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Gustatory Wisdom: Bruegel the Elder's Twelve Proverbs (1558)
Proverbial scenes about human folly painted on serving plates.
Some of the earliest surviving works of the Flemish luminary Pieter Bruegel the Elder are not his detail-rich peasant scenes that furnish art history courses the world over, but painted serving plates, or roundels. Now mounted together in a frame, the roundels are thought to have been originally intended to be used and reused like any other workaday set of decorative tableware — chargers, trivets, runners — in greater proximity to the pleasure-seeking mouth than the cold aesthetic eye. As diners rotated, deciphered, and meditated upon the relationship between text and image, they would also reveal their own learning, opinions, manners, and beliefs — prompted by wildly divergent subject matter, depending on the roundel set: “biblical verse and commentary, erotic tales, marriage advice, figural proverbs, the labours of the months, memento mori reminders, clashes of religious ideologies (they are especially anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish), peasant life, anti-papal sentiments and contentious, topical events”.
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