Edward Snow - Inside Bruegel: The Play of Images in Childrens Games

This interpretation was first suggested by Charles de Tolnay, Pierre Bruegel lAncien, 2 vols. (Brussels: Nouvelle Socit dditions, 1935), 2:18. Otto Benesch, The Art of the Renaissance in Northern Europe, rev. ed. (1947; London: Phaidon, 1965), 112, describes the children as images of the queerness of adults and refers to the presence of a moral meaning in which the conceited walk on stilts while others look at the world upside down. Carl Gustav Stridbeck, Bruegelstudien: Untersuchungen zu den ikonologischen Problemen bei Pieter Bruegel d. A . ( Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis. Stockholm Studies in the History of Art , II) (Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell, 1956), 18591, expands these critical asides into a full-scale reading of the painting. For a recent statement of this view, see Walter Gibson , Bruegel (New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1975), who suggests that the games symbolize folly (p. 85) and claims, No picture could better convey the futility of mankinds professions as they were viewed by Erasmus and other satirists (p. 88). For the moral interpretation of Bruegel in general, see Stridbeck; K. C. Lindsay and B. Hupp, Meaning and Method in Brueghels Painting, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 14 (1956): 37686; and F. Grossmann, Pieter Bruegel: Complete Edition of the Paintings, 3rd rev . ed. (1955; London and New York: Phaidon, 1973).

The iconographic readings of Childrens Games have not been exclusively moralistic.E. Tietze-Conrat, Pieter Bruegels Kinderspiele, Oudheidkundig Jaarboek , II, series 4 (1934):127- 31, claims that the painting represents Infantia, the first of the Ages of Man. According to Jan van Lennep, LAlchimie et Pierre Bruegel lAncien, Bulletin des Muses Royaux des Beaux-Arts des Belgiques 14 (1965):125, it represents the stage of coagulation in the alchemical process and, perhaps, the Golden Age of the philosophers stone. Tolnay, Pierre Bruegel lAncien, 1:2325, takes the painting as an emblem of summer and claims it is part of a lost cycle of works representing seasonal amusements. More recently, C. Gaignebet, Le Combat de Carnival et de Careme de P. Bruegel (1559), Annales: Economies, Socits, Civilisations 28 (1972):331, has suggested that the painting is laid out like a calendar, with the games that can be associated with specific folk customs indicating the time of the year. These interpretations have remained marginal to Bruegel criticism, however, while the moralistic interpretation has become canonical. For an attempt to synthesize all the iconographic readings of the painting into an interpretation that views it as a presentation of the folly of adolescence and manhood, and specifically of marriage, see Sandra Hindman, Pieter Bruegels Childrens Games , Folly, and Chance, Art Bulletin 63 (1981):44775.