Pieter Bruegel the Elder: art discourse in the sixteenth-century Netherlands

Abstract

An investigation of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s later depictions of peasants and festivities—the Peasant Wedding Banquet, Peasant Dance, Peasant and Nest Robber and the Festival of Fools—both of the pictures and their viewing context. The study reconstructs two parallel conversations: first, a visual discourse about art theoretical issues—how a painting should look and function—that is revealed in the images themselves and, second, the verbal discourse that would have taken place between viewers in front of artworks that hung in the domestic interior. By offering close visual analysis in connection with the motivations and mechanisms of the Pléiade poets and rhetorician societies for the enrichment of the vernacular language, I argue that Pieter Bruegel’s monumental peasant paintings should not be understood as antithetical to Italian art, but rather as an effort to cultivate a vernacular style that incorporates visual concepts and pictorial motifs from ambitious painted historiae into scenes of sixteenth-century rustic life—‘artfully’ depicting the ‘natural’ life of Brabant. To gain insight into the character of the viewing context and the interpretive competency of the beholder, I propose as a model the convivium tradition: a genre of literature from Antiquity to the Renaissance that describes interactions between fictional friends that took place before, during and after mealtime.