Inside Bruegel: The Play of Images in Children's Games & Pieter Bruegel: Parables of Order and Enterprise. . - book review

EDWARD SNOW

Inside Bruegel: The Play of Images in Children's Games

New York: North Point Press, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997. 248 pp.; 1 color ill., 150 b/w ills. $40

ETHAN MATT KAVALER

Pieter Bruegel: Parables of Order and Enterprise

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 403 pp.; 139 b/w ills. $80

How does one confront Bruegel's Children's Games as a work of art? The challenge has rarely been taken up by art historians, who, for the most part, have devoted their energies to identifying the individual games represented and to puzzling out their moral significations. An exception to this approach is Hans Sedlmayr's 1934 essay "Bruegel's Macchia," which has recently appeared in English translation. (1) According to Sedlmayr, figures and objects in Children's Games appear as abstracted shapes and patches of color that are not integrated into a spatial setting but are dispersed over the picture surface in a seemingly random configuration. Such a composition both registers and produces an experience of estrangement that the Viennese critic compares to the work of "modern" painters like Giorgio de Chirico. To Sedlmayr, Bruegel's children appear as spotlike figures who summon up the specter of the masses and who, according to Sedlmayr's fascist anthropology, belong to the category of the only liminally human. (2)

Edward Snow's Inside Bruegel: The Play of Images in Children's Games (an expanded presentation of a groundbreaking study that Snow published in 1983) offers an important corrective to Sedlmayr's account. (3) Snow insists on the way in which Bruegel's playing children "come alive": how the kinetic energies that animate his carefully individuated figures elicit the viewer's empathetic responses. Far from accepting Sedlmayr's description of Children's Games as a picture of atomized forms that are randomly distributed across the picture surface, Snow points to the patterned arrangement of figures, shapes, and colors in Bruegel's composition and the way it is built up out of antithetically paired motifs. Paired figures and figure groups are clustered and distributed in such a way as to occasion an extended sequence of dialectical reflections on such themes as innocence and experience, isolation and sociability, nature and culture, and so forth. As this suggests, Snow is primarily concerned with Bruegel as a thinke r, not a maker. In this Snow falls in line with most recent writers, who look to Children's Games primarily as an interpretative challenge. But unlike earlier commentators who have asserted that the activities depicted in the picture serve collectively to support an easily enunciated moral argument--whether affirming the innocence of childhood or the folly of mankind--Snow makes the case for a more complex pictorial intention. (4) Snow shows how "motifs ... are linked by complicated permutations and inversions, not by simple repetition. They imply an authorial sensibility more inclined to make distinctions than to generalize, and to make them more in experiential than in moral terms" (p. 69).

Snow makes his case by analyzing specific examples; his treatment of the central vignette of boys riding piggyback and playing tug-of-war is characteristic of Snow's powers of evocative description:

Bruegel can transport us across four centuries into the immediate kinesis of the game....The collective muscular energy the players expend seems to energize the image and leap across the belted loop from one contending group to the other. It is as if the game holds out the human bond as a synaptic gap. And with this idea active in the image, many other issues of the social body come into play: cooperation based on opposition, the individual's visceral experience versus anonymous collective purpose, power struggles taking place on the backs of the laboring classes, linear energy bound in circular configurations, and opponents as stabilizing counterparts. A self-contained detail becomes a switching point where all sorts of thematic tracks intersect. (pp. 3-4)

Snow asserts that this vignette, centrally placed in Bruegel's composition, serves as the "'hub' around which the games in the central foreground turn" (p. 98), and that a number of those encircling games may be viewed as variations on some of the same themes. Other pairs of vignettes counterpoise children with outstretched limbs to children who are drawn in on themselves; still others counterpoise boys engaged in strenuous, aggressive activities to girls involved in solitary, contemplative pleasures. Snow draws attention to the differences between the activities of children playing in the "city" space at the back of the right side of the painting and those of the children in the "country" space on the left. Whereas the children in the urban prospect "are unwittingly caught in a funneling movement that absorbs individual children and their separate energies into patterns of conformity," the children in the pastoral setting "express a creaturely at-homeness," in a sustaining order that is in nature, and includ es humans in the same way it does trees and streams" (p. 88).

Snow repeatedly stresses the openness of the interpretative response that these antithetical arrangements are designed to occasion. He warns against relying too rigidly on the kinds of evidence art historians have traditionally used to guide their interpretations: ethnographic information used to identify the individual games; iconographic evidence to decode their emblematic significance; and iconological evidence to delineate 16th-century cultural attitudes toward childhood, folly, and education. (5) Contextual information, he argues, should be used "as a complicating factor, a fund of possible connotations rather than a controlling frame" (p. 8).

The results of Snow's approach are a dazzling set of readings--primarily of Children's Games, but also of the Vienna Peasant Kermis, Justice, and other works more briefly mentioned. Inside Bruegel is at once a challenge to the discipline of art history and a tour de force of criticism. Guided by Snow's deft analyses, one repeatedly has the experience of discovering something previously unnoticed in Bruegel's work.

The art historian who is concerned to "get things right" might nonetheless find a few things to query in Snow's account. Of key importance to his interpretative strategy is the viewer's intuitive understanding of the "primary" evidence of the bodily movements of Bruegel's children and the motives those movements betray. Grasping the "meaning" of Children's Games depends in the first instance on accurately identifying what the children are doing. If the game or action is misunderstood, difficulties arise. One example is the vignette of an older figure pulling a blue coat off a group of very young children who have been clustered beneath it. It is evident from the fold pattern in the cloth and from her single-handed gesture that the "finder" is lifting the cloak up and drawing it away from the children; the game being played appears to be one of concealment and discovery. Snow, however, asserts that the older girl is covering" the children with her "apron," and he goes on to construe the vignette as a virtual e mblem of the maternal "grace" that still protects the very young (pp. 67-69, 143-47). In my view, Snow's account approaches the sentimental and rings false to the tone of the painting. I think Snow offers this interpretation, in part, to dispute the importance "iconographers" have attributed to the blue cloak as a reference to the themes of deception and folly. Leaving those themes aside (which I agree have been overworked), it still seems to me that it would have been more fruitful to consider the vignette as one of the many variations the picture presents on the theme of vision and visibility.

Another concern has to do with Snow's stress on the way Bruegel's paintings generate broadly ontological reflections regarding the "human constants beneath history [which] ... persist unchanged" (p. 57). To this way of thinking, Children's Games offers an occasion to ponder the primordial human impulses that underlie culture rather than the rule-bound activities that function to induct children into culturally sanctioned roles. For Snow, therefore, the differences between the behavior of boys and girls instantiate instinctual differences between the sexes. Boys' activities appear as "demonic," "violent," "aggressive," and issuing from a will to dominate. The girls, in contrast, appear as "rooted," "self-sufficient," "exploratory," and motivated by an inclination to remain "contentedly in place." This is crudely put and admittedly oversimplifies Snow's subtle and sympathetic characterizations of the figures in the painting. Still, Snow's discussion of gender differences grated on me, not only because of its es sentializing assumptions but also because it neglects the equally compelling evidence the painting offers about how gender difference is linked to custom and convention.

The older children get, in Breugel's painting, the more differentiated their activities become--especially after boys shed their skirts or dresses. Once boys start wearing pants it becomes easier for them to stand on their heads, twirl on railings, straddle fences, play leapfrog, and walk on stilts. The boy and girl "headstanders" in the fenced enclosure on the left movingly speak to girls' exclusion from these activities. The girl (she is not mentioned by Snow) appears to be less successful in getting her feet off the ground than the boy is. Her skirt covers her head; her exposed backside eloquently signals the ridicule such an attempt by a girl can elicit. But there is nothing to indicate that the impulse to display her athletic prowess is not there. If few of the girls here participate in the games of skill and contestation, we should bear in mind that it was not deemed appropriate for girls to play them. In the world of 16th-century children's games, impulse is always and already constrained by social pos sibility.

Ethan Matt Kavaler's Pieter Bruegel: Parables of Order and Enterprise, in the series of Cambridge Studies in Netherlandish Visual Culture, considers the ways in which a number of works by Bruegel address social and economic questions that preoccupied the merchants and humanists who formed Bruegel's circle of patrons and friends. Kavaler demonstrates how Bruegel's works engage the themes of peasant labor (Landscape with the Fall of Icarus), commerce (Icarus again, the prints of Elck, and The Fight of the Piggy Banks and the Strong Boxes), festive celebration (The Battle between Carnival and Lent, Peasant Wedding Feast, and Peasant Kermis), and conflicts between the individual and the community (Magpie on the Gallows, The Bee Keepers, The Nest Robber).

Kavaler follows Snow in pointing to Bruegel's pictorial strategy of contrasting antithetical motifs and arranging compositions in binary patterns, so as to promote dialectical reflection. But Kavaler differs from Snow in his far greater reliance on external evidence as a controlling framework for interpretation. A good example of Kavaler's approach is the chapter The Fall of Icarus and Natural Order" (pp. 57-76). Kavaler begins by announcing the painting's moral lesson: an "affirmation of communal responsibility and rejection of personal ambition" (p. 57). He analyzes the painting as an illustration of the Ovidian myth and relates it to other pictorial and textual interpretations. He then reviews literary and theatrical sources in which Icarus is cited as a warning against excessive ambition, financial ambition in particular. Kavaler next surveys a wide array of literary, theatrical, and pictorial evidence wherein the farmer at his plow appears as an exemplar of humble labor and the common man. Kavaler's comm and of the material is impressive, as is the way he marshals it to support his reading of the painting.

My only reservation has to do with what he leaves out. In terms of the "internal evidence" of the painting, he has little to say about the armed merchant ship that sails "calmly on" as Icarus plunges into the water. In my view the pairs ship/Icarus and ship/plowman invite at least as much reflection as the single pair Kavaler does consider: Icarus/plowman. By the same token, Kavaler has little to say about the dramatic contrast between land and sea, between ostensibly native and Mediterranean coastlines.

Kavaler disregards important passages within the painting as well as the complexity of 16th-century attitudes toward commerce and capital investment. Contemporary economic thought engaged not only the dangers of excessive risk, but also the merit of calculated risk. The factor of risk, indeed, was what made certain kinds of loans licit (that is, nonusurious) and provided the justification for profits drawn from investments in ventures like shipping and international trade. Inasmuch as a number of Bruegel's friends and patrons made their fortunes from such ventures (as Kavaler demonstrates in his opening chapter), it is reasonable to imagine that Bruegel also designed the painting to occasion reflection on the contrast between the failure of Icarus and the apparent success of the merchant ship sailing past him. By the same token, comparing the ship with the plowman, and the sun-bathed expanse of the open sea with the hedged-in confines of the farmer's field (where its own figure of death, a bodyless head, lurk s at its lower edge) could elicit reflections on the risks and rewards of maritime trade versus the risks and rewards of farming. This is to suggest that the painting has a richer ambiguity than Kavaler allows. The painting accommodates the positive views toward peasant labor that Kavaler surveys as well as the more derisive attitudes to which other scholars have drawn attention. (6) By no means do I wish to argue that Kavaler's interpretation is unconvincing or "wrong," only that it does not quite do justice to the subtlety and complexity of the picture itself.

Similar reservations can be raised regarding Kavaler's discussion of The Battle between Carnival and Lent. The painting's oppositional pairings are construed in such a way as to yield a fixed moral that can be enunciated as a hortatory statement: "Just as we accept winter and summer as parts of the year, so we must accept Carnival and Lent as poles of human existence, though no adequate philosophy of life can be drawn from either extreme alone... If Carnival license is no acceptable guide for life, neither is Lenten penitence; the Middle Way is the course between both extremes" (p. 144). Notwithstanding his restrictive view of the "moral lessons" that some of Bruegel's paintings impart, Kavaler characteristically offers an abundance of new and fascinating contextual evidence. Kavaler's analysis of the folkloric imagery and the urban setting in Carnival and Lent is richly informative, as is his discussion of costume and class distinctions in Peasant Wedding Feast.

Kavaler's chapter "Wealth and Commonwealth" (pp. 77-110) offers an imaginative reading of Bruegel's Elck (my only regret being that Kavaler discusses the reproductive print rather than Bruegel's original drawing). I was particularly taken by Kavaler's suggestion that Bruegel depicts the central figure in such a way as to call to mind both Everyman, the personification of self-interest, and Diogenes, the antimaterialist philosopher who searched the marketplace for an honest man. Here, Kavaler skillfully sets forth the interpretative play that these alternative identifications could occasion: "Behind Bruegel's Elck [is] ... the ghost of the cynic who mimics his actions.... The two readings cannot be reconciled, but rather are a pair of contrasting extremes, defining a range within which the viewers implicitly situate themselves" (p. 83).

Similarly, the chapter "Conflict in the Natural World" (pp. 2 12-54) offers a sensitive appreciation of Magpie on the Gallows. Kavaler begins by reviewing historical evidence having to do with the gathering political crisis in 1568, the year the painting is dated. He then reviews iconographic evidence that illuminates the significations of specific elements within the painting: the dancing peasants, the gallows, the magpies, and so on. But in this case Kavaler acknowledges the multivalence of some of the motifs, the paradoxical way in which they are combined, and the powerful impact of the background landscape. In Kavaler's account, the "meaning" of the painting remains open: "It can be read as a commentary on the breakdown of order ... and on the problems of self awareness in a world characterized by multiple frames or contexts for judging experience... Bruegel embeds the problem of conflict and fragmentation in nature, with a consequent emphasis on the individual--the viewer--as microcosm and module of reso lution" (p. 233).

Notes

(1.) Hans Sedimayr, "Bruegel's Macchia" (1934), trans. Frederic J. Schwartz, in The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s, ed. Christopher S. Wood (New York: Zone Books, 2000), 323-76. Wood's introduction (9-72) sets Sedimayr's criticism in historical context.

(2.) Sedimayr (as in n, 1), 342: "The worlds of primitives, children, the blind and cripples, the crowd, madness, and apes are precisely those liminal worlds 'in which the nature of man becomes dubious.'"

(3.) Edward Snow, "Meaning in Bruegel's Children's Games: On the Limitations of the Iconographic Approach to Bruegel," Representations 2 (1983): 27-60.

(4.) As Snow acknowledges, Svetlana Alpers's "Bruegel's Festive Peasants," Simiolus 6 (1972-73): 163-76, was crucially important to subsequent Bruegel criticism in demonstrating that Bruegel's works can be multivalent and call for more nuanced interpretations.

(5.) For one thing, most of the emblem literature postdates Bruegel's painting; for another, the evidence regarding contemporary attitudes suggests that these accommodated a wide range of often contradictory views (pp. 23- 42).

(6.) Hessel Miedema, "Realism and the Comic Mode: The Peasant," Simiolus 9 (1977): 205-19; Hans-Joachim Raupp, Bauernsatiren: Entstehung und Entwicklung des bauerlichen Genres in der deutschen und niederlandischen Kunst ca. 1470-1570 (Niederzier: Lukassen, 1986); Walter S. Gibson, "Bruegel and the Peasants: A Problem of Interpretation," in Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Two Studies (Lawrence, Kan.: Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, 1991), 11-52; Margaret A. Sullivan, Bruegel's Peasants: Art and Audience in the Northern Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). The broad range of medieval attitudes toward peasants is admirably surveyed in Paul Freeman, Images of the Medieval Peasant (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).

MARGARET 0. CARROLL

Art Department

Wellesley College

Wellesley, Mass. 02481

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