Der in den Schweinestall gestoßene Trunkenbold

This little painted roundel comes from around 1557, a couple of years before Pieter Bruegel packed dozens of folk sayings into his famous panel of Netherlandish proverbs. Here he takes just one and gives it a whole picture. A drunk man is being shoved bodily into a pigsty by his neighbours while the pigs look on, because the old Flemish saying held that a man who lives like a pig belongs in the sty with them. Bruegel worked in a country thick with such proverbs and treated them as plain moral lessons about drink and idleness. The scene is coarse, comic and a little cruel all at once. He painted it small, about the size of a dinner plate, the kind of thing meant to be studied close up.