ABSTRACT
The interpretation of world as a ’stage of follies’ is central for the understanding of the Renaissance culture and the northern humanism. This vision brought the image of a subverted upside-down reality into the political and religious discourses of the 16th century. This chapter, studying the work of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, analyses the problematic ’estranged vision’, embodied by the fool, which spread in the emerging mercantile society of Antwerp. The depiction of atomized crowds and the recurring theme of folly in Bruegel’s paintings are studied as the expression of a subverted vision from the ’outside’: the point of view of the trickster. His illusory ’objectivity’ gave to the fool a predominant role on public stages in squares and markets, relying on his ability of ’speaking the truth’. Thus, during the celebration of the Feast of Fools, the sacrificial figure of the Lord of Misrule underwent a process of divinization from the victim to the saviour. The resulting power of free speech, connected with the figure of the Mock King, will be problematized investigating the transformation of the liminal folk festival into the secular and permanent institution of the chambers of rhetoric.
