Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter (review)

Walter Gibson, a well-known scholar of sixteenth-century Netherlandish art, has set himself an impressive and daunting task in his latest book. He tackles a dilemma familiar to all encountering the powerful yet still puzzling work of Bruegel. Today's viewer cannot rely upon his or her eyes or even older Netherlandish visual traditions to come to terms with the work, but needs keys long buried in the culture — and not only visual culture — to make headway. In the last decade-and-a-half alone, many art historians have taken the plunge into popular culture, examining proverbs and joke books as well as visual evidence like lesser-known prints, to emerge with rich corollary evidence which enriches knowledge of the environment in which Bruegel produced his art. This scholarship, along with new investigations of high culture embedded in humanist philosophy and literature — intellectual realms more commonly applied to Bruegel's work — have provided a marked service to our understanding of the late sixteenth century as a whole. And Gibson engages the insistent question that dogs all art historians after encountering this vast body of once-buried material: what relationship do the other facets of contemporary culture have to Bruegel's art?

In a wide-ranging text composed of six chapters and an epilogue (some expanding on previous publications), Gibson focuses upon laughter as a fundamental reason why many of Bruegel's most famous works were made. Gibson does not try to imagine the art from the maker's perspective, but sets out to determine what viewers' responses might have been to those of Bruegel's works which caused laughter. In doing so, he discusses the history of attitudes to laughter, investigates what contemporaries wrote about laughter, why imagery produced in Bruegel's time made people laugh, who paid for the artist's works that made them laugh, and where amusing Bruegelian revels in paint were located in the home. He documents well-to-do citizens' encounters with real peasants in rustic festivals and what these encounters, as well as representations of them, might have meant to Bruegel's wealthy patrons, and includes a final in-depth case study of Bruegel's painting of a wrathful old woman, Dulle Griet, roaming a hell-like, alarming, yet perversely comic, Boschian dystopia with imagery also derived from old proverbs and jokes.

Gibson pointedly takes issue with much literature on the Flemish artist, beginning with Charles de Tolnay in the mid-twentieth century, by rejecting the idea that Bruegel articulated a consistent philosophy or systematic approach to his subjects because it "does violence to our understanding of the way artists earned their living in the competitive world of Bruegel's time" (7). He believes that an artist working for highly educated noble patrons or the Church could well have developed such a philosophy within his art, but Bruegel's patrons and audience did not belong to these particular groups. His audience — and particularly the patrons of his paintings — were, according to Gibson, not the intelligentsia but wealthy bureaucrats and merchants competing hotly in the marketplace and scrambling up the social ladder. His implication, then, is that Bruegel crafted his humorous paintings to amuse his rich patrons.

The author believes that in seeking a profound meaning for Bruegel's art, scholars have too often dismissed the very important element of humor residing in his prints and paintings, and he makes a good point. As Svetlana Alpers observed some decades ago, historians either found a reflection of actual peasant life — which to non-peasants seemed humorous — mirrored in Bruegel's paintings or a deep moralizing critique of well-to-do viewers' mores embedded in the works. Both types of interpretation missed the artfully comic in Bruegel's production, she maintained, and she urged art historians to take comedy when expressed in visual form as seriously as historians of literature and culture took poetry and popular festivities. Gibson provides a great service because...