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Lot Essay
The Misanthrope, or The Faithlessness of the World, as it was known in its original Flemish formulation, is among the most searching moral inventions associated with the Bruegel dynasty: an image at once comic, cruel and profoundly disquieting, in which worldly renunciation is exposed to the very corruption it seeks to escape. The present roundel belongs to the small group of known treatments of the subject associated with Pieter Brueghel the Younger, and preserves, in intimate scale, one of the most enigmatic allegories devised by his father, Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
The composition derives from Pieter the Elder's celebrated tempera on canvas of 1568 in the Museo e Gallerie Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples (fig. 1), one of the master's final and most enigmatic works, painted the year before his death. Its archaic Flemish inscription, ‘Om dat de werelt is soe ongetru / Daer om gha ic in den ru’ (‘Because the world is so faithless, therefore I wear mourning’), establishes the central paradox of the image: a hooded, black-robed figure, having renounced the world for its treachery, strides solemnly through a barren landscape, oblivious to the impish small figure cutting his purse from behind. Enclosed within a glass globe surmounted by a cross – an orbis cruciger, the ancient emblem of earthly dominion – this thief is not merely a common pickpocket, but the world itself personified: the very thing the misanthrope professes to have forsaken. The bitter irony is therefore double-edged: the supposed renunciant, ostensibly vowed to poverty, carries an incongruously full moneybag, while the caltrops strewn in his path intimate that suffering awaits the unwary, regardless of their moral posture. As Ertz observed, the background scene of robbery near the windmill extends this meditation on worldly perfidy into the surrounding landscape (op. cit., pp. 78-9).
Pieter the Younger's engagement with this composition drew upon multiple sources in a relationship of mutual interdependence: the Naples painting itself, an engraving by Hans Wiericx and the landscape of his father's The Bird Nester of 1568 (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum), from which Pieter the Younger adapted the foreground stage, framing trees, ponds, farm buildings and open recession into distant meadowland. Yet the son’s response is not simply one of replication. In the Naples painting, the misanthrope is a monumental, almost sculptural presence, closed within the heavy contour of his cloak and propelled forward with tragic inevitability. In the works associated with Pieter the Younger, the figure becomes more legible and more anecdotal: he advances upright, hands clasped, his profile emerging from beneath the hood, while the thief is softened into a rounder, more mischievous character, his moral menace tempered by a faintly comic physicality.
The present panel is closely related to the signed and dated painting in the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp (inv. no. 872⁄2; ibid., no. E25), which Ertz considers the most important and finest treatment of the theme, datable to before 1600, as well as the version formerly with Galerie Brod, London (ibid., no. E28). While Ertz never had the opportunity to inspect the present picture first-hand, he closely related it to another version, no. E30, describing the two as almost literal repetitions, believing they would have been executed after 1616, a period in which the artist, like many successful Antwerp masters, increasingly employed the collaborative resources of his workshop to meet sustained demand for his most celebrated compositions. Taken together, these intimate round panels testify to the enduring potency of Pieter the Elder's moral invention. Few Bruegelian subjects compress so much irony into so small a space, or speak with such quiet severity to the frailty of human judgement.
The composition derives from Pieter the Elder's celebrated tempera on canvas of 1568 in the Museo e Gallerie Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples (fig. 1), one of the master's final and most enigmatic works, painted the year before his death. Its archaic Flemish inscription, ‘Om dat de werelt is soe ongetru / Daer om gha ic in den ru’ (‘Because the world is so faithless, therefore I wear mourning’), establishes the central paradox of the image: a hooded, black-robed figure, having renounced the world for its treachery, strides solemnly through a barren landscape, oblivious to the impish small figure cutting his purse from behind. Enclosed within a glass globe surmounted by a cross – an orbis cruciger, the ancient emblem of earthly dominion – this thief is not merely a common pickpocket, but the world itself personified: the very thing the misanthrope professes to have forsaken. The bitter irony is therefore double-edged: the supposed renunciant, ostensibly vowed to poverty, carries an incongruously full moneybag, while the caltrops strewn in his path intimate that suffering awaits the unwary, regardless of their moral posture. As Ertz observed, the background scene of robbery near the windmill extends this meditation on worldly perfidy into the surrounding landscape (op. cit., pp. 78-9).
Pieter the Younger's engagement with this composition drew upon multiple sources in a relationship of mutual interdependence: the Naples painting itself, an engraving by Hans Wiericx and the landscape of his father's The Bird Nester of 1568 (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum), from which Pieter the Younger adapted the foreground stage, framing trees, ponds, farm buildings and open recession into distant meadowland. Yet the son’s response is not simply one of replication. In the Naples painting, the misanthrope is a monumental, almost sculptural presence, closed within the heavy contour of his cloak and propelled forward with tragic inevitability. In the works associated with Pieter the Younger, the figure becomes more legible and more anecdotal: he advances upright, hands clasped, his profile emerging from beneath the hood, while the thief is softened into a rounder, more mischievous character, his moral menace tempered by a faintly comic physicality.
The present panel is closely related to the signed and dated painting in the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp (inv. no. 872⁄2; ibid., no. E25), which Ertz considers the most important and finest treatment of the theme, datable to before 1600, as well as the version formerly with Galerie Brod, London (ibid., no. E28). While Ertz never had the opportunity to inspect the present picture first-hand, he closely related it to another version, no. E30, describing the two as almost literal repetitions, believing they would have been executed after 1616, a period in which the artist, like many successful Antwerp masters, increasingly employed the collaborative resources of his workshop to meet sustained demand for his most celebrated compositions. Taken together, these intimate round panels testify to the enduring potency of Pieter the Elder's moral invention. Few Bruegelian subjects compress so much irony into so small a space, or speak with such quiet severity to the frailty of human judgement.