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UNMASKING THE WORLD
Bruegel’s Ethnography
Joseph Leo Koerner
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 introduc-
tory 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
1. Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman

Randall, Jr., eds., The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 217.
Common Knowledge 10:2

Copyright 2004 by Duke University Press
220
221
a charge of heresy. Even in our time, the word man can hardly be spoken with-
out cringing, and it came under special attack after World War II, simultaneously
from both the Right (Heidegger) and Left (Adorno and Horkheimer). Pico him-
Neo-Stoic Alternatives
self 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 con-
tentment 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
Koerner•
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 contro-
versy even now — that “truth was made rather than found.”2 In place of the obso-
lete 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 cul-
ture—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 unrea-
sonably 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 afar 3— 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
2. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cam- 3. See, for example, Justus Müller Hofstede, “Zur Inter-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 3. pretation von Bruegels Landschaft,” in Pieter Bruegel und
seine Welt, ed. Otto Georg von Simson and Matthias Win-
ner (Berlin: Mann, 1979), 73 –142.
222
COMMON KNOWLEDGE
Figure 1. Jan and Lucas van Duetecum after Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
St. Jerome in the Wilderness, c. 1555–56, etching and engraving.
contingencies engulfed by a limitless, indifferent universe. Typically, Bruegel will

animate a corner of his landscapes with figures expressive of this attitude: in St.
Jerome in the Wilderness (fig. 1) and The Penitent Magdalen (fig. 2), saint and sin-
ner alike convey ascetic withdrawal by turning their backs to the landscape, in
counterpoint to our gaze. More in tune with our activity is the staffage in Rustic
Solicitude (fig. 3), a print that depicts the natural interim in rural labor. One peas-
ant diligently hammers his scythe, exemplifying care — the care particular to his
rural task. A second peasant, neither mowing nor mending, withdraws momen-
tarily from work to contemplate the landscape; he models our aesthetic relation
to the world and in doing so follows the Christian Stoicism championed by
Bruegel’s circle in Antwerp. The ethics of this neo-Stoicism urged pleasure in
the experience of distance — of distance from, though curiosity about, the life-
world of one’s time and place. The neo-Stoic is the ethnographer at home,
observing his culture invent its lifeworld and then behave as if it were nature’s
own. Hieronymous Bosch, neither humanist nor Stoic, saw the worlds that
humans make as unreal and therefore contemptible, whereas Bruegel would see
them as contingent and therefore intriguing.
This newer approach to Bruegel, which coincides with his elevation to the
ranks of the “very great” artists of all time, has replaced an earlier assessment of
him as a folk artist from, of, and for the peasantry.4 This earlier assessment, estab-
4. Max Dvořák, Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte (Munich:

R. Piper), 219.
223
Koerner•
The Penitent Magdalen, c. 1555–56, etching and engraving.
lished during the seventeenth century, was supported by the existence of count-
less inferior imitations of the master’s compositions. The delimitation of his
authentic oeuvre, a growing appreciation for nonclassical styles, the populariza-
tion (via reproductions) of his hitherto little-known masterpieces in Vienna, and
a growing historical awareness of the prestigious Habsburg provenance of most
of his autograph paintings—all contributed to a shift in the artist’s imagined cul-
tural context from the premodern peasantry to a progressive, educated, urban
elite. Bruegel, it was discovered, belonged to the innermost circle of Antwerp
humanists and included among his friends and collaborators the cartographer
Ortelius; the artist, poet, playwright, and political theorist Dirck Coornhert; and
the publishers Hieronymus Cock and Christopher Plantin. Bruegel’s art was now
seen to be erudite in the original sense of the word: it aimed at eliminating rude-
ness (Latin e- + rudis) through instruction. Appreciating his erudition involved
discerning beneath the apparent thematic and stylistic rudeness of so-called Peas-
ant Bruegel a deeper, hidden display of humanist learning. In a typical recent
instance of this strategy, we read that The Peasant and Bird’s Nester, usually cele-
brated as a forerunner of later genre painting, would merely “appear to represent
a scene from daily country life” but “is in reality an allegory concerning man’s
mortality, a memento mori.”5
5. Pierre Vinken and Lucy Schlüter, “Pieter Bruegels

Nestrover en de mens die de dood tegemoet treedt,” Ned-
erlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 47 (1996): 79.
224
COMMON KNOWLEDGE
Rustic Solicitude, c. 1555–56, etching and engraving.
Pursued by academics eager to demonstrate their own learning, this

approach clashes with quite another understanding of Bruegel’s humanism. Mod-
ernist poets, who celebrated his candid portrayal of ordinary life — as well as
modernist painters and art critics, who extolled the matter-of-fact character of
his simplified pictorial forms—recognized a humanism kindred to their own. By
their account, Bruegel’s importance lay in how he humanized art. The events
and personages of myth and religion become, in his pictures, eclipsed by a plau-
sible, earthbound humanity. William Carlos Williams wrote in a poem on
Bruegel’s Fall of Icarus: “insignificant / off the coast / there was // splash quite
unnoticed / this was / Icarus drawing.” More famously, W. H. Auden in “Musée
des Beaux Arts” puts a similar point this way: “In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance;
how everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster . . .”6 Here Bruegel’s
humanism is seen to consist in the elimination of allegory and myth, in a com-
mitment to the everyday, and in an awesome recognition of what Stoics would
term the indifference of the world to man: “the edge of the sea / concerned / with
itself” (Williams). The challenge posed by Bruegel is not, for these modernists,
one of finding significance but of learning to attend to insignificance. One could
6. For a good comparison of these two poems and their

different claims, see Christopher Braider, Refiguring the
Real: Picture and Modernity in Word and Image, 1400–1700
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 72–76.
225
Koerner•
Figure 4. Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Fight between Carnival and Lent, 1559, oil on
oakwood, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (photograph Erich Lessing/Art Resource,
New York).
say that, in the poets’ reading of The Peasant and the Bird’s Nester, what appears
iconographically to be “an allegory concerning man’s mortality” is “in reality” a
“scene from daily life.” Allegory, in other words, gives way to experience in a fash-
ion typically modern.7
Allegory and Experience

Bruegel’s allegorical Fight between Carnival and Lent can be taken literally, and I
am going to do so. Before asking what the artist meant by his panel (now in
Vienna), I need first to work out what he shows, particularly in the painting’s cen-
tral figural group. Here, Carnival is a fat prince mounted on a barrel of beer (fig.
4).8 The blue hat with jagged edges signals his nobility, and the pots hung like
stirrups indicate that the barrel is his mount. With his feet hanging into the pots,
the corpulent individual playing the prince straddles the barrel as if he were rid-
ing a steed. And given the way he clutches it, the long spit becomes his lance
7. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 4th 8. The most recent bibliography on this picture is in Ethan
ed. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1975), 67 – 70; and Paul de Man, Matt Kavaler, Pieter Bruegel: Parables of Order and Enter-
Blindness and Insight, 2d rev. ed. (Minneapolis: University prise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 303
of Minnesota Press, 1983), 188. n. 1; a good, well-illustrated summary is given in Alexan-
der Wied, Bruegel—Der Kampf zwischen Fasching und Fas-
ten (Milan: Electra, 1996).
226
raised for jousting, while the butcher’s knives about his girth serve in place of a
sword. Personification, for the fellow doing it, is a balancing act. Little of his
comic costume would belong to a real prince, since it is mostly kitchen gear; and
COMMON KNOWLEDGE
these humble stand-ins should also display their nonfigurative use, otherwise they
would not be funny. Pots and barrel symbolize their culinary function more col-
orfully than they do their make-believe use as stirrups and steed.
The spit spears a pig’s head, two cooked birds, and a pair of sausages.
Because the object is a spit (and not a lance), and because the man who holds
these meats is probably a butcher, one could imagine that they had been roasted
on it by their bearer. The meats are of different cooking times: even if together
they form a single, hybrid beast —with the playful third sausage as its genitals —
they were assembled, precooked, for display. By their artful arrangement, these
foods celebrate and parody their ingredients, just as Prince Carnival’s costume
does, with its inappropriate components parading their objecthood. Meanwhile,
the player himself must literally balance his noble and culinary attributes. About
to slide from his head, a large chicken pie forces him to raise a hand to steady it—
a gesture foreign to jousting.
Another force besides gravity destabilizes this pastry. Just next to it, and
rhyming with it in size and shape, a bowl with pancake batter draws the pie earth-
ward. The empty shells on the ground between the pie and the batter contrast
the two foods as a chicken to its eggs or as cooked ingredients to raw. A similar
formal and semantic pull is exerted on the skewered meats: their composite form
finished by the shit-eating hog to their right, Bruegel completes an abject diges-
tive cycle from pork to shit to pig and back to pork.9 These associations transcend
the ones belonging to Prince Carnival. Born of an apparently accidental coinci-
dence, the foreground and background elements belong not to the parade but to
our specific vantage point on it. Yet they also complement the prince’s costume,
since it too consists of a parodic misuse of foods. We are led to ask where per-
sonification ends and who its ultimate agent is.
The butcher, for his part, should joust as princes do, but in a manner
befitting the ignoble thing he’s a prince of. The word carnival combines the Latin
cara, meaning “flesh,” with levara, meaning “to put away.” In Italian, carnevale
connects with vale, “farewell,” to become “farewell to meat.”10 The word denotes
the season roughly from Epiphany through Shrove Tuesday when, before the
long, pre-Easter fast of Lent, meat was given a festive farewell by being cooked
9. It would be useful to compare Bruegel’s treatment of 10. One of the best introductions to carnival festivals
the transformation of the pig into food and equipment remains Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern
(sausage and Rommelpot) to Rembrandt’s in his etching Europe (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), 178 – 204; see
Hog, from 1643. also the founding modern critical text on the material,
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène
Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).
227
and consumed in prodigious quantities, and by being celebrated sometimes
in the symbolic form of a meaty, meat-eating, and (from the evidence of those
knives) meat-preparing sovereign. Embodying the rule of an unruly, open body
that eats, shits, and itself gets eaten, this prince has an appropriately rowdy ret-
inue. Equipped with kitchen gear, these masked attendants extend the per-
sonification, serving as the prince’s comic court; and they produce its background
noise. The figure closest to us, dressed in a rug and mask, plays an instrument
made especially for carnival. Called in Dutch a Rommelpot, and consisting of a
pig’s bladder stretched over a jug half-filled with water, it produces, by the fric-
tion of a reed pushed through the bladder, the noise of a stuck pig.11 Causing
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the sound of the animal’s slaughter to resonate around its cooked form, the
Rommelpot squeals in the midst of a more general cacophony of rattling metal
cups, a small guitar, and a knife strumming an iron grill. Bruegel pictures the
ordinary use of such a grill by the bakery in the picture’s background. Unlike the
shit-eating hog and eggy batter, though, this part of the scene appears more an
ethnographic gloss than an allegorical extension. It lets the painting embrace the
spectrum from reality to symbol, hence those stirrups. But then, all the players
in the picture straddle several roles. They complement the symbolism of Prince
Carnival while simultaneously impeding his allegorical action through their plod-
ding march. With them in tow, and given also his corpulence and cumbersome
locomotion on a crude wooden sledge, the jousting butcher creeps inches for-
ward, cutting a furrow in the soil.
Only slightly swifter is Prince Carnival’s opponent, whose throne rolls
more easily on little wheels. According to Bruegel, Lent is a nun or, perhaps, an
emaciated woman dressed up as a nun. Herrings grace her bread-shovel lance,
and the pretzels, flat-bread, mussels, and braided onions on her float all pertain
to the meager fasting fare, as does her beehive cap; for during Lent, honey was
the only sweetener allowed. More troubling are those bees that exceed Lent’s
costume requirements. Either they belong to the actress’s self-flagellating regime
(note the scourge in her left hand) or they are a rare case of Bruegel inflating
his symbolism beyond the otherwise consistent tableau of actual custom. The
curiosity with which the little girl beside her regards Dame Lent, together with
Lent’s genuinely starved look, argue that the underlying actress is as strange as
her costume, and that she might be genuinely oblivious to the bees. Marked like
Lent herself with a little ashen cross on her forehead, and dutifully rocking her
wooden knocker to produce a doleful sound, the girl and the other children do
what they are supposed to do in the procession, while at the same time reveal-
ing individualized attitudes toward their activity. Like youngsters in a school play,
their charm derives from their habit of slipping in and out of character. They per-
11. Wied, Bruegel, 7.

228
form, through their awkwardness, a spectacle of themselves — to the delight of
their parents (at school plays) and (in Bruegel) for our pleasure in the real.
Behind Lent’s cart, a boy with a basket on his head is busy munching bread,
COMMON KNOWLEDGE
carrying shoes and pretzels, and staring out at us. His humanizing distance from
his function in the ritual dramatizes what Bruegel’s painting everywhere con-
firms. Bruegel seems to document, more than to create, the symbolism of which
his painting consists. The peculiar detachment of his performance as a painter
from the performances that he records finds a reflection in the represented actors
themselves. Shown to stand just outside their own activity, they, like the painter,
contribute to our sense that we peer behind their masks to an underlying per-
sonality. To further complicate matters, however, Carnival and Lent are them-
selves both masquerades and rituals of unmasking. Cousin to the dramatic form
of the antimasque, Carnival reveals the true nature of people and society by
mocking their covering illusions: its bizarre costumes and practices aim at a brief
but subversively realistic portrayal of the physical and social body. Lent, in turn,
banishes Carnival’s travesties by reintroducing with a vengeance the drab infirmity
of everyday life. Whereas Carnival unmasks life by giving it a temporarily unre-
strained expression, Lent unmasks death — hence, in Bruegel’s picture, the sev-
eral corpses that later collectors masked by painting over them. Even as Bruegel
distances himself from these ritual forms, he carries into his picture their nega-
tive labor.
Standing before Bruegel’s picture, we feel that we are observing not his
symbolism of Carnival and Lent but someone else’s. Compared with his render-
ing of them, the festive representations themselves seem markedly primitive,
composed of the detritus of everyday life and performed by amateurs (here, the
local butcher and an anorectic nun) who have been roped into the task. The first
historian of northern European painting, Karel van Mander, launched the fiction
of Peasant Bruegel. By his account, published in 1604, the artist’s talent for
“copying peasants with the brush” came from his being a rustic himself: “Nature
found and hit upon her man — only to be had by him —when she went to pick
him out in Brabant in an unknown village amidst peasants.”12 The idea that
nature caught Bruegel only to be captured by him projects into biography the
painter’s fascination with trapping (see, for example, his much-copied Winter
Landscape with Bird Trap). We are thus prepared for the reversal that van Mander
makes some lines on, when he describes how Bruegel, now a famous artist from
Antwerp, snuck into obscure villages “dressed in peasant costume.” “Observing
the nature of the peasants,” van Mander concludes, “[he] knew how to attire them
12. Karel van Mander, The Lives of the Illustrious Nether-

landish and German Painters, from the First Edition of the
“Schilder-boek” (1603–4), trans. and ed. Hessel Miedema
(Doornspij, the Netherlands: Davaco, 1994 – 99), 190.
229
very characteristically in Kempish or other costumes.” In Carnival and Lent,
Bruegel registers with great precision the costumes and equipment particular to
peasants of a certain place — the hats, trousers, and pretzels peculiar to such and
such a village. By the way it is braided, that is, each pretzel displays a distinctive
ethnographic “style,” and it is this differentiation in which the artist specializes.
Bruegel’s catalog of indigenous material culture distances his painting from the
performance it records, since the artist’s own pictorial manner seems to disap-
pear behind the style and facture of these artifacts.13
Performances of the kind recorded in Bruegel’s painting were in fact staged
in Netherlandish towns and villages throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth cen-
Koerner•
turies. Although our historical knowledge of these rituals owes much to Bruegel’s
painting, several mock tournaments between personifications of Carnival and
Lent are documented for the period. Staged (like most carnival entertainments)
by clubs and confraternities led by a King or Abbot of Misrule, and recruiting
largely from young adult males, these performances were staged during the last
days of the Carnival season.14 (The sign of the blue boat above the tavern in
Bruegel’s picture refers to a popular, fictive version of these associations.)15 Set
in the open of a town center, and accompanied by unorganized revelry, fights,
and aggression, these rituals turned urban space into a total theater and forced
the whole populous to be actors. Less important than their specific plot was their
symbolic mode. Based around the fleshly activities of eating and sex, they sus-
pended and inverted the official symbolism of order and morality, allowing, for
a brief time, the body to be boss. And although it was possible merely to observe
the events, as people in Bruegel’s picture are shown to do, revelers were licensed
to force all bystanders to join them or else become the victim of their fun. In
the case of the cripples and lepers in his picture, and perhaps also the fat prince
and thin Dame Lent, Bruegel portrays persons who have been roped into enact-
ing cruel, negative allegories about themselves.
As early as the thirteenth century in Burgundy, the battle between Carni-
val and Lent became a popular motif in the arts. A 1492 inventory of the Medici
collections lists an old Flemish panel showing Carnival mocked by revelers; and
three pictures executed in a Boschian style, including one painted in grisaille
(now in ’s-Hertogenbosch), feature a festive confrontation between Carnival and
Lent.16 There already appear the skewered hog’s head and dangling sausage, the
13. On the ethnographic tenor of Bruegel, see Svetlana 15. Pleij, Het Gilde van de Blauwe Schuit: Literatuur, volks-
Alpers’s pioneering essays “Bruegel’s Festive Peasants,” feest en burgermoraal in de late middeleeuwen (Amsterdam:
Simiolus 6 (1972 – 73): 163 – 76; and “Realism as a Comic Meulenhoff, 1979).
Mode: Low-Life Painting Seen through Bredero’s Eyes,”
16. Paul Vandenbroeck, Hieronymous Bosch: Tussen volks-
Simiolus 8 (1975 – 76): 115 – 44.
leven en stadscultuur (Antwerp: EPO, 1987), 306 – 9.
14. Herman Pleij, Dreaming of Cockaigne: Medieval Fan-
tasies of the Perfect Life, trans. Diane Webb (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2001), 352 – 64.
230
COMMON KNOWLEDGE
Figure 5. Franz Hogenberg. Battle between Carnival and Lent, 1558, etching.
grotesque pairing of imbibing and excreting, and the tendency for objects to be
balanced on heads. The most immediate precursor of Bruegel’s picture was, how-
ever, an engraving by Franz Hogenberg, published by Hieronymus Cock in
Antwerp in 1558 (fig. 5). Bruegel made prints of this kind for Cock. Bruegel
designed the well-known Kermis at Hoboken, and Hogenberg engraved it.17 How-
ever, these two depictions of the ritual are more interesting for their difference
than for their similarity. As in Bruegel’s painting, the village setting and crude
props in the engraving by Hogenberg bespeak a rustic performance. Yet their
arrangement into symmetrical processions that meet at a compositional center
marked by the church, together with the clarifying inscriptions in and around the
image, suggest that the artist seeks to make the vernacular symbolism his own.
The coordination of the picture’s center with the line break of the motto submits
the chaos of the represented ritual to the order of its framing gloss.
Most telling is Hogenberg’s animated treatment of the combat itself. We
have observed Bruegel’s display of the ridiculous slowness of the battle — how,
by registering the weight and friction of the floats, he exposes the comic dispar-
ity between the allegorical action of the joust and its crude depictive vehicle.
Hogenberg does the opposite. He seeks instead to create a better allegory than
the clumsy one that he records. He pushes the contrived figures of Fat Carnival
and Lean Lent back from the point of confrontation, gives them labels, and
replaces their clumsy meeting with a dramatic clash between members of their
17. René van Bastelaer, The Prints of Peter Bruegel the

Elder, trans. Susan Fargo Gilchrist (San Francisco: Alan
Wofsy, 1992), 281– 83, no. 208.
231
retinue. Women exchange angry blows with the emblematic weapons of hams
and fish. Perfectly wedded to the parts they play, these housewives turn the sea-
sonal ritual into an expression of enmity, as if genuinely fighting for the future of
their town. Still, although these passions seem real, they are inconsistent with
how people behaved in real processions, as the rest of the engraving shows.
Hogenberg cannot simultaneously improve on and remain faithful to his folk-
loristic prototype. I am reminded of an epic pageant staged for Nicolai Ceauşescu
just before his fall. The mounted battle, played by thousands of Rumanians in
horse costumes, was so gruesomely implausible that the cameramen, frightened
that their broadcast might be deemed a mockery of the festival, aimed their lenses
Koerner•
as if lovingly at Ceauşescu’s face, proposing it as the spectacle while allowing the
battle to unfold largely unseen.
Instead of modifying the allegorical battle or changing his focus, Bruegel
submits it wholly to the measure of experience. At one level, this realism suits the
parodic spirit of Carnival itself, where clumsiness serves as a chief comedic
resource. At another level, by making the fictive joust look less, rather than more,
combative, Bruegel raises the truth value of his own fiction. The ruts cut by
Prince Carnival’s float ground the performance in physical nature, but they also
elevate the artist who depicts them to another symbolic order from which he can
observe and depict the world without marking it. A painting of everyday life is
born from the materialization of allegory.
Observe the actual interface between Carnival and Lent. The roasting spit
and bread shovel do not cross each other as lances would in the climax of bat-
tle, nor do the combatants display the slightest hint of martial bearing. Prince
Carnival grabs for the pie and Dame Lent stares into space, ignoring even the
bees. The combatants’ minimal movement (and thus their agency) derives not
from them but from attendants who drag their floats. Those attendants are the
pageant’s underlying machinery, the sweat and blood behind the allegorical joust.
Marching past each other without so much as a nod of recognition, they reflect,
without symbolizing, the parties to which they belong. Two lowly artisans, both
visibly flushed with drink, haul Prince Carnival’s float; his costume, one pre-
sumes, was made by persons like themselves. Lent gets hauled by a monk and nun
(as Bruegel shows, in rituals toward the back, the coming fast will be organized
by the church). Together these four — the pair of artisans and the pair of reli-
gious — mobilize the allegory and reveal its social bases. But they do not them-
selves enter the allegory. To allow the two right-handed combatants properly to
clash, the operators must pass each other on the right. Bruegel does not portray
that more bathetic moment when bread shovel and roasting spit get entangled
with each other. He places the tips of these weapons precisely at the middle of
the panel, thus anchoring the allegory to the structure of the visual field and to
232
the geometry of the panel support itself. What are we to make of this coinci-
dence, reminiscent of the diagrammatic pictures of Bosch?18 Scholars have also
noted that the tavern and church at the picture’s edges — at the framework
COMMON KNOWLEDGE
of Bruegel’s composition — repeat the antithesis of Carnival and Lent. Since it

seems to belong to an order superimposed by the artist on his view of the scene,
the opposition of tavern and church has been evinced as supporting evidence for
the thesis that Bruegel condemns Carnival as sinful (like taverns and brothels)
and celebrates the piety of Lent. Are such organizing principles imposed by the
artist, however, or are they derived from the performance itself?
During Carnival, revelers shaped their movements to a prior symbolic
geography of urban space. The face-off of tavern and church is an available
resource, like the found objects used in the revelers’ costumes. Through the
whole of his picture, Bruegel traces this trajectory — from real life into rustic
artifice. Virtually all the allegory’s props appear as mere things elsewhere in the
picture. The mobility of Bruegel’s allegory, the way it shifts from being his sym-
bolism or choreography to being theirs (the natives’), finds a fitting emblem in
the trudging operators who propel the fiction without entering it. Whereas
Hogenberg’s housewives attack each other with implausible fury, Bruegel’s play-
ers — even the ones fully inside the tableau — pursue their activities without
apparent emotion. Instead of primitive identification between player and role,
Bruegel shows a cryptic, and therefore also masklike, detachment. He includes
an everyday instance of the attitude his picture takes toward its subject: near the
center of the picture, at the fuzzy boundary between Carnival and Lent, Bruegel
installs a husband and wife whom we see from behind. Their path crossed by a
fool who lights the way in daylight — an old Carnival motif — the couple seems
to hover between their path (directed toward the church) and the fool’s (aimed
toward the tavern). The fool’s parti-colored outfit, halving his form, intensifies
our sense that even the formal language of an allegorical battle of moral oppo-
sites, staged in Bruegel’s picture, is already there in the costumes and customs
depicted. The fool’s split garb is picked up by the faceless pair, who represent
everyman as a duality of man and woman. More crucially, the travelers introduce
the perspective of a spectator into the picture, reminding us that Bruegel can
admit an ethnography of the viewer. It is in this context that many of the
strongest historical links of Bruegel to the northern humanist outlook — to Stoic
and neo-Stoic models of beholding — have been made.19
When he wanted to, Bruegel could depict allegorical agents veritably con-
vulsed by what they signify. The spread-eagled monster at the lower left of the
18. On these structures in Bosch, see Joseph Leo Koerner 19. See, for example, Hofstede, “Zur Interpretation von
“Hieronymus Bosch’s World Picture,” in Picturing Science/ Pieter Bruegels Landscaft.”
Producing Art, ed. Peter Galison and Carolyn A. Jones
(New York: Routledge, 1998), 297 – 323.
233
Koerner•
Figure 6. Pieter van der Heyden after Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
Lust, c. 1558, engraving.
engraving Lust, designed by Bruegel and engraved by Pieter van der Heyden, is
more than just an abject receptacle (fig. 6).20 Her whole being narrowed to the
performance of carnal desire, she visualizes the constriction caused by lust. On
the other side of the print, her male counterpart simultaneously fondles and
castrates his own penis, while between them, the egg-eating cephalopod is
reduced to one hole. This is Bruegel at his most Boschian: the rules of the world
are replaced by the curiously tighter logic of sin. In his genre scenes, Bosch visu-
alizes the constriction of everyday life by vice. His sinners are obsessive-
compulsives: people driven to pursue rigid habits of eating, sleeping, or forni-
cation to the exclusion of everything else.21 They are natural emblems because
their narrowed existence stands portrayed in everything they do. Living only for
food, his home and family mere extensions of his vice, the “glutton” can repre-
sent gluttony without artistic intervention. The distance from the world to hell
is short, for punishment simply imprisons sinners in the behavior that already
constricts them. In Bosch, allegory is not an external framework imposed on
experience. Once narrowed by sin, experience is already allegorical.
20. Bastelaer, Prints of Peter Bruegel, 172, no. 131. 21. My understanding of allegory agents here and through-
out this essay was informed by Angus Fletcher, Allegory:
The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1964), 39 – 40.
234
Unmasking
It is therefore an important moment, both for art and for the cultural estimation
of experience, when Bruegel unmasks his allegorical agents, revealing them as real
COMMON KNOWLEDGE
people in homemade costumes. Masks have long been a staple of anthropological

reflection. As instruments through which a person can become something else—
a god, a demon, or just another person—masks often appear in association with
categorical change: for example, in rites of initiation, exorcism, healing, and death,
or in festivals of seasonal change.22 The anthropological study of masks derives
partly from their imputed irrationality. Our culture, we are told, habitually dis-
tinguishes between inner personality and outer persona, and associates masking
with mere personae—false personae at that. Primitive cultures, by a contrast that
early anthropologists liked to make, celebrate personae and use masks to engen-
der them. Wearing a mask, the savage becomes the god, demon, or hero he plays,
and this is, for anthropologists, an emblem of his cultural difference from them-
selves. Anthropologists have also studied masks because, demystified as yet another
instrument of social identity, masks confirm the universalist claims of the disci-
pline: even the trance, that outer limit of masquerade, can be functionalized as a
social formation. But anthropologists have admitted, too, that masks are playful
and slippery. When Claude Lévi-Strauss asked an informant what he felt behind
his mask, the man replied: “I feel the mask on my face.”
Unmasking is a far less studied phenomenon, perhaps because it so resem-
bles the anthropologist’s own routines. If to interpret is to peer into and behind,
what happens when the object of analysis is a ceremonial removal of the cover-
ing? Among the indigenous peoples of Terra del Fuego, whose mimicry of Euro-
peans fascinated the young Charles Darwin, unmasking was the central act of
their ceremonial theater.23 On the largest island, Isla Grande, every few years for
months at a time, initiated men dressed themselves in great masks and painted
their bodies red, white, and black to represent powerful spirits. Women and chil-
dren served to witness these performances but were threatened with death if they
in any way intimated that the spirits were not spirits but only men performing in
masks—all familiar enough. What was unusual about this ritual was not the mas-
querade itself but the initiation into its secret. According to the Austrian priest
and anthropologist Martin Gusinde, who underwent this rite of passage him-
self in 1923, initiates were stripped naked, brought to a big hut, and forced to
wrestle with Shoort, the principal demon. At the end of the ordeal, the initiate
was commanded to touch, then to explore, and finally to lift Shoort’s mask.
“Terrified,” Gusinde reports, “he slowly raised it. His gaze hardened. It was the
22. A. David Napier, Masks, Transformation, and Paradox 23. I rely here on Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), xxiii. Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford, CA: Stan-
ford University Press, 1999), 99 – 219.
235
face of someone he knew well, and this face was smiling at him, while remain-
ing completely still. ‘This is a game of men,’ explained the leader, laughing, ‘It is
we who represent all of this. What’s just happened to you just now that made you
so afraid: all this is nothing more than something made by man.”24 The event
recalls destructive rituals of iconoclasm. Image-breakers forced a credulous pop-
ulace to behold, touch, and strike the icons they defaced.25 In iconoclasm, though,
unmasking is a public affair. Acts of iconoclasm are accomplished by or before
crowds, or else — more commonly, to prevent riot — they are performed secretly
by disciplined officials and then publicly displayed. The revelation in the big hut,
by contrast, was limited to initiated men. All others were forbidden secret knowl-
Koerner•
edge on pain of death, though we know that some women knew. Unmasking does
not end with the mask’s removal.
Dismantling illusions lends power to them. Consider the last scenes of a
contemporary drama of unmasking, a 1998 film, The Truman Show. We observe
the hero’s near shipwreck at the edge of the colossal broadcasting studio that has
been his world. The film cuts between the shipwreck (as broadcast on the iden-
tically titled television program, The Truman Show) and a group of spectators,
who are that program’s (and the storm’s) producers. The sufferer, Truman, has
been the show’s star from birth but does not know it, or cannot be certain until
now, when his hand touches the boundary of the studio. What had kept him
inside that world was its consistency. Everything had been crafted so that, to Tru-
man, it would look complete and real. Consistency is the special strength of
film and television as media — their unique capacity to fashion plausible fictions
for and in us. Truman lived unaware that all the players in his life were real actors
and that his lifeworld was bristling with cameras. Nurtured by a semblance of
everyday life, Truman himself became, to the comfort of his global audience, a
dream of consistency: everyman at home in everyday life. What tips him off is an
intervention from outside. Unsettled, Truman begins at first to notice, then to
probe, the inconsistencies that in fact abound until, spurred on by love and
curiosity, he launches his ship of fools. At one level, the film seems to undermine
the hold that films and television have on us; Truman’s deliverance initiates his
audience’s escape from the Platonic cave of vicarious living. At another level,
though, we ourselves, while watching the escape, remain in thrall to the film,
awestruck by its capacity to represent a movement beyond it (even if we also
know that the movement-beyond is no more than a return: the hero will get the
24. Martin Gusinde, Los indios de Tierra del Fuego, vol. 1, 25. Koerner, The Reformation of the Image (Chicago: Uni-
Los Selk’nam, trans. Werner Hoffmann (Buenos Aires: versity of Chicago Press; London: Reaktion, forthcoming
Centro Argentino de Etnología Americano, Consejo 2004), chap. 8; and “The Icon as Iconoclash,” in Iconoclash:
Nacional de Investigaciones Cientifícas y Técnicas, 1982– Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art, ed.
91), 829 – 33; cited in Taussig, Defacement, 128 – 9. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge: MIT Press,
2002), 164 – 213.
236
girl and settle into a quotidian life quite like the staged one he has left). In the
film’s capacity to, as it were, deconstruct itself, its constructed world takes hold
of us afresh.
COMMON KNOWLEDGE
Unmasking happens in what Michael Taussig has called the “public secret,”
by which he means the crucial social skill of “knowing what not to know.”26 On
the Isle Grande, unmasking operates specifically within another masquerade —
impenetrable to anthropologists and the local men alike—of mothers, wives, and
sisters. These women are people in the know: they no longer believe in demons
since they have seen the masks, but they have to believe (while they cannot
confirm it and remain socially masked themselves) that others not informed still
believe. The dilemma finds expression in a secret history of the secret circulat-
ing in the big hut. Originally, women ran the show, impersonating the spirits and
keeping men in the dark. Now only the men supposedly know; knowing, and
believing the women do not know, they recharge their universe with mystery.
Bruegel performs an analogous unmasking. In art historical surveys, after
studying centuries of sacred iconography, the student arrives at his paintings —
pictures of a fully recognizable existence — and the student’s experience is pow-
erful. “It was the face of someone he knew well,” recalls Gusinde, “and this face
was smiling at him, while remaining completely still”: this kind of knowledge
affects us most when the disclosure is most subtle. Everything strange about
Bruegel’s cripples, depicted in the background of Carnival and Lent, makes ana-
tomical sense. Their bodies are not pieced together like the exotic hybrids of
Boschian allegories but simply miss this or that part, for which they have strapped
to themselves an appropriate peg for walking, kneeling, or pointing. The resid-
ual peculiarities, such as, in this painting, the crenellated hat and foxtail orna-
ments, are intentional estrangements, vehicles by which the society in which the
cripples dwell amplify their oddity. For us to have these realizations transforms
the experience of painting from a delight in novel inventions to a troubling redis-
covery of the world. Unmasked, the world looks stranger, perhaps because we
intimate that the cripples’ costumes, as well as the curiosity that draws us to them,
belong to a cruel joke at their expense. While we can deduce from his form that
the third cripple is a legless man turned away, his geometricized body, combined
with the ominous doorway beyond, is more disturbing than anything that even
Bosch ever produced.
In the background of Carnival and Lent, immediately to the left of the
church, Bruegel depicts a bakery in the process of being cleaned. A bogeyman has
been placed in the first floor window as a customary reprimand, or charivari, for
undone spring cleaning.27 Its windows covered with soot, this crumbling shop
26. Taussig, Defacement, 2 – 3. 27. Wilfried Seipel, ed., Pieter Bruegel d. Ä im Kunsthis-
torisches Museum Wien (Milan: Skira; Vienna: Kunsthis-
torisches Museum, 1998), 19.
237
looks like it deserves the rebuke. Note how Bruegel smudges the windowpanes
into being, as if his gray paint was dirt ineffectually smeared about by the woman’s
sponge. With the bogeyman, however, Bruegel refines his brushwork, allowing us
to observe the differing materials out of which it was made: old clothes stuffed
with straw laced together with rope, a dough mask, a branch for antlers or horns.
The bogeyman was an object of customary usage, but in Bruegel’s urban context
it could have used a gloss to explain it. He shows it to be of local manufacture.
Combining common objects—junk, really—into an unlikely whole, he displays
the Boschian hybrid as a product of vernacular making-do.
And yet, despite its crude form, or perhaps because of it, this life-size doll
Koerner•
seems possessed of demonic agency. On the one hand, it is linked to the fabri-
cations of Carnival, which — raucous, cruel, and comical — is itself an elaborate
rebuke both to the official order and to the weak and marginal. Alcoholics and
gluttons were sometimes seduced and sometimes forced into joining the parade,
then beaten up and expelled from the town. I suspect we are meant to laugh with
Prince Carnival but at the man who plays him. On the other hand, placed above
street level, the bogeyman seems to survey with amusement the goings-on below.
As such, the doll mirrors ourselves—though also mimics and mocks us—and has
a vantage point like our own. Bruegel played a similar trick in Children’s Games
(fig. 7). Again from an upper window (at the left), a child seems to gaze toward
us through the smiling mask of an adult.28 As he did with the masks in the Car-
nival procession, so here Bruegel isolates its structure and style. He makes the
mask seem out of place not just because it represents an adult but because, alone
among the toys in the picture, it is of sophisticated manufacture. More mannered
even than Bruegel’s own style, this mask begins to look haunted, though not
through some primitive identification with its wearer, who is dwarfed by it. We
know it is a mask and even recognize its figurative style, yet we respond to it as
a face. Like an early ethnographer, Bruegel explores the mask “primitivistically”
as a charged remnant of a naive or childish perception that, having been ban-
ished, can now be playfully, even yearningly, evoked.
In the Fight between Carnival and Lent, unmasking extends to the Lenten
side of Bruegel’s painting as well. The wax ex-votos and bedded crucifix are all
visibly homespun and therefore become, in their clinical depiction, as culturally
contingent as the masks of Carnival. The “madeness” of religious equipment
extends to the practices in which it is used. There is a dispute in the literature
over whether Bruegel takes a critical stance toward the pious customs he repre-
sents or whether he agrees with the contemporary literary treatments of Carni-
val and Lent that show Lent to be victorious and true.29 Against the latter read-
28. On this detail, see Edward Snow, Inside Bruegel: The 29. See Kavaler, Pieter Bruegel, 124 – 25.
Play of Images in Children’s Games (New York: North Point,
1997), 3 – 6.
238
COMMON KNOWLEDGE
Figure 7. Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Children’s Games, 1560, oil on oakwood,
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (photograph Erich Lessing/Art Resource,
New York).
ing are seemingly critical details such as the fool playing among the almsgivers,
suggesting the latter’s hypocrisy. Bruegel probably intended this uncertainty. Like
his contemporaries Rabelais, Montaigne, and Sebastian Franck, he endeavors
to neutralize difference by framing it as paradox.30 In any case, religious practices
do become estranged by the sheer delight Bruegel takes in their specificity. In
this pleasure he has precursors: the polemical prints of the Reformation. Begin-
ning in the early 1520s, Protestants portrayed the false religion of the Roman
Church by illustrating all its local customs; having no iconography in Catholic
art itself, these practices condemn themselves by their apparent novelty and
numerousness, especially when juxtaposed to a reformed church service of preach-
ing and communion.31
Bruegel does not speak in absolutes, however. Carnival battles Lent as two
faces of the same humanity. Bruegel signals this approach by making the painted
surface of his picture coextensive with a spacious village square. Linked by streets
to the world, and combining church and market into a single structure, the pub-
lic square is a true ecclesia: the assembly of all the inhabitants of a place, rich and
poor, clerical and lay, burghers, marginals, and the dead. Here differences con-
join rather than divide, their conflict neutralized in a comical joust. Modern reli-
30. Jürgen Müller, Das Paradox als Bildform: Studien zur 31. Koerner, Reformation, chaps. 3 and 15.
Ikonologie Pieter Bruegels d. Ä (Munich: W. Fink, 1999).
239
gious pluralism had specific historical roots in Bruegel’s culture. Working in the
culturally and economically diverse city of Antwerp, but drawn into the violent
conflicts between and within the confessions, humanists such as Dirck Coorn-
hert emphasized the fabricated character of all human arrangements. After work-
ing in the 1550s as an engraver for Hieronymus Cock, Coornhert became a lead-
ing theorist of the Dutch revolt. Arguing that “it comes down to people, not
confessions,” he urged his contemporaries to cherish rather than combat differ-
ence: “In these dark times we ought to hold up our judgment of others not
to man and denounce but to tolerate and bear each other amicably in love.”32
Coornhert’s ecumenical perspective, along with his theory of impartial justice,
Koerner•
prefigure the arguments of the French philosophes two centuries later. Though
it is impossible to say if Bruegel shared views like Coornhert’s, his paintings cre-
ate an optic where such pluralism becomes imaginable.
Fight between Carnival and Lent belongs to a group of three pictures that
Bruegel painted between 1559 and 1560. Though early in his painted oeuvre,
they are technically mature, novel in conception, and visually overwhelming. On
panels all of the same proportions, they display vistas of the same huge scope.
Placing the viewpoint high above ground, and tilting the ground-plane up so that
the horizon occurs just below the upper framing edge, Bruegel creates a vast tab-
ula rasa on which to set his figural aggregates: ninety children’s games, ninety-
three proverbs, and about as many festive customs. Viewers will close in on these
details; but stepping back, they will recover a remarkably stable world. Bruegel
combines landscape, cityscape, and cultural compendium within a unified per-
spective and light. Modern painters admire these pictures also for their abstract
geometric forms, which estrange without diminishing spatial depth.
Hoops, potties, barrels, bricks, and aprons, become, in their planar pro-
jection, perfect circles and squares, absorbing the particulars into a serene, inhu-
man order.33 Bruegel inherited this technique from Bosch, as he did the high
viewpoint, steep ground-plane, and dense figural coverage. But Bruegel strips
away Bosch’s sacred framework, displaying genre subjects instead; or more pre-
cisely, Bruegel places, in his Boschian spatial voids, visual atlases of all the motifs
imaginable within a particular genre category. More systematically than Bosch,
Bruegel composes each painting as a miniature collection. Renaissance collectors
organized artworks chiefly according to subject matter. Bruegel’s publisher,
Hieronymus Cock, issued engravings in topical clusters to suit this practice:
exotic landscapes, vernacular landscapes, scenes of ruins, oceangoing ships, por-
32. Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert, Wercken, 3 vols. (Am- 33. This inhumanity was explored by Hans Sedlmayr in
sterdam: Colom, 1630), 2: fol. 9; cited in Martin Van his cryptically antihumanist essay of 1934, “Bruegel’s Mac-
Gelderen, The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt 1555– chia,” in The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Histori-
1590 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), cal Method in the 1930s, ed. Christopher S. Wood (New
246. York: Zone Books, 2000), 323 – 78.
240
traits of famous men, allegorical triumphs, the seven sins, and so on. Made in the
wake of his engravings for Cock, Bruegel’s three encyclopedic paintings are
ready-made albums: of children’s games, Netherlandish proverbs, festive usages.
COMMON KNOWLEDGE
In this spirit, then, Children’s Games, The Proverbs, and Carnival and Lent, taken
together as a suite of collections, constitute an atlas of human culture.34 Games
are, as it were, our entranceway into culture — primordially, as the species Homo
ludens; and ontogenetically, in childhood, as emergent persons. Proverbs exem-
plify the work of language, culture’s essential medium. Verbal games contain-
ing elemental thoughts, proverbs illustrate the indissoluble bond between lan-
guage and knowledge, word and thought. Finally, customs represent culture in
enacted form, as practice. Although centered on the shift from Carnival to Lent,
all moments in the liturgical calendar are indicated in Bruegel’s painting, and
these are embedded in a complete seasonal cycle, as evidenced, for example, by
the trees.35 Play, language, and custom: three elementary forms of culture, all
of them fabrications, all of them, in the motto of the big hut, “nothing more than
something made by men.” In his series Months, painted in 1565, Bruegel would
capture all of nature; and in his religious pictures, which can be grouped together
in significant clusters, he treated representative instances of human history. Pre-
sented with this total picture of culture, nature, and history, we encounter all that
is human from the indifferent vantage point of the world.
The Grounds of Painting

Whether or not Bruegel’s three encyclopedic paintings complete some even
wider whole, they share a common territory. Each centers on an expanse of
ground that, rising steeply to a horizon near the picture’s upper framing edge,
is nearly coextensive with the picture plane. Framed by the built habitat of town
and village, these expanses support the persons who enact the encyclopedias’
entries. These grounds are fascinating to behold. In Carnival and Lent, it is a
strange, swirling surface, opaque toward the foreground and luminous further
back. A variegated ocher containing all colors, and scarred by human use, the sur-
face is littered with the garbage of the life on display: eggs, cards, pots, tops,
bones, shit. While other painters could copy Bruegel’s compositions down to
these details, they were incapable of capturing his endlessly variable and subtly
transparent ground. To understand this component of his art, I will examine
Bruegel’s largest picture (physically the largest landscape of early Netherlandish
art). But first a word on the term “ground.” I mean not only the depicted sur-
34. See Klaus Demus’s remarks on Children’s Games, in 35. Claude Gaignebet, “Le combat de Carnaval et de
Seipel, Pieter Bruegel, 33. On The Proverbs as an encyclo- Carême de P. Bruegel,” Annales: Économies, Sociétés, Civili-
pedic tableau, see Mark A. Meadow, “On the Structure of sations 27 (1972): 313 – 45.
Knowledge in Bruegel’s Netherlandish Proverbs,” Volk-
skundig Bulletin 18 (1992): 141– 69.
241
Koerner•
Figure 8. Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Jesus Carrying the Cross, or The Way to Calvary,
1564, oil on panel, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (photograph Erich Lessing/Art
Resource, New York).
face on which events take place, but also the basis or foundation on which Bruegel’s
fictions stand —what ancient philosophy termed episteme. (In English as in Ger-
man, ground also means reason). Bruegel is a painter, however, not a metaphysi-
cian. His foundation is the physical wooden support on which he sets his col-
ors; more precisely, it is a smooth, chalky, warm-toned surface, composed of
gesso and size, which, in sixteenth-century Dutch, as well as modern English,
is termed the ground. Bruegel’s grounds are also the surfaces of the earth he
depicts; as we will see, he paints these by letting the physical ground of his pan-
els shine through the brushwork that covers it. Bruegel shows both grounds, both
the real and the fictive, to be humanly made, and it is in this revelation that he
departs most from Bosch.
Painted in 1565 for the Antwerp merchant Nicolas Jongelinck, Jesus Car-
rying the Cross engages with the historical roots of the entire Netherlandish pic-
torial tradition (fig. 8). Around 1440, Jan van Eyck had painted a version of this
subject that exerted a huge influence on European art north and south of the Alps.
The picture is lost but its composition can be gleaned from various copies, the best
of which is today in the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest.36 Already in van Eyck’s
painting, sacred history traces a great circle through the world. Christ’s road to
36. Max J. Friedländer, Early Netherlandisch Painting,

trans. Heinz Norden, 14 vols. (Leiden: Sijthoff, 1967–76),
1:70 – 71.
242
COMMON KNOWLEDGE
Figure 9. Martin Schongauer. Carrying of the Cross, c. 1480, engraving.
death, legible in the parade that stretches from Jerusalem’s gates, through the
crowded foreground to the hill of Calvary, has brought him before the viewer and
at the picture’s center; however, the visual agitation of a cruel and curious human-
ity, plus the procession’s own forward march, indicate that our view and its cen-
ter comprise a transitory moment in a plot that leads elsewhere. Ultimately, so the
story goes, the crucifixion will transform our march toward it, redeeming us from
the dolorous path that we too endure. But meanwhile, in the midst of things, in
the off-center middle of history and the earth where the painter places us, every-
thing seems ceaselessly in motion, like windmills in a breeze.
Bruegel need not have known van Eyck’s picture to have echoed its idea. In
the largest engraving of his day, the German painter and printmaker Martin
Schongauer made a widely circulated image of Carrying of the Cross (fig. 9). Again
at the picture’s center, but pushed to the foreground, Christ looks out at us, his
suffering face an icon in the narrative flow. Schongauer pictures time by dividing
the sky into light and dark, with the eclipse that will occur at his death coincid-
ing already with the centralized, mobile Christ. But Bruegel had closer prece-
dents. Many sixteenth-century artists, especially in Antwerp, painted updated
variations of the Eyckian design, among them Herri met de Bles, Cornelis Massys,
and Pieter Aertsen — as well as Jan Amstel, under whom Bruegel may have stud-
ied.37 These variations tend to embed the sacred event in a spectacle of genre
37. See the volume devoted to one of these pictures, Rosasco, and James H. Marrow (Princeton, NJ: Art
Henri Bles, Herri met de Bles: Studies and Explorations of the Museum, Princeton University, 1998).
World Landscape Tradition, ed. Norman E. Muller, Betsy J.
243
details set against a vast landscape background. In addition to all the other inno-
vations in his panel, Bruegel, rather than further modernize his theme, mingles
different times and historical styles. The figures in the foreground differ from
the rest not merely in their sorrowful response to the scene; St. John, the Virgin,
and the other weeping women are painted differently. Their elongated forms, del-
icate features, muted colors, sharp silhouettes, and flamboyant drapery belong to
the visual language of artists more than one century past. Compare the cascad-
ing red robe of the Magdalen to the lumpy dress of the woman struggling to her
left. In previous versions of the theme, everything is biblical but in an anodyne
way: the blue-robed Christ, his ostentatiously clad tormentors, the fantastical
Koerner•
city, and the two little Africans (foreground left), all vaguely indicate difference.
In Bruegel, nothing but the event itself is biblical. Jerusalem becomes a walled
northern European city, Golgotha lies at the fringe of a pleasant Brabant village,
Christ’s executioners are a modern militia, and the eager crowds seem fully of
the painter’s time. By these transpositions, Bruegel leads us correctly to con-
clude that the event itself — people delighting in the brutal execution of an inno-
cent man — can and does happens now. Meanwhile, the foreground figures, dat-
able by the pictorial style of their execution, are not of Christ’s time either, but
of a legendary moment of relatively recent history, the period of van Eyck and
Rogier van der Weyden. In those days, so this early neo-Gothic gesture sug-
gests, art elevated sacred personages above the chaos of everyday life while also
rendering them present through contemporary setting, dress, gesture, and
equipment. By the mid-sixteenth century, through developments in the prac-
tices of collecting, the rise of a localist historiography of Netherlandish art, and
the dissemination of artistic styles through reproductive prints, northern artists
became increasingly aware of the historicity of their craft. Bruegel would have
recognized that his own painting of everyday life derives from the tradition that
he displays here like a fossil: note the minutely detailed foreground vegetation,
another echo of what still gets termed “late Gothic art.” The vaporous histori-
cism of, say, Herri met de Bles, whose works convey pastness by an undiffer-
entiated exoticism but the painting itself is modish throughout, gives way in
Bruegel to a weirdly reversed stratigraphy of historical styles, with an archaic
foreground layer, datable to circa 1440, gazing not up but down upon a later
world. And that later age is so fully of Bruegel’s time that, compared to the fash-
ionable manner of his Antwerp contemporaries, its painted form seems to betray
no period style at all.
Bruegel did not invent the device of stylistic rupture. Distinguishing dif-
ferent realities, it was sometimes used to preserve the decorum of pictures com-
bining high and low subjects. Pieter Aertsen specialized in such breaks, as in his
famous Butcher’s Stall, where he sets off the biblical episode of Christ and the
adulteress against a foreground market scene by painting the former in a more
244
elegant, Italianate style.38 (Early-fifteenth-century Netherlandish painting is
itself filled with stylistic breaks; artists like Rogier absorbed without erasing the
rhetorical and stylistic difference between their works and the old cult icons of
COMMON KNOWLEDGE
Christ and the Virgin which they revivify.) There is an old dispute over whether,
in such Mannerist inversions, the religious scene served as a mere pretext for an
emergent genre painting or whether, by way of the sacred scenes, artists criti-
cized the passions aroused by genre painting.39 Both sides of the controversy treat
ordinary life as cultural contraband, either smuggled in or crossed out by religious
iconography. Now is not the time to enter this debate; however, I would note that
Bruegel’s Jesus Carrying the Cross belongs fully to this pictorial complex not only
through its stylistic contrasts, but also through the game it plays with scale.
A viewer needs to remember his or her first impression of Bruegel’s picture
to recognize its radical design. An initial experience goes something like this. We
enter the picture through the grand sweep of the landscape. Bruegel plots this
sweep through the flow of figures from the sunken distance on the left, past a
middle ground, to a higher distance on the right. There, in the spatial and nar-
rative full stop of the circular crowd, we notice that the cross of Christ is missing
and we are sent back to the foreground, to a scene we perhaps noticed but slipped
past due to its formal reserve. Yet here, where we expect to find him among his
followers, Christ is still absent. The stake and wheel at the far right, together with
the skull at its base, help trick us into thinking that the crucifix rises next to the
Virgin, on Golgotha, hill of the skull. Between the skull and the wheel, however,
a second group of mourners nudge us back into the landscape. Some wear con-
temporary dress; the man in the red cap at furthest to the right (who, like us,
observes the landscape with the stake just to his side) is believed to be a self-
portrait. In any case, it is around now that, tossed back into the agitated move-
ment of the crowds, we seek and at last discover the tiny figure of Christ.
Dwarfing him in the expansive landscape, crowding him out by a teeming
humanity, Bruegel performs the world’s nonrecognition of Christ—also the sub-
ject of several of paintings by Bosch. Love of the world, for Bosch, caused every-
one to overlook Christ in heaven. Yet whereas in works like Bosch’s Hay Wain
our own perspective as viewers of the triptych remains aligned with a salvific
structure, in Bruegel’s Jesus Carrying the Cross our place is inside the sinful parade,
not only because Bruegel offers no external standpoint from which to view it with
impunity, but also because he assures us that our world is the same. Realism, the
38. Friedländer, Early Netherlandisch Painting, 13:101. Stillleben der Beuckelaer oder Betrachtungen über die
Entstehung der neuzeitigen Kabinettmalerei,” Jahrbuch der
39. The most influential account of such inverted still lifes
Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien 36 (1923): 1–14.
as forerunners of modern genre painting is Friedländer,
Essays über die Landschaftsmalerei und andere Bildgattungen
(The Hague: A.A.M. Stols, 1947); also Dvořák, “Ein
245
sense we get that “this is how people actually look and act” repeats both our
knowing the world and our not knowing Christ.
It is one of the painting’s many ironies that everything rushes toward
death — but not because, as in Bosch, death is where we are inattentively bound.
Death saturates Bruegel’s picture, most obviously in those stakes and wheels that
plot a vertiginous recession into depth, their crooked forms turning perspective
into a macabre dance. Here, death is the object of morbid curiosity. The gallop-
ing horses and running children grow sluggish only around the beaten figure of
Christ, where they are happy to bunch up in the thick of violence only to rush
off, further on, to reserve a good view of the crucifixion. Whereas in Bosch, peo-
Koerner•
ple lust for life but get unwittingly trapped in death, here people strain to get a
good look at death: watching someone die appears to be the best thing going.
Beyond the funereal figures in the foreground, only one person in the entire
scene resists joining the gruesome parade.
According to the gospel, soldiers compelled Simon of Cyrene to bear
Christ’s cross; in Bruegel, Simon is held back by his wife, with her falsely pious
rosary. While the multitude show their backs to Christ, Simon, called to carry
Christ’s burden, draws uniquely backward, gazing frantically in our direction.
Christ thus kneels between two sites of indifference, one near the picture’s van-
ishing point, in that empty circle of gawking people on the horizon, and the other
near the viewpoint, where faith is tested. Although tiny in the landscape, Christ
himself faces us from the very center of the panel — and this is the picture’s chief
inheritance from Bosch. In many of Bosch’s paintings, what is most important
appears as a tiny point at the geometric midpoint of his panel.40 There is a world
of difference between these centers and Bruegel’s, however. Bosch not only marks
the midpoint with some special element in the picture’s composition; he also con-
nects that element, by way of its centered mark, to a divine architecture tran-
scending the painting’s fiction. Flanked by paradise or hell, beginning and end,
archē and telos, the center receives in Bosch an absolute foundation. And because
some of his paintings served as altarpieces, these painted centers are anchored,
metaphysically, to altar, church, and cosmos, and thus to the divinity whose
salvific plan they diagrammed. Bruegel produced no altarpieces. His vehicles
were the engraving and the gallery picture. Built for mobility, and stabilized only
by the structural coherence of their views, these rectangular, window-sized
objects envelop us in their ample frame, wherever they hang.41 Even in his
40. See, for example, his Temptation of St. Anthony in Lis- The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-
bon, where the hermit-saint looks out at us from the geo- Painting, trans. Anne-Marie Glasheen (New York: Cam-
metric center of the triptych, and his Seven Deadly Sins and bridge University Press, 1997); on earlier developments,
Four Last Things in the Prado, which is shaped as a giant, see Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the
all-seeing eye with Christ at the center. Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 409 – 90.
41. On the emergence of a model of painting as a framed,
transportable, marketable object, see Victor I. Stoichita,
246
Months, the discreteness of each seasonal view, how air itself looks different in
different times, gives these images their supreme consistency. Functionally
equipped for aesthetic detachment, Jesus Carrying the Cross founds its center not
COMMON KNOWLEDGE
absolutely but contingently. Christ kneels at the middle of the panel because the
painting, endowed with the structure of a human gaze, seems turned toward him.
Christ’s centered form, rather than sublimating our relative viewpoint, confirms
our entrapment. Before Bruegel’s picture, we are and remain passive, curious
bystanders.
In one of his picture’s most memorable passages, Bruegel likens viewing
itself to Christ’s torment. The torture wheel, raised to about the high horizon
at the upper right, is of the same size and shape as the circle on Calvary. The one
seen from below, the other from above, and belonging to each other as a lid does
to a jar, these two rings tell us that humanity was the cross that Christ bore, the
instrument of his suffering. The centers of these are not fixed and occupied, but
mobile and empty. In the one, an executioner digs a hole for the cross; in the
other, the stake allows the wheel to spin around, along with all the other wheels
that plunge us into the distance, and along with the cross-shaped sails of the
windmill in the sky: note how that building’s precarious base is a disk as well.
These terrible rings place us at the periphery. They cause us to notice that the
event we observe, and its landscape setting, are composed as wheels with the
giant rock as their axle. Or more precisely, the picture is composed of two rings,
like the torture wheel and circular crowd at the upper right. On the one hand,
there is the round movement of humanity in its endless march to death. The fact
of its ceaselessness is conveyed not only by the figure of a circle, but also by what
Bruegel tells us about its cause: given how people are, crucifixions will always take
place. On the other hand, this eternal recurrence has worn a deep circle in the
landscape itself. The geographically unlikely rock forms the axle because, located
at the center, it is the only thing uneroded by the march. An inversion of the hole
dug for the cross, the pinnacle measures in eons human history’s miserable
course.42 And the pinnacle explains and indexes the stylistic stratigraphy of the
foreground, for what comes earlier (van Eyck, Rogier) will stand higher than
what follows.
In Bruegel’s time, people were fascinated by the realization that the shape
of the earth is subject to change. Part of a general obsession with mutability, this
new geological awareness exploded the old biblical measure of time. “All these
changes take place on a vast scale,” wrote George Agricola in 1546 of the shap-
42. See Catharina Kahane’s remarkable essay, “Das Kreuz

mit der Distanz. Passion und Landschaft in Pieter
Bruegels Wiener Kreuztragung,” in Gesichter der Haut, ed.
Christoph Geissmar-Brandi (Frankfurt: Stroemfeld, 2002),
189 – 211.
247
ing of mountains by water and wind: “These changes usually go unnoticed, since
due to the large period of time they require they vanish from human memory.”
In Bruegel, history itself, in its longue durée, is the shaping force of nature, just
as it had been the shaping force for his art; hence the archaizing style of the fore-
ground religious figures. He shows its microeffects on the ground. The surface
on which the crowds march is a shifting, uncertain, watery palimpsest of tracks,
ruts, footprints, and gullies, all engraved by the procession. As the sum total of
all these little wounds, human history has shaped the ground into a vast, circu-
lar grave.
For Bruegel, there are no foundations beyond the contingent ones that
Koerner•
human beings make; yet stories and histories are not false grounds. According to
Italian humanists like Boccaccio and Coluccio Salutati, the labor of Hercules —
the basic work of culture — consists in discerning metaphorical connections
within the original chaos of the world; and these invented connections among
things enabled the original binding, or religio, of people to society.43 Primitivis-
tic rather than primitivizing, this humanist view of religion and fable belonged
to an emergent ethnological perspective, but it derived from antique allegorical
interpretations of myth, which understood the gods described by Hesiod and
Homer as mere similitudes of natural forces: fables rendered truth in disguise.
Still, translating them into facts of the physical world did not bring us closer to
truth, since facts became initially available through fables and still had to be
argued rhetorically, as Boccaccio and others held.44 The human center of human-
ism was precisely the conviction that human knowledge and behavior were
humanly produced, and that world, society, religion, and the gods were products
of human work: things made rather than found. Whereas medieval Scholastics
established eternal truths on the grounds of first principles, humanists explored
the changing, illusory, and historical face of reality, recognizing in it alone the
unchanging and divine. In an essay titled “A Fable about Man,” Juan Luis Vives
imagined how Jupiter, to celebrate Juno’s birthday, produced a cosmic play or
fable, creating the world as the stage and human beings as the actors. Observ-
ing the whole course of history, the gods stood amazed at the human ability to
be all things, and, toward the end of the play, by our capacity to mime perfectly
the divine creator, Jupiter. Finally, they invited man to “put off his mask” and take
a seat among them at their banquet and observe the spectacle himself: “Man lay
bare, showing the immortal gods his nature akin to theirs.”45 Written in Flanders
43. Ernesto Grassi, Rhetoric as Philosophy: The Humanistic grateful to my sister, Stephanie Koerner, for introducing
Tradition, trans. John Michael Krois and Azizeh Azodi me to Grassi’s work.
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001), 84;
44. Grassi, Heidegger, 22.
my thinking on Bruegel has been profoundly influenced
by this book and by Grassi’s Heidegger and the Question 45. Ludovicus Vives, “A Fable about Man,” in Cassirer,
of Renaissance Humanism (Binghamton, NY: Center for Kristeller, and Randall, Renaissance Philosophy, 390; dis-
Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1983). I am cussed in Grassi, Rhetoric, 11–13.
248
in 1519, Vives’s fable reverses the human and the divine. By way of its own fan-
tastical representation of a truth, it argues that, at the moment of man’s unmask-
ing, the gods become masks; and man, the underlying reality.
COMMON KNOWLEDGE
Puppetry
To be fictively grounded means to have a foundation in something humanly fab-
ricated rather than naturally found. Do stories and histories have a ground
beneath them? In his biography of Jan Amstel, van Mander describes a kind of
picture where the artist, painting thinly and swiftly so that we can see the brush-
work, “allow[s] the preparation on the panels or canvases to play a part —which
Bruegel very idiosyncratically imitated.”46 The uncanny glow that fills Bruegel’s
landscape, making it seem real, shines forth from this unpainted ground. The
artist allows the clarifying light of the given to illuminate everything he makes.
But let us consider more closely the matter of Bruegel’s distinctive style.
Bruegel’s naturalism is historically contingent, and in dramatic ways. From
the mid-seventeenth century through the nineteenth, viewers found his paint-
ings awkward and artificial. The first modern art historical survey, Franz Kugler’s
1837 Handbook of Painting, calls Bruegel’s Proverbs “a miserable, confused picture,
with painterly effects that are restless and without coherent impact.” Jacob Burck-
hardt judged the artist to be “worthless as a painter, ruinous in his composition,
unbearably crude in his forms, and garish and harsh in his colors.”47 It is hard
to see Bruegel in this way now, in part because the art against which these crit-
ics measured him no longer looks like a progression toward an ideal. Adriaen
Brouwer represents to us a different, rather than a better, way of painting. If any-
thing, a modern bias toward the primitive makes Bruegel seem more progressive
than his successors. But what about Bruegel in his time?
Just after his death, for collectors of the highest caliber, Bruegel’s works
were among the most desirable acquisitions. His son Jan, writing to his patron
Cardinal Borromeo, reports that original paintings by his father were simply
impossible to find, since the emperor, Rudolf II, had offered the highest possible
price for any that should become available.48 Around 1590, Jacob Savery — a tal-
ented artist in his own right—produced a mass of drawings in the elder Bruegel’s
style.49 Fraudulently signed with the master’s signature, and inscribed with dates
46. Van Mander, Lives, 118. Critical Reflections,” in Brueghel Enterprises, ed. Peter van
den Brink (Maastricht: Bonnefantenmuseum; Brussels:
47. Kugler and Burckhardt’s judgments are excerpted and
Musées royaux des beaux-arts de Belgique; Ghent: Ludion,
discussed in Hans Wolfgang von Löhneysen, Die ältere
2001), 47.
niederländische Malerei. Künstler und Kritiker (Eisenach,
Germany: E. Röth, 1956), 150 –151. 49. Hans Mielke, Pieter Bruegel: Die Zeichungen (Turnhout,
Belgium: Brepols, 1996), 74 – 85.
48. Dominique Allart, “Did Pieter Brueghel the Younger
See his Father’s Paintings?: Some Methodological and
249
between 1559 and 1562, these passed for works by the elder Bruegel until a few
years ago. Bruegel was thus massively appreciated at that time, but why?
It is possible that the awkwardness that nineteenth-century viewers criti-
cized in Bruegel, and that we find hard to see, was a quality he deliberately cul-
tivated. Bruegel understood his pictorial manner not as a natural mirror of his
subjects but as a stylistic, and therefore artificial, alternative to the Italianism
fashionable among other northern painters of the time. In a poem of 1565, the
artist and writer Lucas de Heere describes a “certain painter” who mocks his
rivals’ products as “sugar pictures” because of their ornamentation. But it is this
“stupid scoffer,” according to de Heere, who deserves censure: “It is astonishing
Koerner•
that you are not ashamed by this, for you are yourself entirely unmannered, since
you ornament your paintings like carnival dolls.”50 The poem names the scoffer’s
rival, Frans Floris, but not the scoffer himself. According to David Freedberg,
the scoffer is Bruegel who, in 1565, was an unrivaled painter of carnival dolls, and
whose style, however one describes it, is the polar opposite of Floris’s.51 Whether
or not the insult was aimed at Bruegel, it illuminates the painter’s aims. By say-
ing that this artist, whoever he is, ornaments his paintings like carnival dolls, de
Heere proposes an analogy between the artist’s pictures and images of another
kind — the effigies produced by common folk. To say so is like claiming that, in
portraying the leather mask of his Rommelpot player, Bruegel works in the same
style as the mask maker, and that Bruegel’s catalog of customs is not “about” the
people but “of ” the people. Bruegel’s art brims with instances where this claim
would seem valid, as when, in the lower left of Children’s Games, a girl playing
with dolls is painted identically like her toy, only larger (fig. 7).
Bruegel’s frolicking peasants look awkward because their irregular gestures
and pieced-together clothing jar with the coordination expected of a dance. Con-
sider the portly reveler dancing at the far right of Bruegel’s Wedding Dance (fig.
10). Squeezed into his garish jacket, trousers, and codpiece, and weighed down
by heavy shoes, his step seemingly out of sync with the other dancers, this fore-
ground peasant is, from every point of view, turned the wrong direction. His
awkwardness spills into the way Bruegel paints him: observe his hands, so weirdly
cramped. All the clumsiness disappears, however, the moment we catch sight of
his left eye, which casts a perfectly aimed glance at his partner. This connection
suffuses him with a subtle grace peculiar to himself, illuminating his vanity, and
causing us to appreciate the organization of his movements and garb—for exam-
ple, that the laces, tassels, and belt, extended to their last notch, precisely fit his
50. Lucas de Heere, Den hof en boomgaerd der Poësien 51. David Freedberg, “Allusion and Topicality in the Work
(Ghent, 1565), 87; the whole passage is translated in Mark of Pieter Bruegel,” in The Prints of Pieter Bruegel the Elder
A. Meadow, “Bruegel’s Procession to Calvary, Æmulatio and (Tokyo: Tokyo Shimbun, 1989), 53 – 65.
the Space of Vernacular Style,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch
Jaarboek 47 (1996): 181– 82.
250
COMMON KNOWLEDGE
Figure 10. Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The Wedding Dance, c. 1566, oil on oak panel,
City of Detroit Purchase (photograph copyright © 1984, The Detroit Institute
of Arts, Detroit).
girth. We can see why van Mander commended Bruegel for accurately portray-
ing the costumes of his peasants. The seeming awkwardness of the artist’s own
treatment of awkwardness is redeemed in those passages where, for example, the
golden tassels match perfectly both the peasant and the brush that painted them.
And is it not the case that, beneath the hectic clothing, bodily dislocations, and
eccentric points of view, there lies, as if under a vernacularizing mask, the fluid,
virtuoso line of Mannerist disegno? Why, then, the detour through awkwardness
to grace? Why risk painting carnival dolls in a style reminiscent of them?
Bruegel was a contradictory figure even in his own day. On the one hand,
he was Peasant Bruegel, a naive painter indigenous to the rustic culture he por-
trayed; born “among peasants in an obscure village in Brabant,” he was “chosen
by Nature from among the peasants to represent the peasants” (van Mander).
The modern appreciation of Bruegel begins with his assessment, in the late nine-
teenth century, as the greatest folk painter of all time: an ethnographic curios-
ity, in other words, not an exponent of ethnographic curiosity. On the other hand,
Bruegel’s friends and clientele were anything but rustic, as an old anecdote sug-
gests. Van Mander recounts how Bruegel, in the company of a “wealthy and
noble” friend, “often went on trips among the peasants, to their weddings and
fairs. The two dressed like peasants, brought gifts like the other guests, and acted
251
as if they belonged to the family of the bride or groom.” Observing and copy-
ing peasants by masquerading as the rustic he no longer is, Bruegel attends to
their customs and dress, “all of which,” as van Mander noted, “he knew how to
copy in color very comically and skillfully.”52
In his biographical persona, Bruegel is himself at once outsider and insider,
sentimental and naive, ethnographer and informant. As such, he belongs to the
dialectics of unmasking that his pictures represent. Unmasking reveals things as
they really are, not terrible gods but men in costumes. Unveiling is chiefly an ini-
tiation into the secret fact of human making. “Look up!” the shaman, the icon-
oclast, and the Stoic equally command, “all this was made by people.” For a
Koerner•
painter to expose this secret, he must distinguish the mask he lifts from the paint-
ing he makes by depicting that mask in its specific style, since with artifacts style
is the index of their facture. Bruegel knows the stylistic specificity of vernacular
craft goods. Whereas other painters depict generalized rustic equipment, Bruegel,
as van Mander acknowledges, shows how peasants dress, dance, marry, and braid
pretzels in their particular village. And whereas other painters see mere pretzels,
jugs, and grills, Bruegel sees individual works of a signature style. This ethno-
graphic expertise extends to his own craft of painting, where instead of produc-
ing, unreflectively, things in the dominant period style, he either reverts to a
native early Netherlandish model, as he did for the foreground figures of his Jesus
Carrying the Cross, or else — by carrying that local tradition forward to its con-
temporary vestiges — he seeks a new vernacular realism among the peasants.
Through the detour of awkwardness, Bruegel teaches us to recognize and
marvel at indigenous grace. (He discerns a sprezzatura worthy of courtiers among
the peasants.) The awkwardness serves too as his own unmasking. An intimate of
urbane humanist scholars, he becomes Peasant Bruegel and allows us to see him,
not just the peasants and ourselves, as an example of the forms that human life
takes in one place, in one world among worlds. Applied to himself as well as to
the rest of humanity, the Stoic’s detachment reassociates him with us all — and
it is this irony that links contingency to solidarity.53
52. Van Mander, Lives, 190.
53. See note 2 above.

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Joseph Leo Koerner

The gloriﬁcation of “man” that Giovanni Francesco Pico, count of Mirandola,

1. Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman

Common Knowledge 10:2

contingencies engulfed by a limitless, indifferent universe. Typically, Bruegel will

4. Max Dvořák, Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte (Munich:

5. Pierre Vinken and Lucy Schlüter, “Pieter Bruegels

Pursued by academics eager to demonstrate their own learning, this

6. For a good comparison of these two poems and their

Allegory and Experience

11. Wied, Bruegel, 7.

12. Karel van Mander, The Lives of the Illustrious Nether-

17. René van Bastelaer, The Prints of Peter Bruegel the

of Bruegel’s composition — repeat the antithesis of Carnival and Lent. Since it

people in homemade costumes. Masks have long been a staple of anthropological

The Grounds of Painting

36. Max J. Friedländer, Early Netherlandisch Painting,

Figure 9. Martin Schongauer. Carrying of the Cross, c. 1480, engraving.

42. See Catharina Kahane’s remarkable essay, “Das Kreuz

52. Van Mander, Lives, 190.

53. See note 2 above.

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