Bruegel the Elder’s The Land of Cockaigne, aka Het Luilekkerland, makes you think it’s a picnic. Not. It’s a satirical look at Cockaigne, a mythical place where it’s always spring and never winter, in which life is all play and no work, and food and drink are abundant. Het Luilekkerland means “the lazy luscious land.” Which, according to Bruegel, is a hellish place of the depravity of idleness, drunkenness, and gourmandish. Living in Cockaigne is a joke some would like to come true.
Bruegel’s sleeping figures sprawl on the ground like spokes around the axle of a tree. Identifiable are a burgher, a soldier, and a peasant. Off to the side, a Spanish soldier, the only person awake, looks upward at the roof of a shed he under tiled with pies and tarts that are about to fall on him. The others drunk and sated are dead to the world
Food and drink suggest a world gone wrong in which leisure is disruptive and false: a glass drops liquid onto a sleeping soldier, the goose is attempting to get on the plate, open egg with legs in which there is a knife, a pig with a knife in its flesh, a chunk of hollowed bread used as a charger. A large cactus suggests life is thorny. Among Bruegel’s resources is an anonymous poem from the 1330s satirizing the belief of paradise on Earth:
At lunchtime, suppertime, and tea.
It’s true without a doubt, I swear,
No earthly country could compare;
Under heaven no land but this
Has such abundant joy and bliss.
There is many a pleasant sight,
It’s always day, there is no night.
There are no quarrels and no strife,
There is no death, but always life;
Food and clothing are never short.
They must find it boring there
Without more company to share.
But Cockaygne offers better fare,
And without worry, work, or care;
The food is good, the drink flows free
At lunchtime, suppertime, and tea.
It’s true without a doubt, I swear,
No earthly country could compare;
Under heaven no land but this
Has such abundant joy and bliss.
There is many a pleasant sight,
It’s always day, there is no night.
There are no quarrels and no strife,
There is no death, but always life;
Food and clothing are never short.
[The Land of Cockaygne. London, British Library, MS Harley 913, ff. 3r-6v
http://www.soton.ac.uk/~wpwt/trans/cockaygn/coctrans.htm]
The menu includes tarts, cakes, pork, lamb’s feet, eels, fish, beef eggs, cheese, bread, cakes, pies, wine, and beer.
See Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The Land of Cockaigne (1566), oil on wood panel. Alte Pinakothek, Munich, Germany; Ross H. Frank. “An Interpretation of The Land of Cockaigne (1567) by Pieter Bruegel The Elder.” The Sixteenth Century Journal 22, no. 2 (1991): 299-329