Netherlandish Proverbs (1559)

Painted in the same year as The Fight between Carnival and Lent, this painting belongs to the group of allegorical pictures in the manner of Bosch. Although individual proverbs and groups of proverbs had been represented in Flemish art before, this is the first picture to create a whole world of them.

Bruegel's bird's-eye view is a mercilessly moralizing mirror of a misguided town, one peopled by the fruits of the Fall, by the all-too-human condition, exhibited in a comic, didactic fashion. Like a human ant colony populated by a crowded community with the wisdom or folly of its actions, the swarm of miniature men, women, children, animals, and props on this panel serves as an almost subversive manifesto of human folly. Mapping what's wrong with all of us, Bruegel's bird's-eye view is a mercilessly moralizing mirror of a misguided Our Town, one peopled by the fruits of the Fall, by the all-too-human condition, exhibited in a comic, didactic fashion. This overview of innumerable Liliputian transactions and pursuits, of hundreds of eloquent details, is no less than a vision of the world.

More than a hundred proverbs and idiomatic expressions have been identified, describing "topsy-turvy" ways of behaviour. This explains the other name occasionally given the painting, that of The Topsy-Turvy World. Some of the artist's proverbs are still in use today. Other painted sayings come closer to metaphor.