Unmasking the World: Bruegel's Ethnography

The horse was created to draw and to carry; the ox, to plow; the dog, to guard and to hunt; but man was born to contemplate the world with his gaze.

—Cicero, The Republic, printed as an epigraph to Abraham Ortelius's atlas

We have placed you at the center of the world so that, from there, you can more easily observe whatever is in the world. We have made you neither of heaven or earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with freedom of choice and with honor you may fashion yourself in whatever shape you prefer, as though you were the maker and molder of yourself.

—Pico della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man

The glorification of "man" that Giovanni Francesco Pico, count of Mirandola, placed in the mouth of God was meant for a university audience. Writing in 1486, Pico modeled his so-called oration On the Dignity of Man after introductory speeches customary at the opening of a school year—but this speech was never delivered.¹ Together with many of the ideas it defended, the text fell under a charge of heresy. Even in our time, the word man can hardly be spoken without cringing, and it came under special attack after World War II, simultaneously from both the Right (Heidegger) and Left (Adorno and Horkheimer). Pico himself affirmed human dignity against a widespread antihumanism—a conviction of the wretchedness of mankind. Humanism had to contend with a thousand years of eloquent Christian pessimism about humanity: Adam, and with him the whole created world, were vile. But Pico's heretical rapture arose not from contentment with the human world but from the epiphany that whatever "man" is, whatever that word denotes, is in its own power to become. Human mutability has allowed humanism itself to take changing forms, and much can be achieved simply by updating some terms. In place of the old motto "man as measure of the world," focus attention on the humanist insight—fresh enough to cause controversy even now—that "truth was made rather than found."² In place of the obsolete heroism of Homo faber, think of the humanist proposition, foundational to the humanities and social sciences in our own time, that there is no escaping culture—that what we know of nature is what culture will have always already asked.

The original humanists developed attitudes toward what are now termed social construction and cultural determination that were neither celebratory nor fearful. It is worth knowing that such problems have been handled not only before but continuously for centuries, and handled in art with more perspective and thus success than in scholarship or theory. Instead of optimism or pessimism, neo-Stoics of the early modern era opted for their own variety of detachment—not withdrawal from the human world but the attainment of some perspective on it. Endowed with a capacity both to work and to watch, humans distinguish themselves from the rest of creation by having a worldview—by constituting the world as a view. Praising Abraham Ortelius's atlas as a portable image of the world, the Antwerp antiquarian Cornelius van Aecken contrasted ocular travel made possible by maps with the geographic conquests motivated by imperial greed. The humanist neo-Stoic stands aside to view—skeptically, regretfully, but generally in good humor or at least ironically—what other humans take unreasonably to be theirs (and then seize).

Some of the best recent work on Pieter Bruegel the Elder has explored the panoramic view taken in many of his pictures, their tendency to observe the whole from afar³ —and by the early decades of the twentieth century it had already been shown that Bruegel's art has affinities with the ideals of Renaissance humanism. These perceptions are of course related. Positioning us high above ground, Bruegel's pictures are world views and display objects and events as mere [End Page 221...