The Thief, the Miser and the Shepherd

A certain day in the late 1970’s saw me boarding a train at Amsterdam station to travel to Brussels for the afternoon. For me it was worth the round trip, as I was on my way to see a special exhibition of the collected paintings of the 16th-century Flemish master Pieter Bruegel. Among the impressive large-scale works was a more modestly-sized painting depicting a mysterious and rather sinister black-robed figure being surreptitiously robbed by a strange-looking thief enclosed within a sphere.

The composition of the work was bounded by a circle, and at the base of the painting, immaculately lettered in gothic blackletter script, was a rhyming couplet in archaic Flemish:

“Om dat de werelt is soe ongetru / Darr om gha ic in den ru”

My *book on the subject translates this phrase as:

“Because the world is so faithless / I am going into mourning”

Still, having no book with me at the time, and as Dutch is my second language and closely related to Flemish, I was able to translate the phrase into contemporary Dutch:

“Omdat de wereld is zo ontrouw / Daarom ga ik (gekleed) in rouw”

And this produces a different inflexion of meaning to Bruegel’s painting than the translation given in my book back home. The key lies in that word ‘ongetru’. It has nothing to do with any lack of faith, but actually describes someone who is untrustworthy and devious (‘ontrouw’ means ‘unfaithful’ in the sense of infidelity, and by contrast, someone who is faithless is described as ‘ongelovig’). So rendered into English the phrase actually reads:

“Because the world is so untrustworthy / That is why I go (dressed) in mourning”

Now Bruegel’s essential lesson makes sense! The painting’s English title is ‘The Misanthrope’: someone of a miserly nature who despises and shuns the company of his fellows. And indeed, the black-clad old greybeard portrayed by the artist seems to be just such a type. But what of his furtive companion?

In ragged gray leggings and enclosed within a transparent orb, the hunched figure is in the very act of cutting the fastening of the greybeard’s purse (hence the archaic slang term ‘cutpurse’ to describe a thief). So the figure does not symbolize ‘earthly vanity’, as claimed by my above book, but is the world itself, as the rhyming couplet makes clear. Such a crystal sphere or globe was the standard 16th-century means of depicting the world. Thus William Shakespeare, in naming his theatre The Globe, sought to express the idea that the events which unfolded on the stage were a mirror of events happening in the world at large.

The miser has given up on trust. And it is his abandoning of that trust which has embittered him to become what we now would call a ‘grumpy old man’! It is in this embittered state that the world around him obligingly turns his mental preconceptions into a self-fulfilling prophesy. He virtually invites his own robbery.

And in an apparent wish to underscore this point, the artist shows three metal caltrops which are about to be stepped upon by the old man. Caltrops were used in the warfare of the time, and scattered in the path of oncoming troops or advancing cavalry. Their fiendish design ensured that, however carelessly-tossed, they always landed with one spike uppermost – as in the next two steps the self-absorbed miser is about find out.

But there is one other figure in the painting. In the background, in a field near to a village with its mill, a shepherd watches over his flock. It is a scene of pastoral tranquillity and trust. And it is this background scene which provides the counterfoil to the dominating cynical foreground events. We are being cared for, Bruegel seems to reassure us, if only we have trust in the situation in which we find ourselves.

Hawkwood

*Gregory Martin: Bruegel. Thames and Hudson, Ltd, 1978.

Artist: Pieter Bruegel

Work: The Misanthrope, 1568

Medium: Tempera on canvas

Location: National Museum of Capodimonte, Naples, Italy

Caltrops photo from International Military Antiques