The Problem with Looking at Pieter Bruegel's Elck

Abstract

This essay concerns optical wit in Pieter Bruegel's Elck (1558). While scholars have treated this print as an earnest essay in human frailty, I focus instead on its playful negations both of knowledge and of one who would possess it. Building on Peter Parshall's earlier delineation of this paradoxical theme, I suggest that Elck uses a parallelism based in looking to implicate the viewer as one who would obtain a measure of understanding from, or apply it to, the printed image: as the protagonist Elck (Everyone) pores over worldly goods, and as his counterpart Niemant (Nobody) gazes foolishly into a mirror, so does the viewer assess the print. All look, but few – if any – truly see. The implications of this parallelism are crucial. The successful (that is, knowledgeable) interpreter must necessarily cease to exist, as knowledge is, according to the print, the sole province of Nobody; the other option, interpretive failure, associates us with Everyone, who patently lacks any knowledge whatsoever. Bruegel thus cleverly indicts the interpretive skills of his audience by denying the potential for anything but nonsensical reading. I suggest that the print thus disrupts traditional responses to the image and, consequently, calls into question the relationship between artist, object, and observer.