Il contadino e il ladro di nidi

Bruegel painted this in 1568, the year before he died, and it turns a bit of Netherlandish folk wisdom into a single large figure. The saying went that the one who knows where the nest is has the knowledge, but the one who robs it has the nest. So the boy up in the tree, grabbing at the birds, is the thief, and the peasant in the foreground is the man who merely knows and points. That peasant looks pleased with himself as he points up at the robber, and he is about to step straight into the stream at his feet. His raised arm echoes the gesture in Leonardo's paintings of Saint John, which for a Flemish audience turned a country joke into something quietly barbed.