Food, Money, and Nature in the Art of Pieter Bruegel

Robert Baldwin

Associate Professor of Art History

ConnecticutCollege

New London, CT06320

The following is a short section on food and landscape imagery from an unfinished book project on Pieter Bruegel and Renaissance Landscape which I put aside in the late 1990s. All of this material was written up by Oct 1990 but in a longer form which will eventually be posted on my web site. This excerpt was prepared in 2007 as a reading for a guest lecture in a course on food taught by my colleague, Chris Steiner.

My unfinished book project explores how court, burgher (middle class), and church culture each fashioned distinctive views of nature in literature and art. Since Bruegel worked almost exclusively for Dutch burghers, and especially for the Antwerp tax collector, Nicholas Jongelinck, my focus is on burgher culture, defined more dynamically as it interacted with courtly values in an age of rampant social climbing. The burgher investment in villas and art collections, including landscapes, was itself a key index of burgher social advancement.

The discussion of food appears in a larger section on burgher mercantile values and financial anxieties at a time when nature and food were increasingly transformed into commodities with the rise of large urban markets and a proto-capitalist, market economy. The villa described in the first paragraph is an imaginary place described at length in a dialogue written in the early-sixteenth century by the great Dutch humanist, Erasmus. Eusebius is the fictional owner of that villa. “Ter Beken” was the name of the villa of Bruegel’s major patron, Jongelinck. It was filled with an art collection including Bruegel’s large agricultural landscapes, the Labors of the Months.

Burgher Anxieties about Money

Erected out of the noble philosophical desire to escape the ignoble city, the Renaissance country house was profoundly inscribed with anxieties about money and commerce. Despite Eusebius's repeated claims to owning only a small, modest place where he lived moderately in sharp contrast to luxurious estates, [1] his villa was quite sumptuous with two private chapels decorated with religious paintings, an orchard, a hedge-enclosed meadow, an aviary, a bee farm, a stream with a bridge, a library with extensive landscapes, worldscapes, a separate study, three gardens, and a two-story colonnaded gallery decorated with cosmic landscapes on the lower floor and Biblical paintings on the upper. Eusebius was even eager, despite his ostensible fiscal moderation, disdain for ignorant moneylenders, and great show of humanist charity, to feign luxury by imitating sumptuous marble in paint. "We make up for lack of wealth by ingenuity" 52

Jongelinck himself was deeply anxious about money and class as revealed in Lampsonius's poem praising "Ter Beken" already cited in chapter one.

"Let Italy send her pupils to visit the house which you, born of good stock from the lesser citizens, possessed of wealth but an ardent lover of all the arts, also a hater of sordid avarice and its sworn enemy, raised to the stars near proud Antwerp at unusual expense..." [2]

The multiple ironies and contradictions here were precisely those of "Ter Beken" as a whole. First, we see the humanist need for wealth to distance itself from aristocratic excess and refinement. Jongelinck was a good burgher born from the "lesser citizens" - one might almost say a noble peasant - and proud of his city. Second, Lampsonius simultaneously praised Jongelinck for flaunting wealth and despising avarice, thereby allowing him to have his cake and eat it too. Even his "lesser" origins subtly highlighted his great rise in the world which the villa and art collection metaphorically extended to the stars. Using the humanist rhetoric already discussed in chapter one, Jongelinck was elevated by his love of the liberal arts which in turn was displayed not just through his patronage of artists like Floris and Bruegel but through hiring poets and reproductive engravers to publicize that noble patronage throughout the educated, art-collecting world. (One thinks here of Scholz's printed catalogue of his garden.) The context for Lampsonius's poem was as significant as its flattering message; it appeared on one of a series of engravings of 1563 reproducing Floris's cycle of painting on the Labors of Hercules. Two years later, just when Bruegel was finishing the Months, Jongelinck commissioned a second series of engravings with flattering inscriptions to publicize Floris's cycle on the Liberal Arts. [3] Given the humanist topos of social elevation through culture, Bruegel's Months may have allowed Jongelinck to contemplate the relative rise of his own family - his paternal grandfather was a fish merchant (though his maternal grandfather and father were officials in the Antwerp Mint). [4] If so, it was perhaps fitting that humbler beginnings could now be invoked in a luxurious villa decorated with expensive paintings of lowly peasants.

Still other monetary ironies can be developed for the Months. On the one hand, mercantile disenchantment with urban life stemmed from the merchant's own absorption in the risk-filled urban economy. On the other hand, it was entrepreneurial success which allowed merchants to afford easing their souls in formal gardens and luxurious suburban retreats ("huizen van plaisantie") decorated with georgic, pastoral, allegorical and erotic mythological paintings ("poeteryen") by leading artists. In an age before stocks and shares, the only safe investment for capital was land and real estate. And with the expansion of Antwerp's city walls in 1542, patrician investors indulged in extensive land speculation. [5] Jongelinck's estate was itself part of a larger feudal property bought in 1546 by the nearly-assassinated and eventually disgraced financier, industrialist, urban planner, real estate tycoon, and architect, Gilbert van Schoonbeke, the Baron Haussmann and Donald Trump of the new Antwerp. [6] Ever the good developer, Schoonbeke immediately subdivided the estate for resale in smaller lots to Antwerp's many investors eager to indulge the new fashion for country homes. "Ter Beken" was sold to Thomas Jongelinck in 1547 who in turn sold it to his brother, Nicolas, seven years later. [7]

Given the market in real estate, it was common for successful Flemish merchants, bankers, and industrialists to own one or even two "huizen van plaisantie" and dozens of houses in the city [8]. Jongelinck himself owned a number of urban properties including a house rented to his business partner, Daniel de Bruyne, and his own splendid townhouse, "Sphera Mundi", located in the Kipdorf. [9] (Cosmological pretension seems to have been a leitmotif in Jongelinck's cultural self-image.) At a time when most mercantile capital was invested abroad in potentially bad loans and businesses, real estate became, as one Antwerp merchant noted, the only true indication of a person's wealth. [10] Thus, one Italian merchant newly settled in Antwerp described how his eleven-thousand guilder home would make him "respected among the merchants as a wealthy man and a good solid man of honor." [11] By purchasing an estate just outside the St. George's gate, Jongelinck made it easier to stay in touch with his important business commitments. More importantly, the proximity of "Ter Beken" to Antwerpallowed Jongelinck to maximize its potential as an advertisement of his financial reliability while giving him a convenient place to network with potential business partners and creditors. Only when we remember how Renaissance villa culture and landscape art was imbedded in urban values can we develop a more critical understanding of landscape's painted rhetoric of rustic distance and retreat. Did Bruegel insert cities into the distant background of Hunters in the Snow, Dark Day, and Haymaking to help Jongelinck escape far beyond the Antwerp city walls which loomed directly behind "Ter Beken"? [12] Were the deeper, panoramic perspectives of Bruegel's landscapes not just a philosophical or mercantile device but also a way to extend the visual rhetoric of escape at the heart of Renaissance landscape?

The financial reality of Antwerp's luxurious real estate, of course, was that no outward show offered any real guarantee, any true measure of secure wealth or reliable credit. Jongelinck's extensive debt at his death - over 50,000 guilders - [13] reveals he was one of the financially reckless social climbers condemned by Cardinal Granvelle in his 1559 memoirs on the troubles.

"This country was already too prosperous, so that the people were not able to resist luxury and gave in to every vice, exceeding the proper limits of their stations. The nobles ... lived beyond their means ... Merchants also made unnecessary expenditures without limit in an effort to equal and surpass the nobles and became their companions, and the nobles accepted them and paid them honor, attending their banquets and visiting their homes in order to obtain money from them to meet their own expenses." [14]

One wonders what Granvelle thought of Jongelinck’s villa, "Ter Beken," which he probably knew given his close patronage of Jongelinck's brother, the leading Antwerp sculptor of the day. In any case, such complaints make it easier to see even from a sixteenth-century perspective how Jongelinck's country house and landscapes were readily linked with the very urban money and ambition they repudiated.

Other monetary contradictions deserve comment. For Jongelinck's income was far from the Erasmian humanist ideal of an honest fee earned by hard work and shared with the less fortunate. Most of his wealth derived from three lucrative tax offices he had leased from Philip II. Around 1552, Jongelinck acquired the Toll of Zealand levied on all goods shipped by sea into the Netherlands. In 1559, he took over the Great Landtoll of Brabant which covered all goods shipped by land in or through that province (and its three major cities, Antwerp, Brussels, and Louvain). And in 1564, just before he commissioned Bruegel to paint the Labors of theMonths, he took over the Wine Excise tax which levied 1.5 guilders on every barrel of overseas wine entering Brabant, Flanders, and Zealand. Though these offices were highly profitable, they also imposed enormous rental demands of up to 41,000 guilders a year, a burden Jongelinck was eventually unable to meet. He was also involved in organizing city lotteries - a legal form of a much wider mercantile craze for gambling and the risky, "get rich quick" business of maritime insurance [15] which had become corrupted by the wider gambling mania as merchants took out "insurance" on everything from ships and horse races and the lives of princes, kings, and popes. As Florence de Roover notes, "The confusion between genuine insurance and wagers had an adverse effect on marine insurance, which came to be considered as a game of chance." [16] Maritime insurance premiums ran as high as 20% and the whole business was ridden with various kinds of fraud [17] which eventually impelled the Antwerp magistrates to impose new controls. Even in the world of humanism then, his wealth was mired in the corrupt urban finances which the whole villa mentality supposedly rejected. Yet this was the very money which paid for "Ter Beken", its landscapes, and the leisure time necessary for Jongelinck's philosophical meditations and pretentious displays of "liberal arts". (One wonders how Jongelinck would have reacted to Gassel's Calling of Matthew where the godly countryside was contrasted to Antwerp and a contemporary Flemish tax collector whose house displayed a shield with the Hapsburg eagle.)

It is also likely that expenditures on his various properties and ever-expanding art collection contributed to Jongelinck's mounting debts and increased his economic worries even as they provided therapeutic retreats from such vulgar matters. (One thinks of how Frans Floris's grand, Italian-style palazzo in Antwerp helped precipitate his own bankruptcy.) To use a more extreme yet illuminating parallel, "Ter Beken" had something in common with the lavish country home complete with elaborate humanist library erected by the Antwerp merchant and ex-burgomaster, Michael van der Heyden in the late 1540s using materials stolen while serving as "fortification master" for Antwerp's new city walls. Here the villa was literally built from the very urban corruption it claimed to flee. Along with the ex-mayor, dozens of others were charged in 1553 and two hundred witnesses were called including the brother of Bruegel's print publisher, Hieronymous Cock, who administered the excavation for the new city walls around the St. Joris Gate. Bruegel's engraving of drowning and tumbling Ice-Skaters Outside the St. Joris Gate may even have alluded to that scandal. [18] In the light of the widespread corruption in sixteenth-century Antwerp, a more thorough archival investigation of Jongelinck's business dealings will probably uncover a whole series of financial schemes further sharpening the ironies of "Ter Beken" and Bruegel's Months as philosophical retreats from commerce.

Food and the Commoditization of Nature

If the larger social world which encompassed Bruegel's Labors of the Months had transformed nature into a mass-produced, urban commodity bought in large lots by developers and quickly resold in smaller, more profitable ones, the natural products of nature underwent a similar and equally disturbing transformation. In my chapter on money, I already noted the mercantile tendency, seen in Guicciardini's account of Flemish trade, to translate all activities and things into economic terms and to justify this with the rhetoric of "commonwealth". As we saw, Guicciardini's conversion encompassed all of nature's products, even the earth itself. "The turf growing in Holland that is yearly sold out of the country amounts to a marvellous mass of money". [19]

One of the most disturbing features of the new market economy was the transformation of innocent natural products - foodstuffs - into objects of greed, division, violence, and social disorder. To be sure, feasting had long been a traditional area for conspicuous consumption and was, for that reason, a major concern in sumptuary laws. One typical French law passed in 1563 forbade private families to have meals with more than three courses and spelled out in detail the proper dishes for each course. Its repeated reenactment, six times by 1591, suggested the widespread nature of the problem. [20] Luxurious vs. simple meals were also a common topic in ethical writing since classical antiquity. [21] If the sixteenth-century discussion of food was profoundly rooted in this rich discourse, it revitalized and transformed it with contemporary anxieties responding to the unprecedented commoditization of food and its increasing prominence in violent social and economic disputes.

The same changes in the Renaissance experience of food generated a humanist rhetoric of simple meals. Already in Erasmus's The Soldier and the Carthusian, his nature-loving monk asked, "What difference does it make how this poor body is nourished? We can get along with very little if we live in accord with Nature. Which one of us looks fitter, you who eat partridges, pheasants, and capons, or I who live on fish?"[22] Similar advice was echoed in Erasmus' The Epicurean.

"Beware, then, of thinking any Lucullus dines more enjoyably off the partridges, pheasants, doves, hares, wrasses, sheat-fish, or morays served to him than does a godly man off black bread, herbs, or legumes, with water or small beer or well diluted wine for his drink. .. he rises from table not stuffed but revived, not surfeited but restored in mind and body alike."548

What is important in this context is not so much the humanist ideal of moderation but the anxious, nostalgic attempt to reconnect food to nature's supposed simplicity, to return it to its immediate soil and to the basic, "authentic" needs of those inhabiting and working the land (whether peasants or urban vacationers like Eusebius). This is most clear in Erasmus’s Godly Feast when Eusebius sang the joys of "a wholly green feast made, as Horace says, 'from food not bought'" and elaborated his own, home-grown produce. [23]

By the middle of the sixteenth-century, European anxieties about food increased sharply as important changes in food production, distribution and consumption transformed the experience of food in city and country and its larger social meaning and impact.

[Factors behind changes in thinking about food – not yet fully integrated into my text]

- bigger markets for bigger cities (especiallyAntwerp)

- larger, more coordinated international markets, food monopolies, sudden rise of big beer industry, development of regular luxury food markets

- food as foreign commodity disconnected to immediate land

- rapacious buying up in the countryside by foreign agents

- severe inflation of 1540s and 50s (unnatural pricing)

- fraudulent sales of spoiled food, bribery, price-rigging

- hoarding by grain merchants, peasants, city officials, wealthy elites (either for profit or to survive shortages)