Fools and Folly

EXCREMENTAL MIRTH

or how Humour Laid the World Bare, from the Sixteenth Century to the Present

THE DEVIL’S DOMAIN

Homer’s gods can roar with laughter. Zeus, Hera, Poseidon and the rest of the cabal — grinning, giggling, splitting their sides. Anything man can do, the gods can do better. The Greek pantheon is a projection of the terrestrial on to the celestial. It’s only when God becomes man that he stops laughing. Jesus doesn’t do stand-up. There are no gags in the Bible, no guffaws or gales of laughter. The Christian faith is an awfully serious thing. Or so medieval theologians conclude, at any rate. In the absence of so much as a muffled biblical titter they decide that humour and virtue must be incompatible. Christianity is an ode to reason, in the best Platonic tradition. And as far as reason is concerned, anything received and perceived by the senses is a bad thing — Dionysian, bestial, impulsive, uncontrolled. Reason can’t bear unrestrained laughter. Worse, laughing distorts God’s creation: cheeks puff out, eyes squeeze shut, teeth are bared, bellies, buttocks and bingo wings jiggle, bladders are compressed, you may even wet your knickers. No, a modest Marian smile is just about acceptable, but splutters and smirks, grins and grimaces — they definitely belong to the devil’s domain, as pernicious as other unreasoning urges like the lover’s libido, the drunk’s delirious hilarity, or the gambler’s addiction. It’s the realm of the primitive impulsive outsider, of the peasant, of the fool.

YOKELS AND BUMPKINS

In the late-medieval Netherlands, every right-minded burgher knows that ‘peasant’ and ‘fool’ are virtually one and the same thing. Urbanites look down their noses at villagers, even though their parents, grandparents or great-great-grandparents were probably peasants themselves. But now, in the Low Countries, beside the grey North Sea, the old world is shaking on its social foundations. For in strategically sited towns and cities a new species of human is making its entrée. While the divine dramatis personae included only clergy, nobles and peasants, enterprising citizens are now elbowing their way on to the social scene.

Quinten Metsys

A Fool or Folly (detail), c.1525–30

Oil on panel, 60.3 × 47.6 cm

Antwerp, The Phoebus Foundation

Generally speaking, entrepreneurs are critical, levelheaded, realistic beings. They can do without heroism or conceit — life is truth enough. They can afford to chortle at jokes that a nobleman may find funny but can’t laugh at, since social decorum requires him to keep a straight face. At the same time, peasants and fools are just yokels and bumpkins, so they’re ideal objects of ridicule and jest. And thus the growing pains of a new social structure make the prosperous towns and cities of the Netherlands the perfect testing ground for a whole new kind of humour.

Peasants, apparently, are doltish and primitive; all they think about is feasting, eating and drinking to excess, and sex. They eagerly indulge in every conceivable vice and have no control over their bestial tendencies. But what else can you expect — peasants are part and parcel of nature, sons of the soil, tasked by God with tilling and growing and breeding. A mission that they carry out with far too much enthusiasm, according to the morally pedantic townsfolk. In the self-satisfied eyes of merchants and entrepreneurs, God made the peasant to be the antithesis of the civilised city dweller, who, if he has urges, knows how to curb them and would never be guilty of laughing too loudly.

GREASY SAUSAGES AND BAWDY BALLADS

Except, that is, when that thin layer of civilisation is briefly scratched away. During the Church’s feasts of fools, the social order is inverted, the world is turned upside down in a jaw-dropping extravaganza of excess. Clerics found foolish kingdoms ruled by child bishops or donkey popes. Venerable brothers dress up in drag, cavort in the choir and bellow bawdy ballads. Greasy sausages are served on the altar and holy water is replaced by piss. Then the monks move out of the church and into the town.

Sooner or later, a party will attract gatecrashers. What started as a parody of ecclesiastical ritual takes on a secular life of its own in the sixteenth century. Tavern-crawling, binge-quaffing citizens treat the world to a view of what they normally keep decorously covered and gleefully moon their shitty bare arses.

Gonzales Family from Igni, c.1575/80

Watercolour and gouache on vellum, 143 × 184 mm

The Four Elements/Washington, National Gallery

Joris Hoefnagel

An unusual feature of this picture is the presence of a Bavarian lion symbol behind the fool, resting his paws on his shoulders.18 His outfit is elaborate: a feathered red cap in an expensive fabric, which matches the warm colour of both his costume and fancy purse (also adorned with gilded lion clasps). Mertl wears large rings with red cut stones and an ostentatious gold and jewelled crucifix on a gold chain at his neck. However, the jester is not glamorised as an individual; his unshaven face and visible tooth compromise his dignity and suggest his outsider role. In a 1598 Munich inventory, the sitter is identified as Mörtl Witz (‘Mertl the Witty’). The Phoebus Foundation owns a most unusual portrait — by the Flemish artist Jan van Hemessen — of a well-dressed but singularly unattractive, wrinkled old woman, who also might have been such a court figure (p. 35). She has been identified as Elizabeth, or ‘Foolish Bess,’ a fool employed by Anne of Hungary (1503–1547), wife of a Habsburg archduke and eventual Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I (1503–1564).19 Despite being dressed in rich court fashion, with bright yellow and green fabric as well as a necklace strung with rings and finely embroidered gold brocade at her brow, her distracted look suggests that this woman was retained to entertain as a natural fool. Additionally, her portrait was associated with other human rarities, such as giants and dwarves.

Closest to the Phoebus female fool is another Flemish painting of a court figure; in this case, a dwarf who served Cardinal Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle (p. 34 right), principal adviser to the regent of the Netherlands, in Brussels. The painter, a Dutch specialist in portraits, especially of Spanish royalty, was Antonis Mor (active 1544–1576/77). 20 This portrait is not only a careful delineation, but also a parody of royal command. To feature a large hunting dog (as Velázquez did later in his Spanish palace decorations of the 1630s) is to emphasise the martial skills of a nobleman, hunting in peacetime; indeed, Titian had famously painted Emperor Charles V with a hunting dog (1533; Madrid, Prado; based on a previous portrait from life by Jacob Seisenegger; 1532, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum). 21 Dressed in elaborately embroidered matching cape, jerkin and cap, and wearing a fine golden chain, Granvelle’s unnamed dwarf stares defiantly out of the picture, though he stands only a head above the dog itself, which he touches familiarly. He carries a sword and a sceptre-like staff, to convey his own mock authority and to reinforce his own seriousness. Both the physical limitations of Granvelle’s dwarf and his courtly mien, now overshadowed rather than dominating the large dog, show how his earnest performance could still provide entertaining royal parody. While one cannot ascribe the Elizabeth portrait

certainly to Hemessen himself, that picture does find its later, Netherlandish echo in the Granvelle Dwarf During the sixteenth century, other such individual human oddities often served at court, just as rare animal specimens were collected in royal menageries. A good example of this kind of rarity is an extraordinary, hairy family from the Canary Islands. 22 Pedro Gonzales (also known as Petrus Gonsalus) and his two oldest children suffered from a congenital illness that covered their entire bodies and faces with hair. As an infant, Pedro was sent to the French court of Henri II and there took on the manners of a nobleman, as well as the name Don Pedro. Later, the family moved to the Farnese Palace in Rome, and their portraits appeared in the Ambras collection of Habsburg Duke Ferdinand II, as well as the court collection, part of the cabinet of curiosities of Bavarian Duke Wilhelm V. In a miniature painting (p. 36) by Joris Hoefnagel, among his diverse images of animal specimens in the manuscript Four Elements (1570–1600), the children of Pedro Gonzales appear on the folio immediately after his own portrait, alongside his unhairy wife. The inscription accompanying Pedro’s image, dated 1582 by the artist himself, reveals some assumptions underlying these rare human specimens:

‘Tenerife bore me, but a miraculous work of nature strewed my whole body with hairs; France, my other mother, nurtured me from a boy up to a virile age, and taught me to cast aside uncivilised manners […] Here you may discern the munificence of nature: those born to us resemble their mother in form and colouring, yet likewise take after their father, as they too are cloaked in hair.’23

Not surprisingly, most court masquerades and other festivities remained internal, reserved for privileged guests (and thoroughly documented earlier in the century for the masques staged by Emperor Maximilian I). Thus portraits of individual court fools, even within such events, are rare. These depictions of individuals, including Gonzales, in a prized manuscript, were almost always made for the enjoyment of their court patrons, sometimes displayed in palace settings.

Jacob Jordaens

The King Drinks, c.1640

Oil on canvas, 156 × 210 cm

Brussels, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium

Hieronymus Bosch

Operation on the Stone of Folly (detail), c.1500-05

Oil on panel, 48.5 × 34.5 cm

Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado

who hides in the shadows under the operating table; he holds up the supply of stones that will be used in the ongoing deceit; he has a marot head up his sleeve, revealing that he is an actual fool, but on his lips is a prominent lock, indicating that he too is supposed to keep his mouth shut and not reveal the deception. A final painting, The Mocking of Human Follies (c.1565; pp. 84-85) from the lifetime of Pieter Bruegel by his Mechelen counterpart, Frans Verbeeck the Elder (c.1510–1570) encapsulates in myriad separate scenes an inventory of the imagery of human folly examined thus far.52 In fact, here the fools, miniature figures, are being exchanged by merchants, as they fill baskets and sacks held by the two traders in the foreground. In the bottom centre, one tiny fool climbs up the head of his trader and attempts to cut out the stone of folly from his forehead. in the lower right corner sits an amorous old fool, wearing a fool’s cap cowl with another tiny fool climbing up his head (a second fool in his sleeve is ringing a bell that hangs on him like an earring); as he embraces his paramour, dressed like a nun, he is getting his pocket picked. Meanwhile, she looks knowingly out of the picture at the viewer. Opposite, in the lower left corner, stands a religious shrine but a false one, containing an owl with eyeglasses of folly together with a candle and a basket of incense.53 This combination conveys another proverb: ‘What good are a candle and glasses if the owl simply refuses to see?’54 Underneath that same tree, a pair of seemingly pious, but likely fraudulent, pilgrims (see Chapter Six) stop to beg some porridge from a couple, while the female of the two breastfeeds one miniature fool and also offers another a spoonful.

In the centre, several characters in varied costumes (including a learned scholar) assemble around a table, and two men in archaic headwear use a scale to compare fools, one of whom is a cleric with a cross. Behind them at another table a wealthy couple (see Chapter Five) is making a selection, though the well-dressed woman has an old woman along with her, like the courtesans with bawds in bordellos (see Chapter Three). Another measurement occupies the centre background; there a full-sized fool in motley balances a single person against a multitude of tiny fools. Nearby, a fresh wagonload of additional fools is being hauled in the centre distance, while to the left a large ocean-going vessel has docked next to a crane to unload a new shipment of imports. The right distance shows our familiar tavern site with peasant dancers and drinkers (see Chapter Four). Suspended above the tavern in a basket on a precarious high wire, a lone fool in costume sits on an egg; this might relate to a proverb that was designed by Bruegel and illustrated in the twelve print roundels by Jan Wierix (c.1568, p. 227), Drunken Fool on an Egg. It sums up the elements of folly concisely: ‘Shame, you pot-bellied drunken fools, always licking and drinking full. Finding yourself like another fool on a dirty egg, you end up in the empty shell.’55 That is, a fool — here a drunkard — may sit on an egg, but he will only hatch more folly.

— Proverbs 1:7

Fear of the Lord is the foundation of true knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and discipline.

ENDNOTES

1 For this antithesis and the best discussions of Folly literature: Joël Lefebvre, Les fols et la folie. Etude sur les genres du comique et la création littéraire en Allemagne pendant la Renaissance (Paris), 1968; Barbara Könneker, Wesen und Wandlung der Narrenidee im Zeitalter des Humanismus (Wiesbaden, 1966); Barbara Swain, Fools and Folly during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (New York, 1932). For the art-historical, conceptual notion of exempla contraria to a presumed ideal or normalcy, Paul Vandenbroeck, Beeld van de andere, vertoog over het zelf (Antwerp, 1987), pp. 40-57; English translation as ‘Genre Paintings as a Collective Process of Inversive Self-Definition, c.1400-c.1800’, Jaarboek Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen, 2003, pp. 137-193; Korine Hazelzet, Verkeerde werelden. Exempla contraria in de Nederlandse beeldende kunst (Leiden, 2007).

2 Sebastian Brant, Das Narrenschiff. Facsimile (Strasbourg, 1912); German ed., Friedrich Zarncke, Das Narrenschiff (Leipzig, 1854); English translation by Edwin Zeydel, The Ship of Fools (New York, 1944). Generally to visual aspects of this chapter, Yona Pinson, The Fools’ Journey (Turnhout, 2008). Translations of Brant below will be Zeydel’s English version, with references to his 1944 publication.

3 Still basic: Charles Schmidt, Histoire littéraire de l’Alsace (Paris, 1879), Vol. I, pp. 189-333; for the broadsheets, Paul Heitz, Flugblätter des Sebastian Brant (Strassburg, 1915).

4 For printing history and influence, Zeydel/Brant, ‘Introduction’, pp. 1-45, esp. p. 32.

5 Zeydel/Brant, Ship of Fools, p. 57.

6 For Christian traditions of the ship, Pinson, Fool’s Journey, pp. 27-33, 53-67, including the wider notion of the late medieval concept of life as a journey or pilgrimage, ibid., pp. 39-41, for which also see especially Pinson, Fools’ Journey, esp. pp. 27-52, 125-148; Gerhard Ladner, ‘Homo Viator: Medieval Ideas on Alienation and Order’, Speculum 42 (1967), pp. 233-259, which concludes with a discussion of the fool, ibid., pp. 257-259. See also Keith Moxey, ‘The Ship of Fools and the Idea of Folly in Sixteenth-Century Netherlandish Literature’, in Sandra Hindman ed., The Early Illustrated Book. Essays in Honor of Lessing J. Rosenwald (Washington, 1982), pp. 86-102.

7 Zeydel/Brant, Ship of Fools, p. 88. For the Power of Women, Pinson, Fools’ Journey, pp. 109-123; Yvonne Bleyerveld, Hoe bedriechlijkck dat die vrouwen zijn. Vrouwen listen in de beeldende kunst in de Nederlanden circa 1350-1650 (Leiden, 2000); Susan L. Smith, The Power of Women.

A Topos in Medieval Art and Literature (Philadelphia, 1995).

8 Zeydel/Brant, Ship of Fools, p. 363.

9 Zeydel/Brant, Ship of Fools, p. 166.

10 See the translation of the Praise of Folly into English by Clarence Miller (New Haven, CT, 2003). Also valuable for connections with art is the French translation by Claude Blum with visual imagery by Yona Pinson, Éloge de la folie illustré par les peintres de la Renaissance du Nord (Paris, 2013). Among analyses of Erasmus’s complex, shifting text, see Sister Geraldine Thompson, Under Pretext of Praise. Satiric Mode in Erasmus’ Fiction (Toronto, 1973), pp. 51-85; on Erasmus and the visual arts, Peter van der Coelen, ed., Images of Erasmus, exh. cat. (Rotterdam: Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, 2008), pp. 213-251.

11 Thompson, Pretext of Praise, p. 53.

12 See note 5, above, and historical overviews: Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism (Ithaca, NY, 1990); Merry Wiesner-Hanks, Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World, 2nd ed., (New York, 2010).

13 Christian Müller, Die Zeichnungen von Hans Holbein dem Jüngeren und Ambrosius Holbein. Katalog der Zeichnungen des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts Teil 2A (Basel, 1996), pp. 50-66, esp. p. 57, plate 13, no. 38; Erika Michael, The Drawings by Hans Holbein the Younger for Erasmus’ ‘Praise of Folly’ (New York: Garland, 1986), esp. 196-222, for fools’ costumes and paraphernalia; the specific drawing is plate xxix. Michael also notes, pp. 210-212, that medieval Carnival fools wore bells, based on agrarian cults, in order to ward off evil spirits and promote fertility.

14 Müller, Zeichnungen, p. 54, no. 22, observes that this imagery depends on Brant’s woodcut, Chapter 60, ‘Of Self-Complacency’ (Zeydel/ Brant, Ship of Fools, p. 202), but without the outstretched tongue, which does appear in the woodcut to Chapter 19, ‘Of Idle Talk’ (ibid., p. 104).

15 Karla Langedijk, ‘Silentium’, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek

15 (1964), pp. 3-18, for the history of this gesture.

16 Netherlandish tronies chiefly postdate the active period of Metsys. Franziska Gottwald, Das Tronie. Muster, Studie und Meisterwerk. Die Genese einer Gattung der Malerei vom 15. Jahrhundert bis zu Rembrandt (Munich, 2011); Dagmar Hirschfelder, Tronie und Porträt in der niederländischen Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 2008); also Hirschfelder and León Krempel, eds., Tronies: das Gesicht in der frühen Neuzeit (Berlin, 2014).

17 Fullest discussion by Keith Moxey, ‘Pieter Bruegel and The Feast of Fools’, Art Bulletin 64 (1982), pp. 640-646. His translation. For the print history, Nadine Orenstein and Manfred Sellink, Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Drawings and Prints, exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001), pp. 251-252, no. 114. They point out that ‘trumpet’ can also be translated as

‘Jew’s harp’, or mouth organ, a much simpler, peasant metal instrument that was often sold with spectacles.

18 For the meaning of the owl in the North, Paul Vandenbroeck, ‘Bubo significans. I. Die Eule als Sinnbild der Schlechtigkeit und Torheit, vor allem in der niederländischen und deutschen Bilddarstellung und bei Jheronimus Bosch’, Jaarboek Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (1985), pp. 19-136; also Eddy de Jongh, Tot Lering en Vermaak, exh. cat. (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 1976), pp. 247-249, no. 65; Heinrich Schwarz and Volker Plagemann, ‘Eule’, in Reallexikon zur deutschen Kunstgeschichte 6 (1973), cols. 267-322.

19 Moxey, ‘Feast of Fools’, p. 643, n. 23, with discussions of other offensive gestures. Also, Ruth Goodman, How to Behave Badly in Elizabethan England (New York, 2018).

20 Walter Gibson, Figures of Speech. Picturing Proverbs in Renaissance Netherlands (Berkeley, 2010), pp. 93-94, fig. 49; Louis Lebeer, Catalogue raisonné des estampes de Pierre Bruegel l’ancien (Brussels, 1969), pp. 155-168, nos. 65-76, esp. p. 162, no. 69. A drawing after this print (Dresden) is dated 1573. Inscription: ‘Hier netten ende trompen ja oock schoon fluijten,/ Gheen beter waren men nu hier in d’landt en vindt.’ Plus, ‘Wech versiet v Crémere loopt elders stuijten,/ Daer t’uolck noch is hoorende doof en siende blindt.’

21 Christiaan Vogelaar et al., eds., Lucas van Leyden en de Renaissance, exh. cat. (Leiden: Lakenhal, 2011), p. 257, no. 55.

22 Alison Stewart, Unequal Lovers. A Study of Unequal Couples in Northern Art (New York, 1977); also Konrad Renger, Die Sprache der Bilder, exh. cat. (Braunschweig: Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, 1978), pp. 111-115, no. 22; De Jongh and Luijten, Mirror of Everyday Life, pp. 80-84, no. 9, for later Dutch examples in prints.

23 Zeydel/Brant, pp. 182-183; see also the colloquy by Erasmus, ‘A Marriage in Name Only’ or ‘The Unequal Match’, published in 1529; Craig Thompson, trans., The Colloquies of Erasmus (Chicago, 1965), pp. 401-412.

24 Lawrence [Larry] Silver, ‘The Ill-Matched Pair by Quinten Massys’, Studies in the History of Art National Gallery of Art 6 (1974), pp. 104-123, with citations of verse warnings against the allure of loose women by Antwerp rederijkers

25 Also included in Silver, Ill-Matched Pair, as p. 116, fig. 9, is a group image from the Massys entourage (now Antwerp, The Phoebus Foundation) of an unequal couple, an old woman and young man at table, surrounded by other grotesque half-length figures.

26 See above, note 5. Lucas van Leyden produced two print series of the Power of Women and several individual prints; Vogelaar, Lucas van Leyden, pp. 270-276, nos. 71-74, including a lone surviving woodcut of Aristotle and Phyllis (Paris; no. 72).

27 Vogelaar, Lucas van Leyden, p. 319, no. 113. Discussed in the context of the Prodigal Son parable, when the callow youth spends his inheritance foolishly in a tavern (Luke 15:13) by Konrad Renger, Lockere Gesellschaft. Zur Ikonographie des Verlorenen Sohnes und von Wirthshausszenen in der niederländischen Malerei (Berlin, 1970), pp. 24-25, fig. 2.

28 Vogelaar, Lucas van Leyden, pp. 264-265, no. 63. In the centre distance the tiny figure of the converted saint Mary Magdalene appears, transported bodily to heaven by a team of angels, reversing the sensual indulgence of the foreground with this later scene. See also Peter van der Coelen and Friso Lammertse, De ontdekking van het dagelijks leven van Bosch tot Bruegel (Rotterdam, 2015), pp. 76-77, fig. 63; for the early Lucas engraving (c.1508), Young Couple by Night with a Fool, ibid., fig. 65.

29 The drawing design for the print (Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett) is dated 1558. Orenstein/Sellink, Bruegel. Drawings and Prints, pp. 170-172, nos. 60-61; see also Matthias Winner, ‘Zu Bruegels ‘Alchimist’, in Otto von Simon and Winner, eds., Pieter Bruegel und seine Welt (Berlin, 1979), pp. 193-202.

30 Lawrence Principe & Lloyd DeWitt, Transmutations: Alchemy in Art (Philadelphia, 2002). See especially the biting brunaille (1630) by Adriaen Pietersz van de Venne, titled Rijcke-Armoede (Rich Poverty), ibid., p. 19.

31 Zeydel/Brant, p. 327, no. 102. The verses go on, p. 329: ‘But let there not forgotten be/ Our quite deceptive alchemy.’

32 For the findings of the Bosch Research and Conservation Project, Matthijs Ilsink et al., Hieronymus Bosch. Painter and Draughtsman. Catalogue Raisonné (Antwerp, 2016), pp. 316-335, no. 19B. The very visible underdrawing has led some scholars, notably Fritz Koreny, Bosch. Die Zeichnungen (Turnhout, 2012), pp. 236-241, no. 17, to posit a different hand from the Bosch workshop, whom he dubs the ‘Painter of the Prado Haywain’, as the actual artist. For an earlier discussion of Bosch and Brant, disregarding any direct connection, Charles Cuttler, ‘Bosch and the Narrenschiff: A Problem in Relationships’, Art Bulletin 51 (1969), pp. 272-276.

33 Cuttler, ‘Bosch and Narrenschiff’, p. 273, fig. 4, citing numerous examples made in Bruges: the Mayer van den Bergh Breviary, the Hennessy Hours, the Golf Book and the Da Costa Hours, in major rare book rooms. Also Ilsink et al., Bosch Catalogue, p. 326-328, fig. 19.8.

34 Herman Pleij, Het gilde van de Blauwe Schuit: litteratur, volksfeest en burgermoraal in de late middeleeuwen (Amsterdam, 1983), esp. pp. 187-236; also Ben Parsons, ed., Comic Drama in the Low Countries, c.1450-1560:

Jan van Hemessen

The Surgeon, or The Extraction of the Stone of Madness, c.1540-50

Oil on panel, 100 × 141 cm

Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado

is both intimate and relaxed. He, in turn, exchanges glances with her and rests a hand on the edge of the board. Although the scene unfolds in a domestic interior, both figures are well dressed as if for socializing outdoors, especially his flat cap. Moreover, the table is further ornamented with a bowl of fruit at the lower left — possibly a suggestion of a fruitful marriage, but certainly another marker of wealth in the variety of imported tastes.33 In addition, at the lower right corner is an exotic pet: an African grey parrot, a bird favoured by collectors in Europe, known for both its intelligence and its longevity.34

Some sixteenth-century painters continued the late medieval heritage of the love garden, depicting elite indulgences there. The painter Ambrosius Benson (active 1518–1550), originally from Lombardy but active in Bruges in the entourage of Gerard David, continued the tradition.35 Benson’s imagery featured outdoor concerts with flute and lute accompanying feasting and lovemaking around a table, notably in his Outdoors Musical Party (c.1540/45, Basel, Kunstmuseum Basel; p. 166).36 These images have been mistakenly identified as Prodigal Son images, but there is no tavern setting (cf. Jan van Hemessen, 1536; p. 95 top), nor is there any suggestion of a denouement of repentance. While the scene unfolds in an isolated bower, the background setting features a villa-like structure beside a lake, reinforcing the privilege and wealth of this group, clearly conveyed by their rich costumes. Their repast on the table includes a glass of wine and expensive imported fruit. Behind the group, to the right, is a small black servant in livery, carrying an additional transverse flute. The erotic atmosphere is evident from the intertwined couples with arms draped around each other. Although there is no obvious fool present to underscore the excess of such a scene, it forms the kernel of an entirely new painting category — ‘the merry company’ — which would endure, as we shall see, into the seventeenth century.37 Benson followed up this scene with an image of a cluster of fashionable, elite couples dancing outdoors (c.1540; Salt Lake City, Museum of Fine Arts: Utah).

Following on the tradition of Benson’s musical parties in the open air, a later Bruges painter, Pieter Pourbus (1523/1524–1584) produced his own version of our theme: The Allegory of True Love (c.1547; London, The Wallace Collection; p. 169) — the painter’s only secular-themed painting.39 It is an allegory on love, so it could easily have appeared in Chapter Two or Three, but it appears here because of the rich tradition of aristocratic figures indulging their festive appetites outdoors. As usual, a sumptuous table piled with delicacies and metal plates and a jug fills the centre of the composition.

Jan van Hemessen

Double Portrait of Husband and Wife Playing Tables [Backgammon], 1532

Oil on panel, 110.3 × 127.5 cm Antwerp, The Phoebus Foundation

Ambrosius Benson Outdoors Musical Party, c.1540/45

Oil on panel, 91 × 111 cm

Basel, Kunstmuseum Basel

Several flutes and a page of sheet music hint at future accompaniment, with an instrument that is often associated with deception or folly. The music itself can be identified: a chanson about a ‘gay shepherd’.40 As identified by Paul Huvenne, a few female figures are inconspicuously labelled on their garments with Greek names of personifications (e.g. Pasithea, Aglaia and Euphrosyne, the Three Graces, associates of Venus herself), even though half of them are topless. Three of the men are famous lovers from classical literature: Adonis the hunter on the left, Acontius near the centre in urban costume, and Daphnis, appropriately dressed as a shepherd. The remaining women and all the men wear expensive fashions. The one woman who has no other female rival is Fidutia (Trust), who sits at the centre of the composition, wearing a cross at her bosom and with modest, downcast eyes. She is paired with a male figure, Sapiens (Wisdom), in contrast to the more transitory, physical aspects of love, associated with Venus and the Graces. The remaining female figures are all personifications, paired with the Graces into triads of lovers, including the topless females. Open-hearted Cordialitas doubles Aglaia, who cups her own breast. Daphnis almost acts out intercourse, with his leg slung over the lap of Euphrosyne and a phallic flute in his hand, while her hand points to the wine jug. An additional pair of figures in the lower corners respond to the social setting: at the left, a tiny Eros with his arrows turns inwards; at the right, a fool with a marot crouches like a warning guardian. He operates simultaneously as the truth teller and as the observer of folly in love.

Use of such allegorical figures connects with a strong tradition in Bruges of rhetoricians (rederijkers), particularly their leader Cornelis Everaert (c.1480–1556) and the city secretary Eduard de Dene, one of whose refreinen verses repeats a line, ‘Thus do I find most of the amorousness of women.’41 Those De Dene verses, in turn, make evident the role of Trust in love (lines 16–21), and thus serve as a verbal equivalent of Pourbus’s painting. Those lines also followed rederijker convention, penning their refrains in varied standard keys: amoreuse, devoted to courtly love and faithfulness, but also as folly verses, in het zotte, often about overt sexuality.42

Although most of these outdoor aristocratic indulgences seldom refer in any direct way to the biblical parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11–32; cf. Jan van Hemessen’s Brussels painting; 1536; p. 95 top), a panel of the Prodigal Son (dated c.1567–68) by Maarten van Heemskerck (1498–1574) has recently been rediscovered in a Brussels private collection.43 However, this version unfolds not in a brothel, like Van Hemessen’s panel, but rather as an outdoor ‘merry company’ in the open air, beneath

a canopy suspended from a central tree. Thus it responds more directly to the Bruges pictorial tradition of aristocratic outdoor festivities by both Benson and Pourbus. These harlots are scantily but expensively clad, and they are also musical entertainers: the entire composition is littered with various instruments; viols, flutes and lutes are prominent across the foreground, alongside songbooks. As expected, the bounteous display of imported fruits sits at the feet of the lone male in the centre, and he is receiving a glass of wine. In fact, the only real clue to the illicit nature of this love fest is the presence in the upper left corner of an aged bawd, with exposed sagging breasts, a figure that we have already met in tavern scenes and in Van Hemessen’s Prodigal Son. But along with the diaphanous garb worn by the women, which reveals their breasts almost as blatantly as the allegorical figures in the Pourbus work, the sexuality is also explicit here, as the woman closest to the Prodigal Son slings her exposed leg over his thigh, a frequent visual euphemism for intercourse itself.44 As Ilja Veldman notes: ‘The Brussels Prodigal Son points out the consequences of becoming ensnared by bad company, the lustful effect of music and an improper use of the senses.’ In that respect, again without any background denouement of the parable’s resolution, Van Heemskerck’s Prodigal Son acts out the folly possible for aristocratic pleasure-seekers in their ‘merry company’.

Banqueting moved indoors and took place at night in the work of Joos van Winghe (1542/44–1603). His Nocturnal Banquet with Masquerade (1588; pp. 170-71), replicated in an engraving by Johannes Sadeler portrays unrestrained nocturnal revelry by rich and sophisticated participants.45 Van Winghe was already strongly associated with the very same behaviour that is depicted in his biography in Karel van Mander’s 1604 Schilderboeck (folio 264v): ‘He enjoyed company, though he was no drunkard, taking pleasure in passing time chatting over a jug of wine.’ The print comes with a large internal inscription in Latin, from the Wisdom of Solomon (2:6, 9), ironical words spoken by the wicked in advocacy of indulgence, which continue across tablets to the left and right of the central niche containing a nude Venus figure.46 Indeed, the two statues in the flanking niches are Bacchus and Ceres, combining to form the erotic and sensually indulgent classical phrase of Terence (The Eunuch), collected by Erasmus in his widely circulated and reprinted Adagia: ‘Without Bacchus and Ceres, Venus freezes’ (see p. 230).47

Below the Van Winghe print, however, a biblical extract from the Apocrypha (Sirach 19:2) intones a warning that one should curb one’s appetites: ‘Wine and women lead intelligent men astray, and the man who consorts with harlots is very

CHAPTER VI — BEGGARS AND OTHER BEASTS

pp. 210-11

Sebastiaen Vrancx

Allegorical Battle between Armed Monkeys and Cats, c.1630

Oil on panel, 65.5 × 105.5 cm

Antwerp, The Phoebus Foundation

David Teniers the Younger

A Festival of Monkeys, 1633

Oil on copper, 33.4 × 42.5 cm

Antwerp, The Phoebus Foundation

TEXT

Larry Silver with an introduction by Katharina Van Cauteren

TRANSLATION INTRODUCTION

Lee Preedy

EDITING

Cath Phillips

Leen Kelchtermans

IMAGE RESEARCH

Séverine Lacante

IMAGE EDITING

Katrijn Van Bragt

PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Hadewych Van den Bossche

PUBLISHER

Gautier Platteau

GRAPHIC DESIGN

Paul Boudens

PRINTING

die Keure, Bruges, Belgium

BINDING

IBW, Oostkamp, Belgium

with thanks to Niels Schalley

ISBN 978 94 6388 781 6 D/2022/11922/73

NUR 646

© Hannibal Books, 2022

www.hannibalbooks.be

Cover image

Unknown Artist

Fool Looking through his Fingers, c.1520

Oil on panel, 45 × 30,5 cm

Antwerp, The Phoebus Foundation

Backcover image

Jan Massijs and workshop

Peasant Merry Company (detail), c.1560–65

Oil on panel, 51.5 × 67 cm

Antwerp, The Phoebus Foundation

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