The Fight Between Carnival and Lent

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Fight Between Carnival and Lent

Pieter Bruegel, 1559

oil on wood

118 × 164 cm

Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

The Fight Between Carnival and Lent is an oil on panel work painted by Pieter Bruegel in 1559. This painting depicts a common festival of the period, as celebrated in the Southern Netherlands.^[1] It presents the contrast between two sides of contemporary life, as can be seen by the appearance of the inn on the left side - for enjoyment, and the church on the right side - for religious observance. The busy scene depicts well-behaved children near the church and a beer drinking scene near the inn. Other scenes show a well in the centre (the coming together of different parts of the community), a fish stall and two competing floats.

A battle enacted between the figures Carnival and Lent was an important event in community life in early modern Europe, representing the transition between two different seasonal cuisines: livestock that was not to be wintered was slaughtered, and meat was in good supply. As the period of Lent commenced, with its enforced abstinence and the concomitant spiritual purification in preparation for Easter, the butcher shops closed and the butchers travelled into the countryside to purchase cattle for the spring.^[2]

The figure of Carnival was a fat man who led a procession through the town and presided over a large feast.^[3] In some traditions an effigy of the Carnival figure was burned at the end of the celebrations.^[4] In Bruegel's painting the figure is a large man riding a wine barrel, wearing a huge pie as a head-dress; he is wielding a long spit, complete with a pig's head, as a weapon for the fight.

The painting currently resides in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

[edit] References

• G. Martin. (1984). Bruegel. London: Bracken Books. ISBN 0-946495-22-X
• Thomas A. Fudge, Daniel Warner and the Paradox of Religious Democracy in Nineteenth-Century, Edwin Mellen Press, 1998, ISBN 0773482490, pages 14 – 16
• Andrew Cunningham, Ole Peter Grell, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Religion, War, Famine and Death in Reformation Europe, Cambridge University Press 2000, ISBN 0521467012, page 220</ref>

[edit] Footnotes

1. ^ Cunningham and Grell, work cited
2. ^ Jean Elizabeth Howard, Marion F. O'Connor, Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology Routledge 2005, ISBN 0415353122, page 215
3. ^ Mack P. Holt, Alcohol: A Social and Cultural History, Berg 2006, ISBN 1845201663, pages 28 – 29
4. ^ Fudge, work cited page 16.