ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the highly productive period between 1560 and 1562 when Pieter Bruegel the Elder created his etching of the Rabbit Hunt, the large painting known as the Dulle Griet and a smaller painting, the Two Monkeys. Bruegel had made a major breakthrough in his career with his paintings Proverbs, Children's Games, and Carnival and Lent by adapting the ancient inheritance in an independent and original way. For Bruegel's viewers the Dulle Griet could be understood simply as a moral lesson, a warning about the sins of anger, avarice, gluttony, envy, and lust, sins that threaten the sanity of any human being. Bruegel developed his art in the age of the emblem, rebus, and allegory-"speaking pictures" in which word and image stand in a close and symbiotic relationship. By the time Bruegel completed the Dulle Griet and the Two Monkeys he had developed a visual vocabulary with which to express abstract ideas in a vivid and compelling way.