Carnival

• Strongest in the Mediterranean area, Italy, Spain & France, likely due to warmer temperatures
• Fairly Strong in Central Europe
• Weakest in north (though England had Shrove Tuesday)
• Began in January or late December, approaching Lent. - (Burke, 182 & 191)



Pieter Bruegel The Elder, The Fight Between Carnival and Lent (1559)
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

"In southern Europe in particular Carnival was the greatest popular festival of the year... The place of Carnival was the open air of the city centre... Carnival may be seen as a huge play in which the main streets and squares became stages, the city became a theatre without walls and the inhabitants, the actors and spectators, observing the scene from their balconies...
The action of this gigantic play was a set of more or less formally structured events..." (Burke 182-183).

• Feasting
• Processions
• a Competition (often races)
• the Performance of Plays and Acts of Reversal  e.g. Judge put in stocks; Wife triumphed over husband (Burke 190) 
• Celebration of the community's ability to put on a good show

A celebrartion for the community, by th community.

"The Roman Carnival is a festival which, in point of fact, is not given to the people, but which the people give themselves"

-Geothe, Rome, 1788 (15)

The figure of Carnival himself was featured in games and lead processions. He was depicted as a fat man, "pot-bellied, ruddy, cheerful, often hung about" with food, especially sausages. Lent, in contrast, was depicted as a thin old woman, dressed in black and "hung about with fish" (Burke 185).

Detail: Pieter Bruegel The Elder, The Fight Between Carnival and Lent (1559)

"Mardi Gras and Carnival.” The History Channel website. Oct 23 2012
Painting by Workshop of Pieter Bruegel the Elder | www.History.com

 

There is some evidence to suggest that battles between Carnival and Lent were not just figments of the imagination of Bruegel... and other painters, but were enacted in public; in Bologna in 1506, there was a tournament between 'Carnival', on a fat horse, and 'Lent', on a thin one... The last act of the festival was often a drama in which 'Carnival' suffered a mock trial; made a mock confession and... was given a mock execution, usually by burning, and a mock funeral" (Burke 185).

Violence, like sex, "was more or less sublimated into ritual. Verbal aggression was licensed at this season; maskers were allowed to insult individuals and to criticise the authorities," (Burke 187).

"Each man is at liberty to go fooling to the top of his bent, and...all license is permissible short of blows and stabs." -Goethe, Rome, 1788 (15).

Does the execution of 'Carnival' tie him to other harvest figures like Osiris, Dimuzzi and Saturn? The gods of the grain must be sacrificed and ritually dismembered, sometimes even planted, to ensure a Spring crop.
Additionally, the ritual execution of Carnival must have put to rest the playful extremities of celebration, re-confirming such festivities as existing only outside the norm. Thus the normative is re-enforced.

FEASTING

The Fat Kitchen After Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Netherlandish, ca. 1525–1569 Brussels)
Artist: Pieter van der Heyden (Netherlandish, ca. 1525–1569) |  Met Museum Collections

Of Gluttony and Rebelling. | Woodcut attributed to Albrecht Dürer.
Illustration from Stultifera navis (Ship of Fools) by Sebastian Brant, published 1498 | University of Houston Digital Libraries

 

"Such boiling and broiling, such roasting and toasting, such stewing and brewing, such baking, frying, mincing, cutting, carving, devouring, and gorbellied gourmandising, that a man would think people did take two months' provisions at once into their paunches..." -17th c. description of England's Shrove Tuesday (Burke 183).


SEXUAL LICENSE

A Fool and a Woman |  Lucas van Leyden, 1520 | Metropolitan Museum

Fool with a Girl Looking Through Her Fingers | Werner van den Valckert (1585-1627) | Metropolitan Museum

A Couple of Fools | Print by Sebald Beham 1531-1550. German. | British Museum Collections

 

"Carne also meant 'the flesh'..." (Burke 186.)

• Conceptions peaked in February in 18th century France
• Weddings often took place during Carnival
• Mock weddings were a popular game ("the bride might be a man & the groom a bear," Burke 185)
• Songs with double meanings rang through the streets
• Phallic figures were carried through the streets, including over-sized sausages
• 'Carnival' himself was dressed in sausages
• Unmarried girls took part in mock  'ploughings' in Germany
• Masks boasted long noses and horns
 

 The masks now begin to multiply. Young men, dressed in the holiday attire of the women of the lowest class, exposing an open breast and displaying an impudent self-complacency, are mostly the first to be seen. They caress the men they meet, allow themselves all familiarities with the women they encounter... and for the rest do whatever humour, wit or wantonness suggest.  -Goethe, Rome, 1788 (18).

 

TOPSY-TURVY:

"Symbolic inversions enable the participants to contemplate their diverse experiences in relation to the existence of order'" (Pandian 561).

• Carnival was juxtaposed to Lent and to the everyday.
• Symbolic chaos and misrule
• Costume and Disguise allowing Cross-Dressing, Free-Speech and Lewd Behavior
• Sexual Licence, Gorging to Excess on Food and Drink
• Public Performance of Rule-Breaking enacted by all classes
• Comedy, Farce and Satire

"the serious Roman, who has been watchful the whole year round against falling into any slip, doffs his earnestness and gravity..." Goethe, Rome, 1788 (18)

Perhaps in ancient times,  inversion, ritualized reversal and regulated disorder was all in the name of RENEWAL...

 

More Images of Carnival...

Stultorum Chorea | Etching and engraving, Print by Frans Hogenberg 1550-1600
British Museum Collections

Three Fools of Carnival, 1642 | Engraving by Pieter Bruegel the Elder | British Museum Collections

The Months: February | from a series of the months published in Amsterdam. | Print made by Cornelis Dusart, 1675-1704
British Museum Collections



Trajan's column in the centre of the Piazza Colonna in Rome | 1804 Hand-coloured etching |  British Museum

Carnival in Rome: An oil painting from 1839 by Aleksandr-Petrovic Mjasoedo of Roman celebrations.| www.History.com

 "Riots and rebellions frequently took place on the occasions of major festivals" - Burke (204)

Violence during this time was not only ritually enacted or play-acted. Scholarship suggests Bruegel may not have been purely imagining his fight between Carnival and Lent. But whatever violence there was seldom threatened order or grew into full-scale rebellion. Perhaps the lengthy tradition of order restored following inversion festivals was partially responsible.