Along the bottom of this print, in small Latin letters, is a question: Quis metus aut pudor est unquam properantis avari? What fear or shame ever stops the greedy man in a hurry? The line comes from the Roman satirist Juvenal, and it neatly sums up the picture above it, a landscape overrun by people grabbing, hoarding and scheming.
This is Avarice, one plate from a set of seven engravings called The Seven Deadly Sins, made in 1558. The designs were by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who was in his early thirties and not yet famous for the peasant scenes he is remembered for. The engraver was Pieter van der Heyden, and the Antwerp publisher Hieronymus Cock issued the set. Together they produced some of the most widely circulated prints of the Netherlandish Renaissance.
The style borrows from Hieronymus Bosch. At the center a seated woman, the personification of Avarice, is surrounded by a crowd of strange creatures, half-human, half-object, busy at their miserable work. Money, locks and keys, and chests appear everywhere. Around her, people counting coins and scrambling for treasure share the stage with bizarre buildings, and a whole village seems to be turned into a machine for getting rich.
Bruegel's contemporaries enjoyed this kind of moral comedy, but it was also a warning. Antwerp was one of the richest trading cities in Europe, and its merchants had every reason to recognize themselves.
The series shows how early Bruegel was working in the satirical, proverb-filled mode that would come to define him. It still seems timely.
Bruegel's Avarice appears on our: