Bruegel's The Fight Between Carnival and Lent

In Our Time: Culture

BBC

History

4.6 • 978 Ratings

🗓️ 15 January 2015

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Pieter Bruegel the Elder's painting of 1559, 'The Fight Between Carnival And Lent'. Created in Antwerp at a time of religious tension between Catholics and Protestants, the painting is rich in detail and seems ripe for interpretation. But Bruegel is notoriously difficult to interpret. His art seems to reject the preoccupations of the Italian Renaissance, drawing instead on techniques associated with the new technology of the 16th century, print. Was Bruegel using his art to comment on the controversies of his day? If so, what comment was he making?

CONTRIBUTORS

Louise Milne, Lecturer in Visual Culture in the School of Art at the University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh Napier University

Jeanne Nuechterlein, Senior Lecturer in the Department of History of Art, University of York

Miri Rubin, Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History and Head of the School of History at Queen Mary, University of London

Producer: Luke Mulhall.

Transcript

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0:44.0	Hello, I'm looking at a painting which is looking down on a busy square with crowds of people
0:49.9	dressed in a late medieval costume. To the left is a tavern hosting a festive parade. To the right is a church,
0:55.3	with a line of sombre worshippers coming and going. Director in front is what appears to be a mock battle
1:00.8	between a fat man's traveling a barrel wearing a large pork pie in his head,
1:04.8	and he's jouting with a thin lanky figure sitting on a modest wooden chair.
1:08.8	The fat man wheels a long skewer containing pieces of roasted meat, the thin figure holds a long paddle with two small fish on the end of it.
1:16.0	This is the scene in the painting, The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, by the Flemish artist Peter Broigal, the Elder. It was composed in Antwerp in 1559 at the
1:26.2	height of the Protestant Reformation, a time in place where questions of religious practice
1:31.5	were hotly contested and could be a matter of life and death.
	...

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