Bruegel's Proverb Painting and the World Upside Down

Abstract

Pieter Bruegel's famous Netherlandish Proverbs (Berlin-Dahlem) is often characterized as treating the theme of World Upside Down, a term that has also been applied to the painting as a kind of alternative title or subtitle and used, by extension, to characterize comparable paintings by Bruegel, and even his oeuvre as a whole (Fig. 1).1 Bruegel experts justify their use of the term by pointing to the inverted globe that appears in the Proverbs painting on the far left and functions as a house- or inn-sign. It is true that this motif also occurs as a kind of emblem or frontispiece to World Upside Down prints, but to equate the spirit of the Proverbs painting with the theme of the World Upside Down tends to confuse our search for meaning in the painting, as well as our understanding of the different role played by two distinct vehicles of popular thinking.