Homo ludens: Pieter Bruegel’s Children’s Games and the Humanist Educators

Pieter Bruegel,  Children’s Games, 1560, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna

Picturing more than two hundred children playing over eighty different games, Children’s Games (1560) is one of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s most intriguing and least understood paintings. The panel resembles little else in the history of art, and as a result it has often evoked ahistorical responses. The following article addresses this problem by grounding Children’s Games in the century in which it was produced and using a range of sixteenth-century sources to develop fresh insights into how the painting might have been received by its original audience. The literature of François Rabelais, pedagogical treatises and colloquies, and Antwerp’s own progressive schooling system all provide examples of contemporary ideals about children and games that can be brought to bear on Children’s Games. After demonstrating the relevance of these sources to Bruegel’s patrons, the author uses the pedagogical literature to measure aspects of Children’s Games, resulting in a more positive reading of the panel than has hitherto been offered. This becomes particularly marked when the painting is placed alongside other sixteenth-century representations of “ideal” and “non-ideal” children.

DOI: 10.5092/jhna.2012.4.2.1

Acknowledgements

This article developed from my doctoral research on Children’s Games and I would like to thank my supervisor Tom Tolley and my examiners Jill Burke and Mark Meadow for their support, as well as the two anonymous readers for the JHNA for their incisive comments.

Imprint

Review: Peer Review (Double Blind)
DOI: 10.5092/jhna.2012.4.2.1
License:
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation:
Amy Orrock, "Homo ludens: Pieter Bruegel’s Children’s Games and the Humanist Educators," Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 4:2 (Summer 2012) DOI: 10.5092/jhna.2012.4.2.1