Bruegel's Netherlandish Proverbs shows a whole village acting out Flemish sayings, each one taken literally. Together they make what is usually read as a world turned upside down, where everything is done the wrong way round.
The Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder made it in 1559. It now hangs in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, which bought the panel in 1914 from English ownership. No earlier picture is known to have gathered so many proverbs and sayings in one place.
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Nobody can say how many sayings there are. Estimates run from about eighty-five to more than a hundred. One estimate says perhaps more than ninety and admits the number is uncertain. The art historian Margaret Sullivan, at a symposium on the painting in 2004, put it at about eighty-five.
The figures are packed so tightly that any tally depends on which small scenes a scholar counts as a saying, and where one ends and the next begins.
The blue cloak that gave the painting its name
The blue cloak stands for a lie. In the middle of the panel, a woman in a red dress drapes it over a man's head and shoulders. The saying meant a wife was deceiving her husband, and a mantle of this kind was a common sign of deception.
Close by, a man in a red tunic scatters roses in front of a herd of pigs. That is another saying, about wasting good things on creatures that cannot value them.
The painting was once known as The Blue Cloak. Of all its sayings, this is the one that gave it a title.
I read the placement of the cloak as deliberate. A painter who wanted a throwaway joke would have tucked it into a corner. Bruegel put the lie where the eye lands first, and the sign that explains the whole village hangs on a house at the left.
What You'll Discover
Why a globe hangs upside down.
A roof tiled with tarts.
Whose name ended up on the fish.
Whether the village is a joke or a protest.