The Seven Deadly Sins in Bruegels Time by ACC Art Books

The Seven Deadly Sins: Was Pieter Bruegel a Visual Thinker?

DORIEN TAMIS

Nowadays Pieter Bruegel (1525/30-1569) is known above all for his paintings – unique, individual works like Christ Carrying the Cross and The Peasant Wedding – but he initially gained renown as a designer of prints produced in what were large numbers for that time. One of the highlights among his print designs was a series of seven engravings, each of which depicted one of the seven deadly sins in the form of wimmelbilder: complex images teeming with narratives, details and meanings.1 When they first appeared in 1558, the Antwerp publisher Hieronymus Cock (1518-1570) mentioned alongside his own name that of Pieter Bruegel as the inventor (Latin for designer) and the monogram of Pieter van der Heyden (c. 1530-1572/76) as the engraver (cat. 1A-G).

Cock, Bruegel, or perhaps someone else: whose idea was it to publish the series, and who was responsible for the iconographic scheme? No evidence has survived. All seven design drawings by Bruegel do still exist, however (fig. 1).2 The earliest is that depicting Avarice, or Avaritia, made in 1556; the other six are dated 1557. All seven drawings have been pounced in order to transfer the image to the engraving plate. But this is not the only indication of their function. There is nothing rudimentary or exploratory about Bruegel’s drawings of The Seven Deadly Sins. They are rendered meticulously and graphically, so that an engraver could easily transfer them to the copper plate.3 Apart from a few adjustments, where the substance of the image posed too much of a risk in a country riven by religious and political conflict (see below), Van der Heyden did not make any significant changes to them.

Though these are not spontaneous sketches, they are drawings made by Bruegel’s own hand. As such, they appeal more to our urge to get as close as possible to an artist than a print would. So why opt for the engravings as a starting point? Firstly, given the fact that the ink in the drawings has faded over time, well-preserved prints can give us a better impression of the original light-and-dark effects as Bruegel intended them.4 More importantly, it was prints that spread Bruegel’s fame as an artist far and wide – and very rapidly too. While Bruegel’s paintings – on which he focused from 1562 onwards – were seen by only a limited audience, his engravings were in much wider circulation. A copper plate could be used to make some thirteen hundred prints before it wore out, and the number of surviving copies of The Seven

Detail of cat. 3

Attributed to Jan Mandijn after Pieter Bruegel I

The Seven Deadly Sins: Pride / Superbia, after 1558

paintings by both Floris and Bruegel at his country home shows that the contrast was not regarded as troubling at the time, but rather stimulating.41 Bruegel did not stay in Antwerp for long, and he left to travel in Italy from 1552 to 1554. His travelling companion may have been the Romanist Maerten de Vos (1532-1603), one of Frans Floris’ many students. Bruegel’s impressions of southern Europe do not appear to have left any discernible mark on The Seven Deadly Sins. De Vos, on the other hand, later produced some idiosyncratic combinations of contrasting styles, as in a painting that was once the lid of a virginal, a kind of harpsichord (cat. 9, cf. cat. 12).42 The ‘main characters’ in this image of The Temptation of Saint Anthony, the desert father himself and a seductive woman, are definitly in the Romanist style. The sinful temptations to which Anthony was subjected – the copulating dogs in Lust, the winged demon with a sack of money from Greed and the monster with a spoonbill’s beak from Sloth – are however taken from Bruegel, or from Bosch via Bruegel.

School of Maerten de Vos

The Temptation of Saint Anthony on the lid of a virginal, 1580-1599. Oil on panel, 46.6 x 176 cm Antwerp: Museum Mayer van den Bergh Inv. no. MMB.0091

Photo Bart Huysmans, Michel Wuyts

Jheronimus Bosch

> p. 124-125

It is an indisputable fact that Bosch was Bruegel’s great inspiration. His images swarm with demons and devils – and the distinctive ‘koppoters’ (literally: ‘head-feeters’, figures that consist of a head on feet) that feature in each of The Seven Deadly Sins can even be regarded as a playful reference to Bruegel’s predecessor. The desolate scenes as a whole, with fires blazing in the background, bizarre buildings and groups of naked people criss-crossing the landscape, are also reminiscent of the hellish scenes that Bosch and his followers depicted to represent the end of times (cat. 63).43 A monk playing bagpipes, the hollow tree that serves as a love nest, topped with a couple making love in a mussel in Lust; a huge kingfisher in a dead tree stump on the left in Sloth; and the monster with a spoonbill’s beak pulling a bed along (cf. cat. 9) are the few elements drawn directly from surviving work by Bosch.44 Some of Bruegel’s koppoters and hybrid monsters, figures bent over to stick their nose in their own anus, can be found directly in a late-fifteenth-century Last Judgment by Alart du Hameel (1449-1509) (fig. 7). Du Hameel was involved at the same time as Bosch in decorating St. John’s Cathedral in Den Bosch, and must have shared a lot of his pictorial language. As such,

The Reformation of the Seven Deadly Sins A Pictorial Tradition in an Age of Religious Reform

SASKIA COHEN-WILLNER

How will he have stood there, Jaco de Suuanenburch – or Jacob van Swanenburg – of Leiden (1578-1638), when he was summoned to appear before the ecclesiastical court in Naples in 1608? The charge was not trivial. Van Swanenburg, who specialised in the spoockerijen (ghoul) genre, was said to have offered images of witchcraft for sale at his workshop.1 An association with witchcraft could mean death, but things ended well for the painter.2 He would continue to live and work in Naples for another decade or so, before he and his Italian wife Margherita Cardone and their children finally settled in the Northern Netherlands in 1618.3 Van Swanenburg’s spoockerijen supplied a niche market in Italy for images of witchcraft and hell, catering for the tastes of collectors who favoured such bizarre scenes. These images, like the The Last Judgment and the Seven Deadly Sins (cat. 16), encompass a strange mix of northern, Italian and Spanish visual idioms, full of references to early greats like Bosch, Bruegel and Michelangelo, and also to lesser gods like the Spaniard Pedro de Rubiales, a former employee of Vasari, who was active in and around Naples, and died in Rome in circa 1560.4

Hybrid or not, the end of times has clearly arrived in this image. Everything swirls and blazes, bathed in the red glow of hellfire, while hideous monsters and beasts round up and herd away the naked sinners. Some believe they can find refuge with Charon, who welcomes them onto his ferry, but the remarkable thing here is that there is no salvation to be had. Satan’s dark empire is the all-encompassing reality. There is no risen Christ to lead the dead out of limbo (Tamis fig. 2). The spot where one would expect him to appear, at the hideous open mouth of hell, has been used for something else: an allegorical aside featuring couples dressed in contemporaneous apparel – personifications of the seven deadly sins. The message is clear: surrendering to the seven deadly sins will bring humanity to this hellish new reality, a reality that the naked sinners doomed for all eternity have brought upon themselves.

Detail of cat. 18

Lucas Cranach II

Christ and the Woman taken in Adultery, 1549

Gillis Mostaert I Haywain with the Seven Deadly Sins, 1570-1579 Oil on panel, 115.5 x 202.5 cm

Utrecht: Museum het Catharijneconvent

on loan from Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam Inv. no. RMCC s44

Photo Ruben de Heer

The Beauty of Simplicity

The Seven Deadly Sins Among Priceless Artworks and Cheap ‘Consumer Art’

JIP VAN REIJEN

How does one know whether one is living a good life? This is one of life’s great questions, to which humanity has been seeking an answer since time immemorial. Quite apart from the various interpretations, the answer is generally complex. Two seemingly plain Jesuit prints (cat. 36 and 37), which have been subjected to much cutting and pasting, depict the answer in stark terms. How did the Jesuits believe we should live? A heart with the suffering of Christ at its centre, and profession of the Christian faith, with references to fasting (fish) and communion (the host).1 This will keep sin, represented by animals, at a safe distance from your heart. How not to live? With a heart full of sin, caused by comic novels or spirited song.2

Areview of an exhibition will usually discuss the aesthetic qualities of the art. Such critiques rarely consider art of lesser quality, such as that made for mass consumption. As a result, such works are rarely shown in public. May an art object tell its story only if it fits the perfect aesthetic template? In this exhibition, an explicit choice has been to show such art, unknown to many people, among the masterpieces. It is precisely in the artistic margins that the essence of the life and the concerns of a society can be found. Like concise summaries, they provide a glimpse of the meaning of the seven deadly sins in a way that could be understood by the general public, and still can. By comparing them with masterpieces this essay explores the benefits of marginal art: work that can act as a thermometer of popularity, featuring creative choices of image, bringing together various concepts and ultimately forging a crystal-clear pictorial idiom.

New art for a new audience

It became increasingly common in the Southern Netherlands during the sixteenth century for art to be created for a new, art-loving audience: the wealthy middle classes. This dramatically changed the landscape of art. Workshops that had previously produced art for a small wealthy audience scaled up and started to export and sell art on the open market. Art was able to assume different forms, from rapidly distributed prints, paintings on panel and Tüchlein (glue-size paintings) to alabaster figurines and carved altarpieces.3 This last group of objects, the altarpieces, became a popular export product and can now be found in many European countries.

Pieter Dell

Six of the Seven Deadly Sins (Sloth is missing), c. 1535-1540

Pear wood, partially gilded, ranging from 280 x 95 x 70 mm to 280 x 136 x 70 mm

Nuremberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseum

Inv. nos. Pl.O.768-Pl.O.773

Photo M. Runge Best

Temptation in Female Form

The Genesis of the Pictorial Tradition of the Seven Deadly Sins

WENDELIEN VAN WELIE-VINK

In a hideous scene, depicted in an early twelfth-century style, two women are engaged in furious combat (fig. 1). The woman on the left wears chain mail over her long red robe. With a determined look, she sticks a spear into the neck of her opponent. The force of the attack causes the victim to fall backwards, her hair flying. Her mouth is open wide, in dismay, and blood gushes from her throat. This is an image of Chastity vanquishing Lust. It is an illustration in an ancient text, the Psychomachia (‘The War of the Soul’), written in the fourth century AD by the Latin poet Prudentius (348-413).1 In this work, Prudentius describes the pitched battle between virtues and sins. Seven fights take place, in each of which a personification of a virtue does battle with a sin.2 The fights are fierce and gory, and they all end badly for the sins. We have already seen Lust’s throat being slashed. Following Lust, the other sins also meet with violence. Faith, for example, beats the brains out of Idolatry, Greed is strangled and Discord has her tongue pierced with a spear. After these horrific clashes, Prudentius relates how, finally, a temple is built in the soul, where Wisdom (Sapientia) resides as queen of all virtues.

Although Prudentius’ poem is regarded as the first Medieval allegorical work combining elements from classical antiquity and Christianity, he was certainly not the first to present an account of allegories doing battle with each other. Some of the Psychomachia’s huge popularity was down to the fact that it expressed something that has concerned humanity in all cultures down the ages: the battle between good and evil, the quest to do good and avoid the bad.

Evagrius Ponticus brings order to the chaos

The seven virtues and seven sins in the Psychomachia are not the seven deadly sins which we encounter centuries later in the prints designed by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. In antiquity, there was no precise definition of virtues and sins, or indication of which virtue could chal-

Pieter Aertsen

The Last Judgment, c. 1560

Oil on panel, 127 x 149 cm

Alkmaar: Kunsthandel Bijl-Van-Urk

Photo René Gerritsen

Detail from main panel of cat. 64

Hermann Tom Ring

Triptych featuring the Triumph of Death and The Last Judgment, c. 1550-1555

Confound the Devil!* (Literary Essay)

LEEN HUET

Anno Domini 1552, in Venice, the day following the Ascension of Our Lord Abraham Ortelius to his sister Anna, in Antwerp

Dear Sister,

Jean Renialme will deliver this letter to your hand. We arrived safely in the city on the water a week ago. The surrounding land is like the polders around Antwerp: flat and full of ditches, mist, reeds, tides. And from a distance the city appears like a dream, a mirage as described by travellers in the Arabian deserts. But their mirages are oases, a spring and palm trees. Ours is this city, with its opulent buildings, domes and towers. Our home city of Antwerp is wealthy, but Venice is wealthier: the merchants here live in palaces that look Moorish. Their warehouses are down by the water, and above they receive their guests in halls of marble and stucco. There they also keep their books and treasures from around the world, in smaller chambers of inlaid wood. From here, Messire Marco Polo departed for the east, for the court of the great Khan in 1271. I have seen here an old manuscript in which he gives an account of his journey. How I would love to buy it! But it is too expensive, the more so because it contains maps, coarse and rough as they were once drawn. On the island of Murano, at the church of S. Michele, I also saw the famous great map of the world painted a hundred years ago by Fra Mauro. On parchment, in rich colours: truly magnificent. I was sorry that you were not there to admire it yourself. I hope that our business in Antwerp is prospering. Were you able to colour the maps for Captain ‘t Serstevens?

We hope presently to see the famous breviary with the miniatures from Bruges and Ghent at Palazzo Grimani. Now we have presented our letters of recommendation we await the response of Bishop Grimani, who will propose a date for our visit. We know that his family also possesses panels by Jheronimus Bosch; it is whispered that one of them shows the pilgrimage of the soul after death, or during death. A shaft of light, says Jean Renialme, who saw the work some years ago. As a consequence of an inheritance dispute, the panels are now in secure safekeeping at the Doge’s Palace. There is probably little chance that we shall see them. My friend Brueghel and I have however already paid a visit to the renowned master Titian, court painter to our emperor, as was Brueghel’s master Coecke, with honour, God rest his soul.

Hermann Tom Ring

Triptych with the Triumph of Death and the Last Judgment, c. 1550-1555

Oil on panel, 82 x 75 cm (main panel)

81 x 30 cm (side panels) 98 x 92 x 13.5 (whole)

Utrecht: Museum het Catharijneconvent, gift Inv. no. ABM s40

Photo Ruben de Heer

Bonnefanten is subsidised by Limburg provincial authority, the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science and the VriendenLoterij. The exhibition and this publication have been sponsored by the Turing Foundation, the Cultuurfonds (thanks to its Prince Fund), the Mondriaan Funds, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Phoebus Foundation, the Gravin van Bylandt Stichting and the Hendrik Muller Fund.

Credits

Exhibition

Artistic director: Stijn Huijts

Curators: Dorien Tamis and Jip van Reijen

Published by Bonnefanten, Maastricht Waanders Publishers, Zwolle

Authors

Dorien Tamis

Jip van Reijen

Saskia Cohen-Willner

Wendelien van Welie

Leen Huet

Editing

Dorien Tamis

Jip van Reijen

Image editing Mees Knarren

Text editing Lilian Eefting, Leef in tekst

Translation Sue McDonnell

Design Frank de Wit

Lithography Benno Slijkhuis, Wilco Art Books

Printing Wilco Art Books, Amersfoort

Acknowledgements

Thanks also to the entire team at Bonnefanten, to all lenders, and to Joost Vander Auwera, Rob Compaijen, Daniël Christiaens, Saskia CohenWillner, Marjan Debaene, Breghtje Dik, Michiel Franken, Rianneke van der Houwen, Leen Huet, Maartje de Jong, Tobias Kämpf, Jos Koldeweij, Huigen Leeflang, Maximiliaan Martens, Manfred Sellink, Hugo van der Velden, Evelyne Verheggen, Ed van der Vlist, Wendelien van Welie-Vink and Lieke Wijnia.

ISBN 978 94 6262 586 0