Sermons in Symbols

Though hardly anything is known about Pieter Bruegel the Elder, a great deal is known because of him. The demons and louts who crowd the pages of the newly published Fantasy of Pieter Brueghel* (edited by Adriaan L. Barnouw, Lear; $5) tell a lot about his time. Like the Satevepost covers of Norman Rockwell and John Falter, Bruegel's 16th Century pictures are minutely reportorial. But Bruegel never lapsed into slickness or sentimentality, not even when he illustrated the fairy tales and proverbs of his age. His frankness might not get through the mails today.

Like most apprentice painters of the period, Bruegel had begun by making a trip to Italy to learn how Madonnas were done. The experience left his Protestant nature cold; he preferred the brawling uncertainties of the North, and the moralizing surrealism of his Flemish forerunner, Hieronymus Bosch (TIME, Sept. 15). Before he died in 1569, Bruegel was to paint a series of complicated masterpieces in oil, but he got his start working from and for the market place, selling his engravings cheap. His horny-handed customers were bound to appreciate pictured proverbs like The Hay Runs After the Horse (symbolizing girls who chase boys).

Some of his fantasies, like The Land of Cockaigne, a kind of 16th Century Big Rock Candy Mountain, were as timeless as meat & potatoes. The inscription which was printed beneath that engraving merely hinted at the edible delights spread out in the picture. It read: "All ye who are lazy and gluttonous, be ye peasant, soldier or scholar, get to the land of Cockaigne and taste there all sorts of things without any labor. The fences are sausages, the houses covered with cakes; capons and chickens fly around ready-roasted."

Bruegel intended his Temptation of Saint Anthony (see cut) as a topical sermon. The rotting fish atop the head in the center of the picture, says Editor Barnouw, represented the Church of Rome, which Bruegel considered viciously corrupt. The half-submerged head itself was the Christian world, its mouth on fire, and in the background floated a menacing turretful of Turks. Hermit Saint Anthony turns his back on the nightmare. Ignoring the crossbowman above him, he takes comfort in the psalm: "In the Lord put I my trust . . . for lo, the wicked bend their bow, they make ready their arrow upon the string. . . ."

* Bruegel dropped the "h" in his name during the last ten years of his life.

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