(Delft 1589–1662 The Hague)
‘Geweldige Botticheyt’,
signed lower right: AP (ligated) van de Venne,
oil on panel, 40 x 56 cm, framed

Provenance:
sale, Christie’s, Amsterdam, 14 November 2007, lot 130

The present raucous scene, so rich in both humour and human drama, is a characteristically vivid work from Adriaen Pietersz. van de Venne. On the left a man seated beside a spinning wheel of a knife or scissor grinder is shown, with an idiotic farmer having his face sharpened, held aloft by a clog-wearing figure on the left. A cartouche beneath reads Geweldige Botticheyt which has a subtle double meaning, typical of the Zotten, or fools, a sub-genre of Netherlandish painting to which this work belongs. The Dutch word ‘bot’ (meaning blunt), which is implies both as ‘blunt’ (in the case of knives and scissors) or as ‘stupid’, dull-minded (in the case of people), while ‘Geweldige’ means ‘great’ so here we have a scene of ‘great foolishness/bluntness’.

The comic motif of a head-grinder is also employed by van der Venne in his engraved series with comic inscriptions, Tafereel van de belacchende Werelt published in 1635. The present works repeats the compositional scheme of the engraving in reverse, although the current panel is enlivened by small changes to some of the figures and the background. Van de Venne played an important role in the Northern Low Countries in the early seventeenth century of further developing the rich tradition of the humanistic interest in folk customs which dates back to Erasmus of Rotterdam in his 1511 work Lof der Zotheid, illustrated by Hans Holbein, and most notably as depicted in the works of Pieter Brueghel the Elder and his followers.