"Figures of Speech" addresses a key topic in Renaissance studies: the importance and pervasiveness of proverbs. For sixteenth-century Netherlanders, proverbs revealed the wisdom of the Ancients as well as the linguistic richness found in their own native language; for Pieter Bruegel, Hieronymus Bosch, and other Renaissance painters, proverbs were a frequent and appealing subject. In this book, Walter S. Gibson provides a comprehensive and engaging survey of these visual representations, capturing for twenty-first-century readers the moral sensibilities of a time and culture when such adages (and the images conveying their meaning) were invaluable guides to life.

No one can look at the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch without amazement and bewilderment. Professor Gibson shows that what seems inexplicable to us today--the canvases full of torture, monsters, and leering devils--was perfectly intelligible to the fifteenth-century viewer. The subjects of Bosch's paintings were in fact the overwhelming concerns of late medieval Europe: the Last Judgment, original sin, death, temptations of the flesh. The author describes each picture in detail, placing each work within the context of medieval folklore and religion, and explains that many of the acts portrayed in the pictures were visual translations of verbal puns or metaphors.

"In "Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter Walter Gibson makes it abundantly clear that laughter is a key feature in many of Bruegel's works. He examines witty and humorous elements in Bruegel's paintings, prints, and drawings and creates a context for understanding them as part of sixteenth-century culture. The material Gibson brings to bear on Bruegel will be new to many. This book will appeal to art historians and anyone interested in sixteenth-century thought and culture."--John Oliver Hand, Curator of Northern Renaissance Paintings at the National Gallery of Art, Washington
"This book offers a much needed, and long overdue alternative to the primarily moralizing approach to Northern Renaissance and Baroque art and the works of Pieter Bruegel. Walter Gibson goes way beyond what art history has offered to date, giving a new, more balanced reading of Bruegel's art."--Alison Stewart, Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln
"In "Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter Walter Gibson offers a marvelously engaging antidote to the hermetic readings that have plagued the interpretation of Bruegel's works for far too long. The book provides an abundance of evidence for the importance of laughter in the responses these works were intended to provoke, illuminating not only the paintings and prints of this much misunderstood artist, but also the role of laughter in sixteenth-century culture as a whole."--David Freedberg, Professor of Art History at Columbia University

Eminently a genius of his time, the brilliant Flemish Renaissance, Pieter Bruegel the Elder has enjoyed both admiration and popularity for four hundred years. He belongs, with Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Van Gogh, to that select company of artists who enjoy universal esteem in our time.