Artist: Jheronimus Van Aken
Date: 1620
Size: 75 x 240 cm
Technique: Oil On Panel
This many-figured, oblong composition depicts the battle between Shrove Tuesday (Carnival) and Lent, in other words between excess and moderation. A little man playing the bagpipes who personifies the carnival is being carried on a table out of the kitchen on the left. His pitcher of drink has fallen over, to the glee of one of the people carrying him. In the kitchen itself, the activities around the fireplace allude to Shrove Tuesday, and the cleaning of fish to Lent. The round table on the right is being carried on a woman’s head, and on it are just two fish in reference to the meagre Lenten diet. To the right of the woman is a colossal bagpipe containing a lute-player and several other figures. The foreground is largely filled with two dancing couples (monks and nuns), and their dance is the dance of fools, signifying stupidity.14 The fool with his bauble in the left middleground, the odd headgear of some of the figures, the pitcher, spindles, bellows, the basket with a cat and a stone, are also symbols of folly.15 There are several versions of this scene.16 A version in grisaille that has been considerably truncated on the left and right has been in the collection of the Noordbrabants Museum in ’s-Hertogenbosch since 1988 (fig. a).17 Unverfehrt dated this version between 1540 and 1550, long after Bosch’s death, making it the earliest of them all, but doubted that Bosch was the inventor of the composition.18 The fairly sober grisaille technique gives the painting in ’s-Hertogenbosch a rather archaic look, and for that reason it does vaguely recall the work of Bosch. The technique and style of the Rijksmuseum version and of another coloured, almost identical one in the Museum Mayer van den Bergh in Antwerp make them appear much later.19 The Antwerp version is usually dated around 1560. The one in Amsterdam, which differs from the others in having an inscription, has to be dated to the closing decades of the 16th century on the basis of the dendrochronology. It is very unlikely that The Battle between Carnival and Lent is based on a lost work by Jheronimus Bosch, and one can even wonder whether it can be regarded as an imitation in his manner. Only the people making music in the bagpipe recall his work. It would perhaps be better, then, to place the invention of the composition in Antwerp around 1560 with followers of Bosch like Frans Huys and Jan Verbeeck.20 Finally, the painting raises the question as to the iconographic relationship between this scene and Pieter Brueghel’s Battle between Carnival and Lent of 1559 in Vienna.21 The inscription about Luther dancing with his nun, which was assumed in the past to be a later addition, does fit in well with the satirical connotations that were attached to works by Bosch and his followers in this period.22 The inscription led to the fat monk in the middle being identified as Luther, and the nun as his wife, Katherine von Bora. In this reading the painting is a satirical comment on the turbulent developments taking place in the Church in the 16th century.23 J. Bogers, 2010 Literature updated by J.P. Filedt Kok, 2016
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