ABSTRACT
During the first half of the sixteenth century, the earliest visual representations of peasant festivals in European art were produced in Germany.! These works, all prints, showcase peasants expelling their drink with the result that art historians today, nearly 400 years later, have described these prints as gross and indecent. In their revulsion and distancing from sixteenth-century Germany's insistently colorful visual and verbal vocabulary, art historians of Northern European art appear to have stressed both the values and preferences of their own twentieth-century culture and that of the sixteenth-century Netherlands rather than those of the society that produced them - sixteenth-century Germany. This preference for clean peasant festival images, ones that are scatologically free, underscores the art historical preference for Netherlandish art that includes Pieter Bruegel's paintings and prints of peasant festivals over the German prints, which originated the theme.
