Pieter Bruegel and the Idea of Human Nature by Elizabeth Alice Honig

Author:Elizabeth Alice Honig
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

49 Valentin and Orson: detail of Battle between Carnival and Lent.

In this staged battle, every person plays a part but nobody except the two main combatants is a specific character: they are all ciphers of a way of being, not full individuals who happen to behave this way. Even Mr Carnival and Sister Lent are performing allegories, and in that sense have no ‘real’, internal character that their external signs mask or reveal. That is not true, however, in the secondary performances that occur under the aegis of festivity on the left-hand side of the picture. Closest to us, a group is enacting the play of the ‘Dirty Bride’, a burlesque that involves urban people performing the parts of peasants, whose raucous festive customs will be the subject of the next chapter. The two leads do not seem to wear masks at all; their audience knows exactly who they ‘really’ are, even as they make themselves comic for the show’s duration. It is their gestures and costumes that inform the audience of their assumed characters. Only their money-collector, paradoxically, hides his face under a cloth mask. Before the inn back near the lepers’ procession, a more familiar scene is enacted: Valentin and Orson, with King Peppin and even Clarina with her ring (illus. 49). Only she is masked, once again. The courtiers have minimal disguise, only attributes. But Orson is a hairy monster, altered from head to toe by his wild, uncivilized upbringing. He exemplifies how not only the human face but also the body can be a sign, available to be read carefully by those attuned to the multiplicity of truths it holds, and its potential to lie. Bodies will join faces as another major aspect of legible, meaningful display and problematic deception in the urban world of Carnival and Lent.

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