Figures of Speech ─ Picturing Proverbs in Renaissance Netherlands

"Walter Gibson, dean of Bruegel scholars, has done it again. His new book, like the proverbs it studies, instructs gently yet plainly in compact size. While it figures forth the depths of Bruegel's own passion for proverbs, this wide-ranging period study also shows the cultural breadth of Dutch proverbs in other media, including the witty world of urban rhetoricians. These 'loquacious pictures' have their adept translator in Walter Gibson."--Larry Silver, author of Peasant Scenes and Landscapes

"This is an important book for anyone interested in the representation of the verbal in Northern Renaissance art, and Gibson, who has long conveyed the latest research into Netherlandish iconography to the English-speaking world, an authoritative guide to this neglected aspect of the intellectual climate of the period. Here is new light illuminating some of the lesser-known works of Bosch and Bruegel, but also those of much less well-known artists who chose to pictorialise the idiom in an era--as this study triumphantly demonstrates--in which the proverb came into its own and the verbal became visual not just in manuscripts and paintings but in the very market-place."--Malcolm Jones, author of The Secret Middle Ages

Walter S. Gibson is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities Emeritus at Case Western Reserve University and the author of many books including Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter and Pleasant Places: The Rustic Landscape from Bruegel to Ruisdael, both from UC Press.