Pieter Bruegel and the Idea of Human Nature by Elizabeth Alice Honig (review)

For an artist whose mention popularly evokes scenes of peasant merrymaking and sedate, wintry landscapes, Pieter Bruegel the Elder has aroused fierce debate among twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars. Controversy has erupted over the correct orthography and pronunciation of his family name, conflicting theories about his socioeconomic background have generated radically opposed interpretations of his art, and speculation over his religious and political persuasions continue to overburden pictures that may have been fairly benign in his day. It is hard to fault these zealous historians; Bruegel's artistic legacy is a seductive cocktail of scant archival evidence and complex, enigmatic imagery. The opacity of Dulle Griet (1563), for instance, could lead even the most pedantic of scholars to flights of interpretive fancy, and it is often the boldest assertions that best contend with the vibrancy of Bruegel's art. But rather than court controversy, Elizabeth Alice Honig's new book elaborates Bruegel's body of work with plausibility, offering elegant, convincing solutions to the artist's pictorial puzzles.

Honig's diplomatic insights are rooted in the premise that Bruegel's pictures were fundamentally discursive objects. Not content with conceiving of these works as ornaments or as handmaidens to propagandistic aims, Honig posits that Bruegel's compositions functioned actively, sparking lively conversation, selfexamination, and forms of philosophical meditation among beholders. These claims ring of credibility, as the titular "idea of human nature" was inarguably a preoccupation for Bruegel and his audience, as it has been throughout recorded history. But Honig's study never descends into platitudes; the book's investigation of art and human nature is historiographically rigorous and thoroughly nuanced.

Honig is undaunted by the capacious, universal implications of her title, assembling a formidable amount of evidence to support her thesis. Instead of excavating obscure sources with tenuous links to Bruegel's imagery, as some students of Bruegel have been inclined to do, Honig fleshes out the most probable climate of thought. She defers often and effectively to Erasmus, not to suggest a direct correspondence between the philosopher's writings and Bruegel's visualizations, but to demonstrate how Erasmus's ideas on human nature were ubiquitous in Bruegel's world. She also references other worldview-shaping philosophies, such as Neo-Stoicism, Christianity, and Humanism, which were so prevalent as to be inescapable. As a consequence of building out this rich context, Honig is able to theorize the reception of Bruegel's work instead of laboring to reconstruct artistic intent. The emphases on human nature and reception have two advantages: first, they allow Honig to explore the myriad meanings available to contemporary viewers instead of hewing to narrower iconographic possibilities; second, they permit a truly comprehensive odyssey into the artist's oeuvre, as ideas of human nature and their provocations suffuse the full scope of Bruegel's artistic chronology and the multiple mediums in which he worked.

Accordingly, the book's chapters cohere around subthemes instead of more familiar organizing principles, such as mediums or stylistic progress. Each chapter theme addresses a feature of human nature—from connection with the natural world to the traumas of war—that manifests in Bruegel's art. The first chapter, "Humanity and Self-Knowledge," is the most broadly philosophical, engaging classical, medieval, and early modern writings on selfhood and the soul to elucidate prints such as Bruegel's Everyman (ca. 1558) and his Seven Virtues series (1560). Attention to elite philosophy is balanced by a complementary focus on folk knowledge, which Bruegel vividly pictorialized in his Netherlandish Proverbs (1559). Honig's explication of these various knowledge sources emphasizes the diverse milieus in which these objects could have stimulated discourse. She also stresses the artist's innovations, by pointing out discontinuities between written articulations of human nature and Bruegel's visual interpretations. Discrepancies between text and image are revisited in the sixth chapter, "Laughing Man," in which Honig considers Bruegel's spin on kermis imagery. Prints of this type conventionally ridiculed peasants in...