' guild (St. Luke) of Antwerp as
master in 1551; two letters (156 1, 1565) by the Italian geographer Scipio to the
Antwerp cartographer Abraham Orteliu s inquiring about their mutual friend' s
health; a notation in a Brussels church register (summer, 1563) verifying his
marriage to Pieter Coeck's (his first teacher) daughter, Mayken; and Carel van
Mander's biography of him , published 35 years after his death ( 1604) in a volume
entitled Het Schilder-Boeck 'The Book of Painters'. There are also two portrait
prints, one by a contemporary, Philip Galle, bearing a Latin verse at the bottom
declaring Bruegel to be the successor of Hieronymous Bosch.
According to van Mander, he was born in a village (Brueghel, near Breda) in
the duchy of Brabant near the border of present-day Holland and Belgium - one
of 17 provinces then a hotbed of Calvinism, Anabaptism, and F lemish
nationalism. However, the exact place and date of his birth are somewhat
apocryphal. His friend Ortelius tells us he died in 1569 'in the flower of his age,'
or what was then considered the medial point of one's life - his forty-fifth year.
This implies that he was born in about 1525 and was twenty-six when he was
admitted as a master into the guild of St. Luke. Bruegel studied under the painter,
scholar and architect, Pieter Coeck (date unspecified) and after Coeck's death in
1550, he went to work in the studio of Hieronymous Cock, a painter and copper

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 engraver who founded a publishing house (from which Cock dominated the
printing trade in the Low Countries) in Antwerp, then a cosmopolitan city.
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Cock's publishing house, called At the Sight of the Four Winds, was a meeting
place for artists and the intelligentsia. In 1551 Bruegel was in Rome, probably
under Cock's auspices, where he met Giulio Clovio, the famous miniaturist with
whom Bruegel occasionally collaborated and to whom he presented at least three
of hi s works. By 1557, he had returned to Antwerp and had completed his first
dated painting, "Landscape with Christ Appearing to the Apostles.' However,
during the next four or five years he was preoccupied as a designer for engravings
and restricted himself to subjects that could be reproduced in large numbers .
Many of these entailed the diabolic iconography of Hieronymous Bosch, espe-
cially the two series The Seven Deadly Sins, and The Virtues. These engravings
and some of his paintings (e.g. Dulle Grief 'Mad Meg,' "The Triumph of Death,'
and 'The Fall of the Rebel Angels') have closely identified Bruegel with Bosch
but they mark only one aspect of Bruegel in his use of traditional and folk
iconography. After his marriage in 1563 to Mayken, the daughter of Pieter Coeck
(his first teacher) , two sons were born , Pieter (known as 'Hell' due to his own
preoccupation as a painter with his father's and Bosch's diabolic scenes) in 1564,
and Jan (also to become a painter, whose taste for sartorial splendor won him the
nickname "Velvet') in 1568. Bruegel died suddenly on September 4 , 1569 while
working on a set of pictures commissioned by the Brussels City Council to
commemorate the completion of the Brussels-Antwerp Canal.

2. THE INTERPRETER

What qualifies Bruegel as an interpreter of ultimate reality a nd meaning?

Superficially the link with Bosch would seem to provide an answer. Bosch's
phantasmagoria, his drolleries and horrific visions appear to link Bruegel with
the surrealists of modern times. As some have pointed out, however, even
Bosch's visions are not as ' unconscious' as they appear, for he used metaphors
and symbols with decipherable traditional meanings. Moreover, already in
Bosch we see a hazy line separating hell and man's s in and folly-ridden existence
on earth. Bruegel moves several steps away from this, for while he began by
drawing Boschian subjects, his most Boschian work represents the penetration
of the fantastic into the everyday world. It is really in the later paintings that
Bruegel's mature view of what G .I. Gurdjieff called the 'terror of the situation'
seeps in. Bruegel's is a n inner-worldly mys ticism , a mysticism focusing on the
mundane world much in the way that certain Sufi, Zen and shamanistic doctrines
do. The more obvious drolleries of Bosch and Bruegel paradoxically are par-
ables, and like biblical parables, become worn. Bruegel profited from Bosch but
evolved a style of his own in his secularization of hell (Dulle Grief is an ordinary
peasant woman in armor leading an army through hell) and in his turn toward- in
many paintings - totally secular subjects . His religious subjects were not devo-
tional altar-pieces but were anti-clerical and anti-elitist, among other things. In
other words, for Bruegel the esoteric is a part of the exoteric. It is Bruegel's

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 interpretation of folly, his ironic conception of the huma n condition, his de-
mystification of biblical events, and his capacity for establishing links between
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people's private troubles and public issues, tha t distinguishes him . In short, the
major themes a re : the debunking, or demystifying of great events, the develop-
ment of a social dra maturgy , and 'scale' or a sense of the simultane ity of human
events a nd levels of experience a nd reality.
The debunking motif (demystification) refers to what might be called 'skepti-
cism by impartiality,' a sort of stripping away of facades. T hi s is a n act subver-
sive in itself since we take these facades fo r granted or a t their face value.
Thorough description is enough to erode the c redibility lent to them by form ulas,
propaganda and ideologies, including those romanticizing the past. T he notion of
dramaturgy is one native to Bruegel's own time - the metaphor (or top os) of the
world as a stage, that is, of people conceived as actors playing roles in the play
constituted by social reality. It is a play set in motion by impersonal or unap-
prehended forces. Scale refers to the graded levels of reality within which the
huma n condition unfolds. In the context established he re, we move from the
individual, to society, history, Nature (landscape), and the cosmos .
Bruegel lived through a time of tremendous turmoil. H e rubbed shoulders with
and befriended the literati of The Four Winds Circle, men who overtly and
covertl y pa rticipated in the Dutch Reformation. Leading figures suc h as the
geographer Ortelius, the theologian-philosopher Coornhe rt, and Hans Franckert
a nd C hristophe r Plantin were c lose friend s . Van Ma nder writes that Bruegel was
a n adroit observer, who in the company of Franckert often went to the coun-
tryside to observe- often in disguise- peasant folkways . T hese forays have been
preserved in Bruegel's pa intings depicting peasant weddings and cele brations .
Moreover, his work was highl y c ritical, so much so that on his deathbed he
requested his wife to have much of it burned for fear of her having to answer for
the m to the Inquisitio n.
How are the aforeme ntioned themes - debu nking, drama turgy, a nd scale -
incorporated into his work? Take, for example 'Landscape With The Fall of
Icarus.' It is the only painting Bruegel d id with a non-Biblical mythological
subject. W.H. Auden's poem 'Musee des Beaux Arts' describes it:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just
walking dully a long; ...
In Bruegel'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 a n important fa ilure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; a nd the expensive delicate ship tha t must have seen
Something a mazing, a boy fa lling out of the sky.
Had somewhere to go a nd sailed calmly on .

The painting shows Icarus, barely discernible, already submerged but for his

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 legs. The ploughman in the foreground, the fis herman with his back to us, the
s hepherd leaning on his crook staring at the bla nk s ky , his back to Icarus, the ship
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sailing away from Icarus to the horizon as the tones of earth and water fade
toward the splashing pastels of a setting sun on the horizon , all underline
Bruegel's comment on the folly of human a mbitions . H e had , as other Northern
intellectuals, been familiar with Erasmus' The Praise ofFolly and the tradition of
the "fool literature' of the time, especially Brandt's ·Ship of Fools' (The Nar-
renschiff, 1494). The painting represents a rendering of the German proverb: 'No
plough comes to a standstill because a man dies .' As such, it establishes a
continuity of myth and the times, but rather than make the event tragic he makes
it inconsequential next to the mundane purs uits at hand. We come upon the
actors in tableau , frozen as in a movie still about to come into action; the splas h-
frozen too - c reates a tens ion but one soon to be exhausted and consumed by the
natural sple ndor of the s unset. Here the painter has produced an eidetic effect: he
has captured the event's meaning while a t the same time debunking its grandios-
ity. The mundane elements of work and subs is tence capture our attention, until
as an afterthought we notice pale Icarus about to disappear. All of this is cradled
in nature so that the painting becomes a pageant of indifference with a sense of
cosmic irony. It is the scale of nature which makes the scene great though the
actors in both harmony and tens ion with nature are unaware of the forces at
work. Hence, Bruegel's 'throwing away of the title ,' a technique borrowed from
the manneris ts whom this painting de bunks as well. Here Bruegel has entered a
controversy over the desirability of Italian painting that raged among Flemish
painters at the time. The rea lism of the Flemish plowman, a nticipating in style
and fla vor Thomas Hart Benton's rural apotheosis, the barely discernible corpse
in the wooded area in the left middle ground , the theme of the fall, and the fragile
make-believe classicized buildings moving toward the horizon to which all goes
and from which everything comes, all point to a rejection of the hegemony of
classicis m , the debunking (relativizing) of mythologies superimposed from the
outside, and an identification with indigenous Netherlandish elements repre-
sented by the peasantry.
In the ·suicide of Saul' Bruegel c losely follows the Old Testament story in the
thirty-first c ha pter of the First Book of Samuel ( 1-5).
In the fo reground, pouring through a gully formed by a steep s lope on the right
and a rocky precipice on the left , are multitudes of armor-clad Philistines and
fleeing Israelite troops : they are individually discernible but are fused into a
prickly mass of lances, like the lines of force in a magnetic field. Moving back
toward the middle ground, the spears recede into a small plateau on which a
horrible s laughter has taken place. On a rocky ledge to the left, Saul and his
armor-bearer have impaled themselves on their swords as four of the uncircum-
cised wend the ir way around the rocks to 'abuse' them. Finally, we move off to
an idyllic landscape incongruously conveying peace a nd tranquility, as in the
Icarus painting .
This is another instance of the throwing away of the title. This particular

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 biblical e pisode was an uncommon one in pamtmg although its allegorical
significance lies in the the me of the punishme nt of ma n's pride whic h alie na tes
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him fro m his God. Importa nt too is the fact that the soldiers are all dressed in the
costume of Bruegel's time. Bruegel had fi rst-hand observations of war, having
witnessed some of the Spanish a trocities in Flanders . In effect. the d iminished
significance of Sa ul' s prideful suicide is owing to its a pposition with the equally
fa tuous altruistic suicide of the mass of soldiers . Bruegel has demystified his
subject - the pride of man - a nd has also demystified the grande ur of war , for
here, the human one a nd the ma ny a re the same : equal a nd unimpo rta nt.
In a sense Bruegel has abstracted his subj ect fo r he has c reated types (men as
species). H e never painted portraits a nd his sketches, finely wrought as they a re
in the best mas ter's style, are reall y intricate costume studies - 'dictiona ries of
detail ' as they have been called. Mode rn art stude nts ha ve sometimes said tha t
Bruegel' s use of local color could be instructive in itself without reference to the
· subject.
This painting retains the quality of a la ndscape a nd again e mphasizes scale .
While ma n is not de picted as living harmoniously with nature as he is, fo r
example, in Bruegel's la ndscape drawings a nd engravings a nd his paintings of
the seasons, there is conveyed a sense of ma n's incomple teness fo r not doing so
and conseque ntly , fo r the mechanicality of his behavior . There is a n organicity in
Bruegel's la ndscapes which has moved a t lea st o ne schola r to impute a 'sort of
cosmic o r a t least te rrestrial a nimism ' to the m. The la ndscape is no mere prop . If
Bruegel ma kes any moral judgment in his work here, it must rest upo n the exte nt
to whic h his characters ha rmonize with na ture or be be nt to its purposes . As G .I.
G urdjieffput it , ma n 's passivity becomes a means fo r na ture ' s ' involutionary a nd
evolutio na ry construction ' whe rein he is a slave to events.
In a simila r painting, "T he Conve rsio n of St. Pa ul' we see a Re naissance arm y
with its bac k toward us, winding through a mountain pa th. Far into the
background we finall y locate Paul lying o n the ground. Again we are more
impressed with the mountain scenery a nd the larger painted figures tha n we a re
with our "hero.' Even the horses' behinds command our atte ntio n before we
notice Paul. T he a rm y may represent the c ruel Spa nish Duke of Alba's inquisito-
rial campaign as well as the proverb , 'Pride goeth before a fall. ' No ne theless , the
themes come through clearl y again. Va n Mander noted tha t Bruegel's c hief
impression from his Italia n j ourney was tha t of the Alps .
Of his biblical the mes , pe rha ps his greatest tour de force is 'The Procession to
Calvary.' The gist of the painting can be summarized in a contemporary jo ke
about the day of c rucifixion in which, as Jesus painfully moves under his burde n
toward Calvary, a wave of e xcited whispering moves up a nd down the lines of
spec tato rs on either side of his path: 'The Master's lips are moving, they're
moving- he's saying something. What is he saying?' Finally it is de termined. In a
weak and crac king voice Jesus is singing: ' I .. . love a parade ... ' 'The Processio n
to Calvary' contains everything but a hot dog stand. (In fact , it nearly contains
that too, fo r it de picts a mong other things, a man selling cide r). This painting too,

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 is set in a panoramic landscape and constitutes an anthology of aphorisms. The
sunny landscape teems with human life - the ambience has drawn a festive crowd
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to witness a public execution. In the middle ground the procession - the red
thread of Spanish uniformed soldiers - wends its way across the picture curving
up toward the right; in the background the execution hill is ringed by people. The
sky darkens from day to night as the procession moves toward Calvary: the hill
contains gallows and gibbet wheels used for punishment of criminals. The two
crosses are in position; a hole in the ground is being prepared for the third.
Nearby on a hillock there is a double gallows on which yesterday's victim
swings. In the distance, there is a second gallows with its corpse; the crowd
meanders by a double row of wheels on high poles which on the morrow will be
draped with new victims.
Only after some scanning can we find Jesus - he is in the dead center of the
picture, collapsing under the weight of the cross. Ahead, accompanied by two
priests (one's face is hidden by a black cassock) in a horse-drawn wagon are the
two thieves. The populace flows out of the town in the background and includes
frolicking children engaged in games such as pole-vaulting. For the most part, the
spectators are in a festive mood (the painting contains more than five hundred
distinct people). Few are mourning. The picture is crammed with incidental
activity: he re a man stoops to find his hat ; people stare vacantly, idly, amused,
interested; a girl lifts her skirts to ford a puddle gesturing to her playmate who has
already crossed; people walk arm in arm; a nd the cart driver nonchalantly leans
on his horse. Somewhat to the left and below Christ are Simon of Cyrene and his
wife, being entreated by the soldiers to he lp Christ bear the burden - they resist
vigorously. As a show of piety, Simon's wife wears a rosary and a cross . This
detail is a condemnation of hypocritical/c le rical C hristianity. The authentic
mourners a re in the right foreground with St. John , Mary and the two holy
women at the visua l center of the cameo. Fascinating is the archaic fifteenth-
century style of the Pie ta , an intentional concession to ma nnerism used - with
characteristically elongated figures - to idealize the subject.
A 'funky' windmill perched impossibly on a high rocky pedestal caricatures
the cross and symbolizes folly . It is diagonally counterpoised with a gibbet wheel
in the right foreground: it also underlines the fealty to folk/peasant values . An
elongated animal's skull lies below it to the right of the mourners in the lower
right hand corner of the picture. This is a depiction of the New Testament
reference to Golgotha as the place of the skulls . Ominous black carrion birds fly
overhead.
In effect, what we have here is a fusion of human, natural , and cosmic action .
The simultaneity of human activities represents the fact that even during seem-
ingly auspicious moments people are seldom aware of the reciprocal effects of
natural , social, and historic forces. On the human level we can speak of this as an
·ecology of games,' as people willy-nilly pursuing their interests and little
scenarios sometimes including or being unwittingly included and affected by
other people's (and other forces') games.

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 An importa nt aspect of this painting, which was completed in 1564, is that it
must be considered a record of the Inquisition in Flanders . As we know from
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contemporary society and history , executions a re often the climaxes of social

dramas whether we call them exa mples of 'degradation ceremonies,' dramas of
victimage, or socie tal mora lity plays . 'The Procession to Calva ry ' is a depiction
of one of many scenarios of humiliation staged by the Spanish theocratic -
monarc hical complex in the Netherla nds: it recalls the s pectac ular pageants he ld
throughout the s ixteenth century. In the Netherla nds, they were scena rios of
humiliation styled by the Spanish hegemony. In other places like Ve nice , they
were simply spectacular theatrical events.
Philip II , the Hapsburg son of C harles V , was bequeathed Spain and the
Netherlands upon C ha rles' abdication in 1555. Charles, while a strong s upporter
of the counter-Reformation, was popular in the Nethe rlands . Philip, a Spaniard
by birth, was a more fanatical Catholic than his father a nd became absentee ruler
of the low countries. H e saw the Nethe rlands and its 17 provinces, each with its
own loca l government, as a threat to his power and as a hotbed of Calvinist and
Anabaptist he resy . As a result he ruled through a mbitio us local clerical poten-
tates such as Granville (who collec ted Bruegel's paintings!) a nd lie utenants
dispatched to ad ministe r and sq ue lch rebellion (the Duke o f Alba a nd Margaret
of Parma). The result was torture, atroc ity and re pression whic h resulted in the
Eighty Years War, officially begun in 1567, two years before Bruegel's d eath.
Muc h of this was carried o ut unde r the Edict of 1555 (The Edict o f Blood) a
re publis hed edict unenforced by C harles but carried out with a vengeance by
Philip. Because of its literal enforcement, it is re printed here to provide
background for 'The Procession to Calvary' a nd th e paintings to follow:
'N o o ne shall print, write. copy. keep. conceal. sell. buy. o r give in c hu rches. streets . or other
places. any book or writing made by Martin Luthe r . Jo hn Ecolampadius. Ulrich Zwi nglius.
Martin Bucer. Jo hn Calvin or other heretics reprobated by the Holy Church; ... nor break. nor
otherwise injure the images of the holy Virgin. or canonized saints ; ... nor in his ho use ho ld
conventicles. or illegal gatherings. or be present al a ny such in which the adherents of the
above-mentioned heretics teach, baptize. and form conspiracies against the H o ly Churc h a nd
the general welfare .... Moreover. we forb id a ll lay persons to converse o r dispute concerning
the Holy Scriptures. ope n or secretly. espec ia lly on any doubtful or difficult matters. or to
read. teach. or expound the Scriptures. unless they have duly studied theology a nd have been
approved by some re nowned university; ... o r to preach secretly. or openly. or to entertain
any of the opinions of the above-mentioned heretics; ... suc h perturbators of the general qu ie t
are to be executed. to wit: the men with the sword and the women to be buried al ive, if they do
not persist in the ir errors i.e .. confess and repent; if they do persist in them then they are to be
executed with fire; a ll their property in both cases being confiscated to the c rown ... we forb id
. .. all persons to lodge. entertai n. furnish w ith food. fire. or clothing. o r o the rwise to favor any
one ho lde n or notoriously suspected of being a heretic; ... and any one failing to denounce any
suc h we o rdain shall be liable lo the above-mentioned punishments ... The informer, in case of
conviction. shall be entitled to one-half the property of the accused. if not more than one
hundred pounds Flemish; if more. then ten percent. of all excess· (Wilenski. 1955. p. 40)

As we witness mode rn scenaric contrivances s uch as commercial sports events

in the name of women's liberation , military parades in neo-colonialist capita ls,

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 televised congressional hearings on political corruption, a nd the sociopolitical
drama staged by international cartels and their cooperating government elites as
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they move the world toward economic depression, war and the resurgence of
fascism, Bruegel gives us pause to think about the transpersonal forces that
move us.
Other paintings which record the rule of terror of the Inquisition are the
Boschian 'Triumph of Death' ( 1568) which details a n e ncyclopedia of tortures
meted out by an army of skeletons, and 'The Massacre of the Innocents ,' a
painting set in a snow-covered 16th Century village. The latter recalls the New
Testament tale of Herod's efforts to kill the newborn Jesus by murdering all boys
under two years of age. Here in Bruegel's rendition, is a raid on a Flemish hamlet
by armored cavalry led by a black-clad horsema n (possibly Alba). At first, the
picture looks like a peaceful winter scene, but closer inspection reveals, again in
the center, a stationary group of mounted soldiers impassively watching
swordsmen and lance rs butchering baby boys while their distraught parents
weep, struggle or turn away in horror from the slaughter. In a companion
painting ( 1566), 'The Numbering of Bethlehem,' we encounter a similar populated
snow-covered hamlet with Joseph and Mary hardl y discernible. Both pictures,
like ' Calvary ,' represent indifference; the first to suffering, a nd the other, indif-
ference to one's fellow man. Ironically, perhaps it is the message of these
paintings which afforded Bruegel sufficient protective coloration to avoid pros-
ecution under the Inquisition. They appear - upon superficial inspection - to be
no more than innocuou s renderings. How else to explain the fact that clerics such
as Granvelle collected them? Perhaps their decorative value was diversionary.
In the scena ric "The Procession to Calvary' we see the recurrence of the moral
drama of Christ. The mannerist-styled holy family of mourners is a deliberate
use of anachronism so that archaism is underlined in the historical context of the
Inquisition in the Netherlands. This marks a departure from the common
medieval use of anachronism where classical subjects were naively depicted in
medieval garb. Herod and Christ are rooted in sixteenth Century sod. Speaking
of the 'drama of Christ' P.O. Ouspensky notes :

In this drama there was nothing spontaneous. unconscio us or accidental. Every actor knew
what words he had to say and at what moment; and he did in fact say exactly what he had to say
and in the exact way he had to say it. This was a drama with the whole world as an a udience for
hundreds and thousands of years . And the drama was played without the s mallest mistake,
without the smallest inexactness, in accordance with the design of the a uthor and the plan of
the producer. for in compliance with the idea of esoteric ism the re mu st certa inl y have been
both an a uthor a nd a producer ( 1931 , 1971 , p. 26).

Who the ·author a nd produce r' are, we come to in the next section.
A major philosophical aspect of Bruegel's representations is the docta ig-
norantia, the idea that the original ground of all things lies beyond Being and
Knowledge. This doctrine formed a large part of the humanism which Bruegel

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 represented . It makes its appearance in the early Middle Ages and has its basis in
Greek a nd Arab esoteric thoug ht. It comes down through Meister Ec kha rt ,
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N ic ho las ofCusa, Jacob Boehme a nd Giordano Bruno. The docta ignorantia, a

neo-pla to nic ' idealistic nomina lism ,' is propounded by Cusa, who c laims that
e mpirical knowledge apprehends only a n inner world of ideas and serves as s igns
of things, but is different than things themselves . The mind knows only w hat it
conta ins, as contrasted with true essences of things. Hence, human thought only
possesses conjectures - modes of representation congrue nt with its own na ture .
All this assumes the knowledge of no n-knowledge, which, paradoxicall y, is the
o nl y way o ut of rational science (as o pposed to ' real' empirical science, it is the
re latio ns between ideas) to signless, immediate unio n of knowledge with true
Being. In o the r words, man is oblivio us to hi s purpose in life . He is a series of
a utomatisms - he is mecha nical. However, his mec han ica lity can be pierced by
'learned igno rance' (docta ignorantia) which exemplifies a unio n of o ppos ites.
All of this a ppea rs in the Renaissance as Neo-Plato ni sm, pantheism,
Boehme 's symbol of the organismic unfolding a nd manifesta tio n of the uni verse
in natu re (the macrocosm in the microcosm) , Bruno's mo nad , even in numerol-
ogy (numbe r mysticism and symbolis m), astrology, a lchem y, and magic. This
ge nealogy of ideas attai ns ideological significance in the reformation, in the
anti-clerical and , therefore, anti-Aris totelia n a nimus of Zwingli, Lelio Sozzini,
Sebastia n Franck, a nd so o n.
Humanism included scho lars s uch as Valla and Erasmus w ho in their sys-
tematic philological reco nstru ction of the New Testament from the linguistic and
historical context of th e origina l Greek attacked the A ristotelia n logic and the
syllogism of the theologia ns .
Bruegel was conversant with all this, be longing as he did to a c irc le of
E rasmian Catholics a nd possibl y to a mystical sect (the Family of Love), whic h
was part of the Free Spirits who were able to combine mysticism (emphasizing
the accessibility of God and the fat uo us historic manifestation of God in C hrist)
and rationalism. Erasmus was influe nced by the Brethre n of the Common Life
and sha red their s kepticism about scho larly speculation and the ceremonia l
manifestations ofreligio n.
Bruegel absorbs this mysticism, but it is manifested as a ratio na l statement
about man's mechanicality in the context of the flow of history. While this can be
interpreted as a fo rm of pessimism, we must remember, too, the o the r part of the
doctrine w hic h stresses man's potentiality, his abi lity to awaken through self-
knowledge (the dismissal of ignorance) a nd the universalistic optimism he shared
with Renaissance humanism. T his becomes c lear as we view B ruegel's depic tion
of Erasmian foll y in his portrayal of The Vices a nd the Virtues, where the culprit
is not the fatal carna l knowledge s tipula ted by th e Churc h but rathe r , ignorance,
lac k of knowledge as the chief sin. That there is a way o ut is testified to by the
pastel vanishing points of la ndscapes w hic h become the setting for the theater of
man's petty sins - the frolicking around in 'Calvary ... '; his hubris - poor pale

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 Icarus, a nd Saul ; his collective ignora nce, bad faith, c ruelty, and self-
destructiveness - the a rm y of 'S aul '; a nd the ens na rement of him by the institu-
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tions he creates. The vanishing points are a remind er of man's potentiality.

The depiction of folly naturally leads, through Breugel's translation of the
huma nists' juxtapos itio n of contradictory things, through the self-pe rpe tua tion
and self-destructiveness of man's vices to the d epiction of th e world as a stage, to
the puppe t theater a na logy of society - the dramaturgical model. Lest we vainl y
think that this is me re ly argument by analogy, we should aga in be reminded that
Bruegel was very much influe nced by E ras mus a nd the fool literature of Brandt.
H e re Bruegel goes beyond philosophy, for he fleshes out the docta ignorantia
with a graphic phenomenology of everyday life . Take his picture the 'Nether-
la ndis h P roverbs . ' It is one of his encyclopedi c pictures (others being 'The Fight
Between Carnival a nd Lent,' a nd 'Children's Games') or a Wimmelbild 'teem-
ing figure picture' in w hich masses of people a re portrayed o n a large pane l.
Here we find more than a hundred proverbs detailing human folly. (Examples
are: If the bl ind lead the blind both shall fall into the ditch; The pillar-biter -
hypocritical pie ty -; The fool ge ts the trump card - fortune favors fools-; H e
bangs his head aga inst the wall ; He carries baskets of light out into the sunshine-
coals to Newcastle-; To have the devil fo r a confessor; An eel caught by the tail
is not yet caught - don't count your chicke ns until they hatc h -; Anyone can see
through an oak door if there's a hole in it). As s uch these paintings are an-
tho logies of folklore and c ustom. The paintings discussed earlier pull this ma te-
rial together into a mo re systema tic dra maturgy by demonstrating the mecha-
nis ms by which the individual' s commitments to social roles in his torical and
socia l contexts compel him to take the world for granted . The proverbs a nd
folk-wisdom B ruegel implemented, enabled him to s how ma n as a puppet inas-
much as the individua l in his s lee p has forfeited his autonomy to a higher will.
This skepticism a llowed Bruegel to depict C hrist as a woode n puppet o n Judge-
me nt Day.
Where, then is the highe r w ill - the 'author and producer?' We return to the
docta ignorantia. It is man's sleep, and Nature; there is ma nkind's salvation or
his obliteratio n. In Nature we are saved or damned. In a drawing called Spes
"Hope' Bruegel constructs an iconography of nature. The sy mbo ls of a s hip a nd
a caged bird are contrasted with a prison tower, a boat landing, a nd c ity wall. T he
hopes of the soul (the ship and caged bird) a re o pposed to the results of human
reason and ingenuity offering a haven against nature. This security , however, is
only won by man cooperating with Nature as in the peasant d oing his d aily work,
or s hips moving out to sea; otherwise ma n becomes humus for Great Nature.
Thus, there is the possibility of freedom if man can work with his fell ow ma n
and be attentive to him , if he can prod himself awake and out of the prideful
undertakings of other men making him herdlike, a nd if he can avoid the drug of
h y pocrisy. In s hort, man must become self-reliant. Bruegel's emphasis o n genre
(he never painted altar panels), his love of the common ma n (he was derisively
called 'Peasant Bruegel'), and his attempt to view the world with s imulta ne ity

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 and impartiality, led him to the understanding of the fictions me n live by. He
demystified the grandeur of events and used the classics and the b ible to demon-
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strate their analogy to the present. In doing so , he freed the present of its
uniqueness by showing the recurrence of the human dram a a s it unfolded. Thus,
the present is rendered s pecious by eternal recurrence or the past repeating itself
with b ut minor changes . Nonetheless, the actors mo ve through their paces
mechanically. He offers us actors an opening in the door to wakefulness by
demo nstrating the connections between the scenario s of nature, society , powe r ,
and the se lf.

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