The Dutch Proverbs Pieter Brueghel The Elder (1525-1569)

Description of Peter Bruegel the Elder’s painting Dutch Proverbs

Bruegel’s painting "Dutch Proverbs" contains over a hundred proverbs, many of which have never been solved, and some of which are still used in our lives today.

Art historians are still engaged in the identification of many proverbs, and more than a hundred proverbs and winged expressions have already been found in the picture. We see in the center of the painting a prominent arbor in which a man is confessing to the devil. At the same time, a monk nearby is mocking Jesus Christ with an artificial beard. The pie-covered roof is an illustration of the winged "Fool’s Paradise," and the absence of a piece of shingles on it is a kind of prototype of the modern "the walls have ears."

The man in the tower is doing aimless work-"throwing feathers in the wind"-and his mate is "keeping his cloak in the wind," that is, adjusting his beliefs to the circumstances. The woman gazing at the stork is practically "counting crows." Many more interesting characters in the painting: and the girl who swaddles the devil with a pillow, the girl carries a smoking head and a bucket of water, another - puts the horns on her husband, or rather covers him with a blue cloak, one man tries to open his mouth wider than a pipe, that is overestimate their capabilities ... And many, many others, corresponding proverbs, phrases and expressions.

In general, the goal of the author of the painting was not just to collect a lot of proverbs on one canvas, but also to condemn stupidity, destruction, immorality. Most proverbs mock or reproach people with various vices: gluttony, avarice, lust, pride, etc. This whole folkloric panorama is a skeptical critique of the artist’s contemporaries, which is not imposed on the viewer, but is demonstrated in the actions of the people in the picture, most often quite ridiculous, along with the ordinary villagers.

To give a final sense of how exaggerated and yet close to reality the composition is, the author draws an ordinary globe, but upside down, symbolizing the inversion of the world and the onset of chaos on the basis of what has already succeeded in shaking the normal life.

In this way, Bruegel conveyed in his painting a multiplicity of folklore and also expressed his discontent, denouncing in as graphic a manner as possible many of the vices and problems of the time.