Figures of Speech: Picturing Proverbs in Renaissance Netherlands

Figures of Speech addresses a key topic in Renaissance studies: the importance and pervasiveness of proverbs. For sixteenth-century Netherlanders, proverbs revealed the wisdom of the Ancients as well as the linguistic richness found in their own native language; for Pieter Bruegel, Hieronymus Bosch, and other Renaissance painters, proverbs were a frequent and appealing subject. In this book, Walter S. Gibson provides a comprehensive and engaging survey of these visual representations, capturing for twenty-first–century readers the moral sensibilities of a time and culture when such adages (and the images conveying their meaning) were invaluable guides to life.