Slide 17 of 26
Notes:
Panel 52x78 cm/ 1567/ Munich, Alate Pinakothek
Bruegel here represents Never-Never Land, where everything is done for the inhabitant and all there is to do is sleep. His targets are gluttony and sloth; in Dutch the Land of Cockaigne is Luikkerland (lui meaning lazy and lekker, gluttonous). Bruegel has here returned to his earliest Bosch-derived idiom, and in this respect the painting recalls The Netherlandish Proverbs. When an engraving of The Land of Cockaigne was published by Hieronymous Cock, a Flemish verse was added to underline the message:
All you loafers and gluttons always lying about / Farmer, soldier and clerk, you live without work. / Here the fences are sausages, the houses are cake, / And the fowl fly roasted, ready to eat.
All three characters are here: the clerk lying on his fur robe, ink and pen aat his waist, book beside him; the peasant sleeping on his flail; and the soldier with lance and gauntlet lying useless beside him. Beneath the clerk and the peasnat runs an egg, already half-eaten; empty eggshells in Buregel, as in Bosch, are symbolic of spiritual sterility. Behind the sleepers a roast goose lays itself down on a sliver platter to be eaten. To its right a traveller has reached Luikkerland; he has eaten his way through a mountain of pudding and is swinging down with the aid of a conveniently placed tree. The fence at the edge of the sleepers’ enclosure is woven out of sausages.
The composition is a simple geometric pattern: the characters are inserted into it like the spokes of a wheel, the hub of which is the tree-cum-table.
