Fooling with Carnival and Lent

Abstract

When Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted the Fight between Carnival and Lent sometime around 1559, it was already an act of recuperation if not nostalgia. The degree to which late medieval European societies processed reality in terms of such a fight can never be accurately measured but it is evident that their Renaissance or early modern successors deployed the trope regularly as a means of understanding earlier patterns of existence. The manner of Bruegel’s depiction suggests that he was concerned not merely to represent one of the dominant ways in which human existence was understood but rather to present an ironic version of the struggle. Although the fight is the foreground and chief action of the painting, it is neither the highlight, nor the point to which the eye of the spectator is drawn. Both church on the right and tavern on the left emerge out of the gloom against which the fight is played out. The joyless parade of the stock emblems of Carnival and Lent — meat and fish, body and soul — suggests that it may be time to develop different ways of responding to the demands of the flesh and the spirit. Many of those shown are taking no interest in the fight and are engaged in their own activities, including making and watching some sort of theatrical performance around the figure of a green man or Robin Hood. The visual focus of the painting is a fool with his back to the proceedings, leading a man and a woman away from the fight.

FOLY: Nay, it is I that foles can make;

For be he cayser, or be he kynge,

To felowshype with Foly I can hym brynge.

[1214–16] (Skelton, Magnyfycence)