The battle of changing times : picaresque parodies from Bruegel to Grosz

Abstract

This study focuses on Bruegel's parodic legacy in the picaresque tradition. It is based, on the one hand, on visual rhetoric, visual parody, and the poetics of epideictic rhetoric; and, on the other, on the interaction between epideictic rhetoric's salient features and the Bruegelian themes of camivalisation, the satirising of human folly, and the ontic order of the World Upside Down topos as organising principles. The relationships between the above themes are chronologically traced in various disguises in pictures by representative picaresque artists from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries: i.e., in Bruegel, Steen, Hogarth, Daumier, and Grosz. Each of these picaresque artists battled with their own times, parodying the paradigmatic targets of the high mode, in both social and genre hierarchy, and in doing so revealed the complexities of the above themes at work within an ever changing context-bound rhetoricity.