Slide 20 of 26
Notes:
Panel/118x164.5, signed and dated, 1559, Vienna Kunsthistorisches Musuem
This painting takes as its subject the traditional annual carnival which was held in Flemish towns and villages in the week before Lent. A half-religious, half-secular festival, it provided an excuse for excesses of eating, drinking and sex; contemporary moralists condemned it as the duivelsweek (devil’s week). Bruegel stresses the opposition between the traditional enemies, Carnival [paganism] and Lent [Christianity], by representing their conflict as a joust. The two adversaries--the obese Carnival, seated astride a barrel and with a spit for a tilting lance, and the thin pinched figure of Lent, seated in a cart and using a baker’s shovel as her weapon--come to blows in the square of a small Flemish town.
Breugel’s mocking treatment of the figures of both Carnival and Lent has led some writers to see the painting as a satire on contemporary religion an it is certainly true that the humanist circle to which Breugel belonged in Antwerp believed that the conflict between the Protestant (Carnival) and the Catholic (Lent) churches was at the root of the troubled state of northern Europe in Bruegel’s day. However, it probably has a more gneralized meaning, illustrating Bruegel’s belief that human activities are motivated by folly and self-seeking [Roberts].
