Take a close look at the corner of this print and you will find the name Hieronymus Bosch. Bosch had died in 1516, forty years before the print was made. The real designer was Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who had made a signed and dated drawing of the same scene in 1556. The engraver, Pieter van der Heyden, cut the plate and the publisher, Hieronymus Cock, issued it in 1557 with Bosch's name on it. Historians suspect Cock made the swap because Bosch sold better than an unknown Bruegel.
The scene is a landscape full of fish, with a huge fish lying beached in the middle. It is split open by a man in a helmet with a very large knife, and smaller fish spill out of its belly and mouth, many of them with even smaller fish in their own mouths. Fish are eating fish, and some have legs.
The proverb is very old: the big fish eat the small ones. At the bottom, a father in a boat points at the carnage and tells his son in Flemish, in effect, look, I have long known that big fish eat the small. It is the most cynical lesson in the whole of sixteenth-century art, delivered like a bedtime story.
The print is a Bruegel through and through, even under another man's name. He was among the first artists to take proverbs and turn them into whole pictures, and the world he drew had both humor and teeth. Some scholars see a comment on greedy rulers and the way the powerful consume the weak.
The mistaken signature actually proves the point. In the market, a famous name eats a less famous one.
Bruegel's Big Fish Eat Little Fish appears on our: