Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Expelling From Top And Bottom: The Changing Role Of Scatology In Images Of Peasant Festivals From Albrecht Dürer To Pieter Bruegel, Alison Stewart

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity

During the first half of the sixteenth century, the earliest visual representations of peasant festivals in European art were produced in Germany. These works, all prints, showcase peasants expelling their drink with the result that art historians today, nearly 400 years later, have described these prints as gross and indecent. In their revulsion and distancing from sixteenth-century Germany’s insistently colorful visual and verbal vocabulary, art historians of Northern European art appear to have stressed both the values and preferences of their own twentieth-century culture and that of the sixteenth-century Netherlands rather than those of the society that produced them—sixteenth-century Germany. …