The World Turned Upside Down

In 1559, Pieter Bruegel the Elder set down his brush on an oak panel and left behind one of the strangest villages ever painted: a crowded, chaotic scene teeming with more than a hundred human figures, animals, and objects, each one performing an act that seems nonsensical until you realize it is a literal enactment of a Dutch-language proverb or idiom. The painting, known as Netherlandish Proverbs, was also called The Blue Cloak or The Topsy Turvy World, and that alternate title gives away the game: this is a world where sense has been inverted, where folly reigns, and where every corner of the canvas rewards a closer look.

Proverbs were enormously popular in Bruegel's era. Collections of them, most famously Adagia by the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus, had circulated for decades, and illustrated proverbs had already appeared in Flemish books of hours a century earlier. The French writer François Rabelais packed his novel Gargantua and Pantagruel, completed in 1564, with them. Bruegel was hardly alone in mining this vein — the Flemish artist Frans Hogenberg produced an engraving around 1558 illustrating 43 proverbs in a composition strikingly similar to Bruegel's, even sharing the Blue Cloak motif.

Bruegel himself had already tested the theme in smaller works: Big Fish Eat Little Fish in 1556 and Twelve Proverbs in 1558. But Netherlandish Proverbs, painted the following year, was his first large-scale attempt to gather this folk wisdom into a single sprawling tableau. It wasn't simply a visual encyclopedia, though. The painting's original title, The Blue Cloak or The Folly of the World, suggests Bruegel's deeper aim: to catalogue human foolishness itself. Many of his figures wear the blank, vacant expressions he used elsewhere in his work to mark out fools.

At the heart of the composition stands the scene that gave the painting its earlier name — a woman placing a blue cloak over her husband's shoulders, a Flemish idiom for cuckolding him. Around this central pair, the absurdities multiply. A man dumps earth into a pond only after his calf has already died and drowned, a picture of pointless, too-late effort. Above the blue-cloaked man, another figure carries daylight around in a basket, wasting his hours on something impossible to contain. Nearby, two men crouch shearing animals — one a sheep, one a pig — a scene that seems to capture two proverbs at once: that one person gains advantage over another, and that one should make use of resources without exploiting them past reason.

Scholars have identified roughly 126 distinct proverbs and idioms woven into the scene, though Bruegel may have hidden still more that time and language change have made unrecognizable. Some of these sayings remain instantly familiar today — swimming against the tide, banging one's head against a brick wall, being armed to the teeth. Others have vanished from everyday speech, such as 'having one's roof tiled with tarts,' an image of overflowing abundance that Bruegel would return to years later in his painting of the mythical Land of Cockaigne.