The cripples

The cripples
Pieter Bruegel the Elder , 1568
oil on wood
18 × 21 cm
Louvre , Paris

The Cripple is a painting by Pieter Brueghel the Elder from 1568. It was painted with oils on wood and is located in the Louvre .

description

The small format picture is slightly wider than it is tall. It shows a group of six people against an architectural background, at least five of whom are physically deformed and disabled. These five men occupy the foreground of the picture and form a rather lively group: two of the people are turned to the left and seem to be jumping or swinging on their crutches towards the lower left corner of the picture, two of them turn their backs on the viewer and seem to tend to move towards the right into the background, one stands a little to the right of the central axis of the picture, facing to the right, but turns her head to the left side of the picture. Behind the five men in the right half of the picture a masked, probably female figure passes by. She moves to the right and carries a plate in front of her that can be used just as well for collecting as it is for handing out benevolent gifts for beggars. The red brick walls in the background lead from a vanishing point of view to an archway behind which trees can be seen; however, the vegetation in both the background and the foreground is rather dreary and poor.

The man swinging forward on the left edge of the picture has his tall red headgear slipped into his leaning face so that his eyes cannot be seen. However, the gaze seems to be turned to his neighbor, who, like himself, has no feet and is moving in the same direction, albeit less energetically. The two footless men each use armpit crutches and wear a kind of protectors on their lower legs so that they can slide or stand on their shins, although the construction is different: the aids that the "jumping person" wears on the left edge of the picture can obviously only contribute horizontal positioning of the lower legs can be used, while with the second footless there is a thorn on the front of the shin guard, which possibly enables a half-upright standing on the leg stumps. Almost nothing can be seen of the man in the gray-brown cloak who is behind these two people. His head is well below the horizon line, which suggests that he too is not normally standing on full legs; To some extent, a walking aid can be seen below the right arm, if it is present at all. However, further details cannot be seen. The man on the far right is also footless and uses armpit crutches and basket-like devices under his lower legs, on which he seems to slide after the woman in the background, who shows a red stockinged foot. They are attached to the remains of the leg with wide straps. The man in the middle with the fur-adorned headgear is in possession of all limbs, but is standing twisted on strongly bent legs, which are apparently hung with bells. Only the tips of the feet seem to be touching the ground. This man also uses armpit crutches. His face with his eyes rolled up and his mouth wide open could indicate an intellectual disability, but it could also be a sign that he is not able to control all of his body muscles. The fur-padded helmet-like cap, which was usually interpreted differently, could also be a protective device in the event of a fall against this background. The second man, whose face is completely recognizable, does not keep his mouth completely closed, but has a rather focused look. His facial expressions could more likely be due to the exertion involved in locomotion.

Four of the disabled men are wearing outer clothing that is hung with animal tails, the three on the right in the foreground also wear a white wrap over their other clothes. The portrayed also wear various headgear, which some viewers described as carnivalistic and seen as a satirical illustration of their misery. In addition to a bishop's hat, a knight's helmet, a fur hat and a royal crown are said to be represented; In fact, the three figures in front are wearing relatively tall, stiff headgear or attachments on their hats or caps, which are in rather striking colors, white and red.

Interpretations

Hans Holbein the Elder J .: The expulsion from paradise

The red fox tails attached to the clothes (including marten tails ?) Were, like the bells, accessories of fools, and the fool-like headgear, probably made of cardboard, go with them. The clothing, especially the headgear, offered scope for further interpretive efforts; the picture was seen, among other things, as an illustration of the saying “Beware of the marked ones”.

For example, the picture was interpreted as a representation of the different classes: the red crown symbolizes the king, the beret the citizen, the helmet the soldier, the cap the peasant and the miter the bishop - which led to Brueghel's cripple as “one Art of death dance in the tradition of Holbein “were interpreted: Before death, which wiped out all classes , all people were cripples and beggars and fell victim to evil. Charity personified with the bowl can only turn away from this society. Only the figure who embodies the peasant class turns towards the passage into the light, but whether it can achieve its goal is questionable.

Another possible interpretation is the idea of seeing a reference to the Huguenot Wars in the picture , in which the revolting Protestants opposed the Catholic representatives of the monarchy. The Duke of Guise , which sounds like the French word for beggar woman, gueuse, was the chief military leader of the Crown. One could see the picture as a satirical representation of the Duke of Guise, who leaves only cripples and misery and sneaks away.

classification

According to Max Dvořák , the picture Die Krüppel documents Brueghel's turning away from the picture sheet technique and the creation of a new form of moral image that comes about through “content and formal concentration” on the individual group.

As a conscious act of decomposition in the sense of the Macchia theory developed by Vittorio Imbriani and Benedetto Croce , according to which even the first, distant impression of what is seen, the “color spot” (macchia), must trigger a corresponding impulse in the viewer, Hans Sedlmayr saw some peculiarities of Brueghel's work and came to the result, among other things: "The ideal would be a body of a primitive sack shape without extremities: for this view the monstrous lumps of cripples are an ideal subject of representation [...] Bruegel's pictures are particularly suitable in a certain sense to prove Imbriani's theory, for they contain, in a strange way, that first distant vision even in their executed state. In order to restore the 'spot of color' from which the completed picture started, one does not need to - it seems - artificially disregard the representational meaning by pretending to be soul-blind. But the picture itself, or more precisely one of the two basic components [...] shows the tendency to strip away the representational meaning and to appear to the viewer purely as a brightly colored pattern made of spots of color. Without any activity on our part, in calm, passive gazing, if you look for a long time (for some viewers also immediately) the human figures of the typical Bruegel pictures begin to decompose, to break up into parts and thus also to lose their meaning and their usual meaning. When this process reaches its climax, instead of the figures, one sees a multitude of flat, colorful spots of tightly closed contours and uniform coloring, which seem to lie disconnected and disordered next to and on top of one another in a foremost layer of the picture. They are, as it were, the atoms of the picture. But not the entire picture structure is affected by this transformation. The landscape deep space in which the figures stand does not by itself tend to disintegrate into pieces or to such a loss of meaning, and even if the decomposition tendency extends to parts of its structure, it offers resistance [ ...] The overall impression that arises in this way and that the viewer experiences of amazement and alienation is extremely characteristic of almost all of Bruegel's painted pictures, even if it occurs with certain deviations in the large-figured ones [...] It there can be no doubt that Bruegel applied the described effect with the greatest intentionality. "

pathology

In the 1950s, the doctoral student Tony-Michel Torrilhon wrote a dissertation at the Sorbonne on The Pathology at Bruegel , in which he dealt with the clinical pictures presented by Brueghel. Torrilhon did not deny the influences that Hieronymus Bosch had on the young Brueghel and that were already recognized by his first biographer, Carel van Mander. In contrast to Bosch, however, according to Torrilhon, Brueghel did not allow himself any fantastic exaggerations of the grotesque, but presented the diseases and deformities, which apparently interested him very objectively, so objectively that reliable diagnoses could be made based on the paintings alone. Brueghel painted, so to speak, "with the eyes of a doctor".

In the picture Die Krüppel , Torrilhon was particularly interested in the precisely depicted orthopedic aids from the Renaissance period . When he was working on other pictures or details of Brueghel's pictures, he explicitly mentioned the ailments that, in his opinion, were shown here.

Quarrel of the carnival with the fasts , detail

For example, in the battle between Carnival and Lent in 1559, he discovered a victim of Buerger's disease : Thrombangitis obliterans leads to the death of limbs through inflammation of the blood vessels. The beggar who can be seen in the picture of the fasting no longer has any feet and he is also missing his left forearm.

In the same picture, Torrilhon believed he could make out someone with syphilitic muscle paralysis or spinal palsy : The man crawls with the help of hand supports and pulls his body, which is resting on a basket with extremely bent knees.

Rich material for diagnostic activity gave the students an blind with whom Brueghel illustrated a Bible verse: "And if the blind lead the other, both will fall into the pit." Brueghel was not only two blind men, but six are from left. seen to the right, diagnosed Torrilhon in the illustrated people a case of chronic pemphigus , a case of black Star , a case of atrophy of eyeballs by eye inflammation or glaucoma , and a case of leucoma . The eyeballs of the fifth depicted were surgically removed, the face of the sixth cannot be recognized, so that Torrilhon was unable to make a diagnosis here either.

Adoration of the Magi , detail

During the Adoration of the Magi , Torrilhon discovered a victim of syphilis in the second stage: one of the kings from the Orient suffered from paralysis of the facial surface.

At the village fair he found a bagpiper who suffered from swollen and inflamed lips, slack cheek muscles and a swollen parotid gland, which is why the young farmer, who stands next to the figure, has the task of giving him regular drinks so that he can drink could continue playing at all. Other ailments that Torrilhon believed he discovered in Brueghel paintings were nasal and pharyngeal gums, a deformed ear, which he classified as Stahl's ear # 3, and symptoms of Graves' disease .

In addition to physical symptoms, Brueghel also put mental symptoms into the picture. So Torrilhon saw in the landscape and Temptation of St. Anthony the delusional symptoms of a paranoid and in the Grete tunnel hallucinations that a menopause - psychosis are due. The newspaper Le Monde was rather critical of Torrilhon's theses, but he was awarded the doctorate for his research. Later, however, Torrilhon did not work in the medical field, but turned entirely to art.

literature

• Tony-Michel Torrilhon: La pathologie chez Bruegel. Theses pour le doctorat en médecine. Faculté de Médecine de Paris, 1957.

Web links

Commons : Die Krüppel  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} PETER BRUEGEL: Diagnoses . In: Der Spiegel . No. 11 , 1958 ( online - Mar. 12, 1958 ).
2. ↑ Veronika Luther: Narrentum and Karnevaleskes in "A short-term reading of Dil Ulenspiegel". GRIN Verlag, 2012, ISBN 978-3-656-21517-2 , p. 21.
3. ↑ Representation of the disabled in Austria, disability and society
4. ↑ Hans Sedlmayr: The ›macchia‹ Bruegel. P. 6 ff.
5. ↑ Torrilhon's biography