Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This title investigates the artist's depictions of folkloric themes and the visual structures that the artist used to maximize effective communication between painter and viewer. Arguing that Bruegel's depictions of popular fables address issues of social transformation and conflict, Ethan Matt Kavaler demonstrates that they affirm the ideal of a stable, hierarchical society, an ethos opposed to a culture increasingly oriented toward business. The author draws a detailed picture of the evolving world in which Bruegel worked using a wide assortment of images and writings, including legal handbooks, popular theater, costume books, personal correspondence, emblem books, and alba amicorum. Also examined is the role of Antwerp as a center for the arts and home to an intellectual and commercial elite, who, ironically, were the owners of Bruegel's pictures of peasants.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• 1 Commerce, culture, crisis
• 2 The Fall of Icarus and the natural order
• 3 Everyman and his interest
• 4 The city and the cycle of nature: the battle between Carnival and Lent
• 5 Custom, costume, and community: celebrating a marriage
• 6 Invitation to the dance: the Peasant Kermis
• 7 Conflict in the natural world

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Kavaler (art historian, Univ. of Toronto) has written an intriguing series of highly original interpretations of selected works by the great Flemish artist. Although his subjects are mostly chosen from among drawings, paintings, and prints of peasants that have had extensive previous scholarly attention, Kavaler contravenes the popular arguments that Bruegel's depictions are meant to be satires on that class of people. Rather, he tries in general to demonstrate that works such as Battle between Carnival and Lent, Peasant Wedding Feast, or Peasant Kermis express sympathetic and realistic narratives of lower-class behavior. The overarching commentary seems to be that Bruegel attempted symbolic expressions of social harmony or balance between extremes of human behavior. Kavaler positions the artist within the intellectual circle of Antwerp and the humanistic concerns of his patrons. There is copious use of contemporary literature in the text to support Kavaler's interpretations (two sources are reproduced in the appendixes). For an authoritative survey of Bruegel's life and work that is more extensive, and a basis for much of Kavaler's study, see Walter S. Gibson's Bruegel (CH, Jan'78). Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. J. Howett; emeritus, Emory University