ARTH 4007 Pieter Bruegel Brueghel the Elder Part 2

Peter Bruegel's most extensive proverb painting is this painting, which is in the Gamalda Galleria in Berlin, and it goes by several names. Netherlandish Proverbs, Flemish Proverbs, The World Turned Upside Down, and frequently it's also called The Blue Cloak, from this one detail which you see here blowing up so you can see it. Now, as you can see, there's all these figures in a very extensive landscape. It goes from city buildings to the countryside to the sea, and within that there are all of these figures who are engaged in various activities which both seem very strange. They illustrate different proverbs, and over 100 proverbs are illustrated here. Depending on what book you pick up, I found one that said, oh, there's about 85. Well, since that was published, one of the museum catalogs, which has the masterpieces of the Berlin Museum, of the Gamalda Galleria, says there's 118 different proverbs. There's some suggestions, but they haven't been certainly identified, and some figures, there's, involves a number of different proverbs rather than just one with the, you know, what the figures are doing, or how they're dressed, or what they're carrying. So, what we want to do is look at this a little bit in context. There actually was a forerunner of this. There's a printmaker named Franz Hogenberg, and we think the year before Reutl came out with the Netherlandish proverb painting, Hogenberg, who was a young man at the time, he was about 18, he brought out this etching, and it was called the Blue Cloak, and it's a print that illustrates 43 proverbs. Each one of them has an image and the text, so there's no question about which proverb is being shown, and some of these proverbs Peter Bruegel also illustrated in a somewhat different manner. The reason it's called the Blue Cloak is because that's named in the heading at the top, and the heading translates, the Blue Cloak is this most often named, but the world's oddities, or it might be the world's deceits, depending on how you translate it, but the world's oddities, or the world's deceits, is more beseeming. In other words, we usually call this the Blue Cloak, but a better name for it would be either the world's oddities or the world's deceits. And maybe it leans a little bit of both, you know, that there are some oddities going on, but they do deal with the theme of deceit, and you can see this has a kind of landscape, but it's not as well integrated as Bruegel's work. It's nowhere near the quality of Bruegel's painting, and the figures are pretty much, you know, just strewn across the landscape separately, where with Bruegel, there seems to be sometimes the relationship between the different figures, the different proverbs. Now, this was the only picture that I could find of it, and so the little detail is very pixelated. It's a very tiny little detail that I blew up, so you can't see that terribly clearly, but some general things about it. And I'm showing you this and show you where the Blue Cloak, the two figures, the woman putting a cloak, and this identifies a blue cloak, on her husband is marked with this white square, and there's the detail that I've blown up. And you can see, you know, this is, the woman has a cloak, she's putting it over her husband who's facing her, quite a bit different than the way Bruegel did it. Now, what is this Blue Cloak thing? Well, it's a saying. To put a blue cloak on a husband means that his wife is deceiving him, that his wife is committing adultery. Now, why blue? Because blue is the traditional color of fidelity. So, this is an inversion of that meaning. Maybe she's trying to seem faithful, but she really isn't. Or blue has been used so often that it almost means the opposite. So, it's a kind of false fidelity. She's not really faithful to him. And you can see that what Bruegel does is he shows you the figures, but he has no inscriptions. He's not telling you what each one of these mean. And what it seems to be is this is a game. Someone called it a puzzle picture. And the viewers would try to identify the proverbs. Now, I know this works because when I teach the course in a traditional manner, rather than online, I always end with this painting. And you might have noticed that it was 1559, so it was earlier than some of the paintings we've talked about. But I wanted to, you know, I want to end with it. Because when you show students this, and you start pointing out some of the proverbs, they get really interested. And in the traditional class, we'd have this up on the screen, we'd identify some of the proverbs, and then the students would go, well, what's this one? What's this? What's that? And they try to figure them out. And I had a list from the museum catalog, and so they'd say, what's that? And we'd find it on the list. And, you know, it was really interesting. And students that didn't have someplace else to go, many of them would just stay and go through the painting. Now, we don't use all of these. Some of the proverbs are very similar to what we have, some of the sayings we have in English. But many of them are very, very different. So imagine, you know, that you are a person who, you know, speaks Nederlands, same language. And, you know, you know, these proverbs, you live with them. So, you know, you might have a extra insight. But, you know, it is a kind of game. It may have a moralizing purpose. But it also is humorous. It also is fun. Now, when you look at the difference between Hogenberg and Bruegel, of course, you see the difference between, you know, a very excellent artist and someone who's, you know, a good workaday artist, maybe, but not Bruegel's quality. And, of course, we said there's a disparity in ages. Bruegel is, you know, height of his powers, Hogenberg is just starting out. But Bruegel characterizes his figures. You know, when you look at these, you can get an idea of what's going on. You have the young wife and she's dressed in this red garment with very, very low cut bodice. You know, a woman wouldn't wear that around town. She'd have her, you know, she'd have her cleavage covered up if she were a proper matron or a virtuous woman. So, right there, you have a hint of what may be going on. And then we see her husband looks like, you know, an old, pretty, decrepit man. He has to have a cane to walk. He's going to bow over. And she's put this cloak on him and it has this brim that goes out and covers up his face. And she's also standing behind him, so he can't really see her clearly. And then his, his gaze is obscured anyway. So, you have a whole lot of things that tell you what's going on. With Hogenberg, you, of course, you don't have color. You know, it's black and white. And, but it looks like that the husband does not look like he's very old. He's wearing the, you know, the short garment with hose, which the older man would probably wear a longer garment. And he doesn't seem to have a beard, or, you know, he doesn't give any characteristics that say he's old. And he's looking right at his wife. So, the deceit, let's say, is spelled out much more with Bruegel. So, here we're looking at the Netherlandish Proverbs. And what we're going to do is, I'm just going to show you some of them, because, as I say, there's over a hundred in here. I'm going to put up on the class website a key to this and a list of the Proverbs. You can also find places on the web that list some of them. And, of course, many books will as well. And they will sometimes differ in how they translate it, or what they think the proverb is. So, let's start looking at some of these. That steep roof, and, of course, this is what you would have in the Netherlands, because they have to have very steep, peaked, gabled roofs so that the snow will fall off of them. You have these pies, or tarts, on the roof. Now, I always heard it as pie on the roof, as though we were saying pie in the sky, you know, something that's unattainable. But when I started looking up in the different books, what I found was a proverb that says, their roof is tiled with tarts. And this was interpreted as, they live in a land of plenty. You know, they're so affluent they can put tarts, they can have tarts instead of tiles on their roof or something. Or maybe it's a fool's paradise, because, frankly, pies and tarts would not be very good roofing material. Then, of course, there's many, many details here. I'm just going to show you a few of them. Fools get the best cards, and you can see the card player with, falling down. And you have this guy hanging out of the window, and he's, no, he's defecating. He shits on the world, says, and that's quoting from one of the translations. They seem to use it all the time. There's a lot of scatological humor and scatological proverbs here. That kind of means, you know, he has contempt for the world. And then you notice that the world here, which is the globe, and it has, if you've seen pictures of Jesus holding the orb and cross, as they say, so the circular orb or globe of the world, the earth, and then the cross surmounts it. But here, the cross is hanging down. So it's the world is turned upside down. Everything's topsy-turvy. Things are not how they should be. And some people say that's the theme of this, you know, because he does use that world turned upside down several times. In that same building, we have a man, you know, well, we had someone defecating, now we have someone urinating. He's pissing at the moon. And this was one of the proverbs that Hogenberg used, but he had a man who literally, the moon was up in the sky, and the piss was trying to go up that way. This one, it's a placard, like maybe the name of the inn would be the moon or something of that nature. So he's pissing at the placard with crescent moon. Now, pissing at the moon means what? Something you can't do. You can't reach the moon. So you're seeking the unattainable. And here, I'll show you some of these, and then I'll show another one in the next picture. You can see over on the far left, there's a man with his arms around a broken pillar, and he's biting it. And one of the places said they don't know what the hat on the top of it means. That hasn't been identified with the meaning. But a pillar biter was a hypocrite. And next to him, you see a woman with tongs and a sort of burning coal in one hand and a bucket with water in it on the other. She carries fire in one hand and water in the other. And this is someone who's two-faced. I think I read one place that it also might mean somebody who nags. And then here's one that, you know, we're familiar with with English, you know, to bang one's head against a brick wall or to beat your head against the wall. Yeah, we say that too. There's a couple of other things. There's something, there's one about the shoes not fitting. You see a guy without a shoe. He can't get a shoe to fit him. And he has a long knife, but everyone with a long knife is not a cook. And in the background, you see the sow taking the bung or the cork out of the barrel with the drink in it. Now, this really interesting image down in the lower left corner shows, you know, a woman with very strong jaw. And she's tying the devil to a pillow. And she's been very successful with that. This is the very quarrelsome person, a person who's very obstinate. And, of course, women were supposed to be submissive. So, you know, it's supposed to be a negative image, but it's also very humorous. And you think, well, she can really get her own way if she can tie the devil to the pillow. And, you know, it, one person translated as obstinacy conquers all. If you're obstinate enough and troublesome and quarrelsome enough, you can even conquer the devil. You can see a man who is armored, belling the cat, putting a bell around a cat. So one of the proverbs might be to bell the cat. And, you know, to do something maybe a little dangerous, you could get scratched. Another source said, enlarged on this, and he said to wear armor to bell the cat. In other words, you're so afraid of a cat that you have to wear armor, you know, just to put a bell on him. And then you can see he's holding, it looks like he's holding a knife in his mouth. He's armed to the teeth. So, you know, there's several proverbs with one image. Up above him, you see someone who is feeling the hens, I guess feeling them to see if they're going to lay an egg. This is like counting the eggs before they've been hatched. And then you see these two women, you know, seated there, and one is winding and the other is spinning. And one winds what the other spins, and basically that's a metaphor for gossiping. Down below, you see two people engaged in shearing their animals, but one person's shearing sheep, the other shears pigs. Well, obviously, when you're shearing sheep, you get the wool. When you shear pigs, you don't get much of anything. So, this seems to be, you know, one person's getting all the advantages, the other person is getting none. In this section, which is sort of about the center in the lower part, you see a man who's filling in a well, and you can see the body of a calf floating in it, and that's filling in the well after the calf has drowned. We'd say locking the barn door after the horse is stolen, and it's too late to do that, you should have done it before. And then you see a guy down on his knees climbing into this huge transparent orb and cross the world, and, you know, depending on your translation, it's to stoop or to squirm or to bend over to get on in the world. It's a lot of trouble to get on in the world, or to get through the world. And then you see this very confident guy, sort of the opposite of our bender and squirmer, who's standing there well-dressed, and he's got the world spinning on his thumb. Everything's going well for him, he's got all the advantages, he's got the world just spinning on his thumb. And then you have one that's pretty close to the way we'd say it in English, it's actually from the Bible. In Dutch, they say casting roses before swine. In English, we would say casting pearls before swine. Comes out of the Bible, Matthew 7, 6, and it's people who give their wisdom, their spiritual acuity to people who just can't possibly understand. Up above, you see someone stabbing the pig, and stabbing the pig in the belly, and that means, you know, it's done, what's done, you can't undo it. And here you see again, to stoop to get through the world, to stoop, squirm, bend, to get through the world, you have to, you can only succeed if you make sacrifices. And the world spinning on his thumb, as we saw. Spilled porridge, can it be scraped up again? And we would say it's no use crying over spilled milk rather than porridge, or, you know, it's done. As Lady Macbeth says, what is done cannot be undone. Two dogs gnaw one bone, or two dogs one bone. It could mean several things, you know, it could mean people who argue over one thing, over a single point, or it could refer to jealousy, you know, they both want the bone, there's only one bone, but they both want it. And I'm just going to show you, we've seen the man who's lost his porridge, who can't, you know, get the porridge back again. That man who stretched out on the plank, his hands are trying to extend from one loaf of bread to another, and, you know, this thing about extending from one loaf to another, it means, you know, it's hard to make ends meet. It's not easy to reach from one loaf to another. But look in the upper left of this detail, and that's what we're going to look at next. You can see here that you have a chair with Jesus sitting in it, and he's holding the Orban cross again, he's the ruler of the universe, and we have this person who's dressed as a friar, and holding very large prayer beads, and he's reaching up and he's put a fake beard on Christ, this long fake beard, and the proverb is to tie a flaxen beard on God. It means false piety, to tie a flaxen beard on God. Here's one we've talked about before, it seems to pop up in Netherlandish art, big fish eat little fish, that's the way the world goes, and then you see this man, it looks like he has a fan that he's trying to block the sun or something like that perhaps, but he seems very, very upset because there's sun shining on the water. He cannot bear to see the sun shine on water, which means he's jealous. Now he can't even, he doesn't want to anybody else have good fortune, and one that's pretty easy, I guess, to interpret, you see this man, well-dressed, wealthy, just dropping coins into the water, and he's just throwing his money away, he's throwing money in the water, in other words, he's wasting money. Now you see the boat here on the water, sailing before the wind, something that's easy to do, the wind is blowing it, and this also might have a second proverb, and see this one is mentioned as well, keeping an eye on the sail, which means something like, be alert. You can see this horse and the guy trying to collect something from the rear end of the horse, the warning is, horse droppings are not figs, in other words, watch out for swindlers, we're going to tell you that these horse droppings are figs. We'd probably say, I have the Brooklyn Bridge to sell you, similar. You can see at the lower part, you have a man who is grabbed an eel by the tail, it's involved with something that's, you know, he's just doing something that's useless. The person who's sitting there, standing there looking at the bears, there's a couple of suggestions, that's one of them that people aren't sure of, it's been suggested that the dancing bears means someone's having, you know, sort of hallucinations because they're so hungry, and there's some, several ideas about that. So here we see Netherlandish proverbs, and if this tantalizes you, feel free to continue and look up all these different proverbs, or as many as you'd like.