Los proverbios neerlandeses

Bruegel packed this single village scene with more than a hundred Netherlandish sayings, each acted out by a little figure. A man bangs his head against a brick wall. Another throws his money into the water. Someone tries to reach from one loaf to the other and can't, someone else carries daylight outside in a basket. In the middle of the tangle, a wife slips a blue cloak over her husband's shoulders, the old image for cheating on him. It was made in Antwerp, then one of the richest trading cities in Europe, where cheap printed sheets of proverbs and folk wisdom were popular, and Bruegel turned that street-level culture into a whole painted world. Rather than praising these sayings, he crowds them together to show a topsy-turvy village where nearly everyone is being foolish, greedy, or false at once. It rewards slow looking. The longer you stay with it, the more small dramas surface out of the crowd, and scholars still argue over exactly how many of the old phrases he managed to fit in.