Pieter Bruegel: Parables of Order and Enterprise.

Ethan Matt Kavaler, Pieter Bruegel: Parables of Order and Enterprise Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 139 pls. + 403 pp. $80. ISBN: 0-521-62267-0.

This important, richly documented book consists of nine case studies that interpret Bruegel's paintings, drawings, and prints as registers of competing notions of authority and social organization. Citing historians such as G. Marnef and G. E. Wells, Kavaler focuses on the situation in Antwerp, where mercantile models of polity based on avontuur (risk) and eyghen baet (self-interest) threatened to disrupt fixed relations between the estates; the unresolved tensions marking this clash are read onto structural analyses of images, whose motifs Kavaler embeds in literary, political, and philosophical discourses. In this respect, his book nicely complements the work of Mark Meadow, who favors close readings of pictorial structure over iconographical glosses and has argued, for example, that Bruegel's Netherlandish Proverbs of 1559 evinces the ordering principles of the notebook system set forth by Erasmus and Melanchthon. But whereas Meadow views cultural templates such as the rederijker stage as stable structures capable of reconciling different modes (and styles) of experience, Kavaler dwells instead on pictorial devices that encode experiential rupture -- the sense conveyed by the aggregation of elements in Bruegel's Beekeepers or Magpie on the Gallows, that opposing patterns of conduct are irreconcilable.

Kavaler begins by characterizing the community of viewers for whom Bruegel painted: the magnates Gillis Hooftman and his associate Joannes Radermacher, the merchants Niclaes Jongelinck and Jean Noirot, and enterprising humanists such as Abraham Ortelius, Jean Vivien, and Emmanuel van Meteren. Kavaler reconstructs this diverse company, united in spite of religious differences, by making excellent use of the emblematic imagery featured in alba amicorum that circulated among these friends. With reference to the emblem "Quis contra nos?" from Claude Paradin's Devises Heroiques, he avers that the motto, taken from Romans 8, was appropriated by the Calvinist Van Meteren to distill the doctrine of faith in Christ, invoked as well by the Catholic Ortelius, whose impresa includes the motto, "Folly on God's Behalf," an Erasmian sanction of the imitation of Christ. (Kavaler's plates are themselves worth the price of this book. He publishes a little known drawing by Marten de Vos from the Album Amcorum Johanni Viviani, t hat pays homage to Vivien's love of the arts by portraying Apollo with a lyre and quill, attributes of lyric poetry and draftsmanship; the lyre casts a shadow, an example of natural artifice alluding to the origins of drawing, beside which a Zeuxian image of grapes affirms the higher artifice of De Vos's pictorial art.)

The case studies that follow indicate how Bruegel offered these viewers heuristic prompts that become increasingly open and complex as the book proceeds. Kavaler commences with chapters on the Fall of Icarus, Elck, and the Battle of the Piggy Banks and Strongboxes. The print of Elck (modello dated 1558), featuring multiples of the mercantile Everyman absorbed in the pursuit of profit, is seen to embody a contradictory allusion to Diogenes. Kavaler compares Bruegel's usage to that of Jan van Hemessen, who makes indeterminate the identity of the courtier/courtesan in his Young Woman Playing the Virginal: she is an epitome of beauty (and synecdoche of beautiful painting), but also the Magdalen in her worldly life (in this valence she becomes the ambivalent figure of painting's seductive properties). The presence of Niemant (Nobody) further complicates Elck's meaning, attaching his immoderacy to Nobody's failure to know himself.

The search for the Middle Way, as Kavaler shows, constitutes the central theme of Bruegel's Battle between Carnival and Lent of 1559, which combines the confrontational motifs in Hieronymus Bosch's Carnival and Lent with the metaphor of the pilgrimage of life developed by Joachim Patinir. The problem of the viewer's participation also looms large in the Peasant Kermis of circa 1568, which incorporates the figures of a laughing fool at the apex of the visual wedge, anchoring the viewer to the heart of the village square where the rustic dance is performed. Kavaler compares this device to the presence of the fool at the rear of Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen's moralizing Seller of Glasses, but Bruegel's fool compares more persuasively to the characters who perpetrate ironic reversals in the Dutch fools' tracts Kavaler cites. Moreover, Margaret Sullivan has argued in her book on Bruegel's peasant imagery that the fool must be seen in conjunction with the frowning peasant at his side, the pair constituting a sort of village Democritus and Heraclitus whose extreme responses to the festivity are satirized.

Kavaler closes with fine accounts of three puzzling late works: the Magpie on the Gallows, Beekeepers, and Nest Robber. Following Karel van Mander, who identified the Magpie on the Gallows as an allegory of gossip, he suggests how the proverbially loquacious magpie heightens the minatory sense of a watchful nature, "whose fields have eyes, whose woods have ears" (he uses Cornelis Crul's poem Mont to, borse toe [Mouth Closed, Purse Closed] to make his case). The competing Senecan sense of nature as benevolent witness to the Deus Artifex, is nevertheless bound up in the shifting meaning of the painting, which distinguishes eloquentia from loquantia in mercantile terms, even while inviting cognitio Dei et naturae racionalis.