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Bruegel's Peasants examines the nature of the Northern Renaissance and the criteria used to recognise its humanistic themes. By identifying an audience with professional and personal ties to Bruegel, and analysing the critical reception of several of his most important paintings, Margaret A. Sullivan counters the view of Bruegel's peasant subjects as a parochial, anti-humanistic phenomenon. The artist's Northern audience, she argues, 'saw' the paintings within a framework that was largely conditioned by a knowledge of the ancients conveyed principally through literature and rhetorical texts. These provided models for the heroic aspects of classicism, as well as its less than idealizing underside - the ungainly and grotesque imagery of everyday life, and ancient genres such as satire in which the didactic and the amusing coexist. As 'earnest jests', Bruegel's depictions of peasants present philosophical problems humorously. They reflect, moreover, the interest and concerns of humanists in the Low Countries in the middle of the sixteenth century, successfully meeting the high expectations of an audience that applied the rigorous standards of the ancients to the art of their own time.

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CHOICE Review

Scholars studying the work of Pieter Bruegel the Elder have been especially interested in interpreting his subject matter against the background of Netherlandish culture; Sullivan's book is the latest in this tradition. She focuses on only two of Bruegel's late works depicting peasants--Peasant Dance and Peasant Wedding Banquet, both, according to the author, dating around 1566. These works seem to her to represent "witty attacks on peasant behavior" based on classical examples of satire familiar to Bruegel's audience, which is characterized as Christian humanist. Sullivan marshals a vast amount of classical and contemporary literature to support her thesis, and although the reader may be left unconvinced by the extremes of her interpretations, the book is recommended as a credible contribution to Bruegel studies. The most reasonable account of Bruegel's art, one that also places it within the interests of his audience, is Walter S. Gibson's Bruegel (CH, Jan'78). Upper-division undergraduate; graduate; faculty. J. Howett; Emory University