Did Pieter Bruegel Play Dice? The Story of Seemingly Insignificant Detail

Figure and Background: Bruegel and the Others

Now let’s get to the heart of the matter. On September 20th, 2023, I was at the Kunsthistorisches Museum and spent several hours in the Bruegel Room. While standing before The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, I wondered how the artist conceived the role of chance and fate in human life. As you know, in this great master’s paintings, the human condition appears quite different from how his Italian colleagues depicted it: take a painting by Raphael or Parmigianino.

The Italian Renaissance shows us a free and self-sufficient man who stands out against the landscape, dominates it, forgets it—he can almost omit it, in short. Nature and the world are always in the background, functioning mostly as inert scenery, caption, or decoration. A nature, however (as shown in Leonardo’s paintings for example), is freed from the whims of the divine or the diabolical, of the symbolic and the magical. It is subjected to the tranquility of Euclidean geometry: the same geometry that one day would answer only to the forces christened by Galileo and Newton (not even the appearance of an angel in the foreground could disturb that placid ordo rerum). In that world, between human will and the outcome of the action aimed at fulfilling it, there is almost no intermediary that facilitates or hinders.

With Bruegel, it is different: the world is not an inert backdrop. Man is entangled in the world and subjected to the climate, resources, geography, and his body: he depends on the world. He must chop wood and light fires to stay warm; nothing guarantees the success of his hunt.  To move his herds or harvest the grain, he must follow the (not always favorable) seasons. His joy and sorrow are not the center of the scene—they occur among countless other things, as W. H. Auden observed. A very important man drags a cross, lost in the crowd.

What is most significant might be found in a corner. A man urinating against a wall is not free: he depends on his physiology. And Bruegel tells us this, making us smile or recoil in horror, from a corner, while another man repairs the roof of a house. Between human will and its fulfillment or failure lies a merciless world governed by the unpredictable forces of fate. This awareness could even have unexpected therapeutic consequences as likely suggested by Gerolamo Cardano, who “recommended gambling as a remedy for anxiety precisely because the sense of being completely at the mercy of fortune and unable to exercise any form of control over one’s life had, for him, a powerful therapeutic effect.”⁴

And here we are, in front of our painting, which sees the forces of vice and virtue clashing. The geometric center of the panel is empty. Around it, the clamor of 200 moving figures. But we are interested in two figures in a corner.

A Very Detailed Detail

In the lower-left corner, two men seem focused on a bet. One of them (on the right) has just rolled a pair of dice, and both are looking at the result. Herman Pleij wrote on the outcome of the game and the possible fraud into which the challenger has fallen. He reconstructed an accurate history of the hooded figure holding the waffle, the phenomenon of the mommekansen and the figure of the Mommekanser⁵ (unmasked by his mask). However, his study is focused on the semantic implications of the representation. Even Jedlicka Gotthard spoke about the players, finding a correspondence with the figures giving alms below, in the bottom right corner.⁶

Others have speculated that the man being mocked by the cheat was Bruegel himself; this idea can also be found in a novel by Rudy Rucker.⁷ In any case, so far, nothing too unusual: the painting would depict a man being swindled with rigged dice, losing the coin placed on the stone.

The available studies examine the type of game being played between the two men we see around the dice. Another studied aspect is a possible symbolic and moral meaning of the game—in the context that contrasts Lenten virtues with Carnival excesses or vices. Yet, in none of the studies dedicated to the subject do I find any mention of the curious final position of the dice on the stone.

Here, the quintessential game of chance seems to deny chance’s oppressive reign. Indeed, the sum of each pair (based on spatial orientation) of visible faces per die gives the result 7: 6+1 for the faces facing upward (A); 4+3 for those facing right (B), and 2+5 for those facing left (C). This also implies that the six faces we cannot see perpetuate the same behavior and that distributed across two dice, we are shown all the numbers of a single die. The die on the right shows the three even numbers (2, 4, 6). The left die shows the odd ones (5, 3, 1).

It is quite ironic—and irony is certainly a hallmark of Bruegel’s work—and interesting that, to convey a message (even a trivial one, which we are not concerned with now), he chose dice as symbols of the code. Dice appear elsewhere in Bruegel’s work: we find them in a painting many years later, The Peasant Wedding (1567); in the catastrophe of The Triumph of Death (1562); and, in The Dutch Proverbs (“the die is cast”). One even finds them in a different part of the painting we are examining (below). We even see them in one of the intricately chaotic infernos of his predecessor Hieronymus Bosch.

But in none of these representations do their faces sum to seven (though in Bosch, a sinister 666 can be deciphered, indicating that dice had already been considered for signaling something). In copying the painting, his son Pieter noticed that shell left by his father on the tumultuous ocean of chance, and at least in one case reproduced the same dice: this is the case in the Brussels copy; but in other copies, it is different: the variations that then surface attest to the diminishing entertainment quality of his father’s original intent.

A Strange Alliance of Chance, Probability, and Meaning

However, on a traditional six-sided die, the numbers are generally positioned so that the opposite faces sum to seven: Bruegel is thus showing us two perfectly complementary dice (like vice and virtue?).

Beyond possible esoteric or doctrinal references (the seven deadly sins, the seven virtues—three theological and four cardinal), 7 is also the expected value for a roll of two dice. The frequentist interpretation of probability would be formalized only in the mid-19th century. However, it circulated in the minds of Gerolamo Cardano and other “sinful” mathematicians right around the time Bruegel was observing the battlefield between vice and virtue.⁸ It is therefore not unlikely that there was an intuitive understanding of the phenomenon at the time, which would add a layer of ambiguity to Bruegel’s irony. However, in this case, those are not real but painted dice…

The dice are cast onto a stone. On that stone, Bruegel wrote his name and the date: BRVEGEL, 1559. By dropping the eighth letter of the Latin alphabet (the “h”), his eight-letter surname becomes a seven-letter one. If we use one of the methods in which the alphabets are translated to numbers, removing the “h” in front of the “g” (the seventh letter of the alphabet) leads to the following: B = 2, R = 9⁹, U = 3, E = 5, G = 7, E = 5, L = 3. Adding all the numbers gives 34. 3 + 4 = 7.

However, the letter “j” does not appear in the earliest Dutch orthographic treatises: it is absent from the Nederlandsche spellynghe by Joos Lambrecht (1550) as well as from De Orthographia Linguæ Belgicæ by Antonius Saxagius (1576). It appears later in the Twe-spraack vande Nederduitsche letterkunst of 1584, positioned between “i” and “k.” The Dictionarium Teutonico-Latinum by Cornelius Kiliaan (Plantin, 1574) skips from “i” directly to “k.” By omitting the “j,” we could instead arrive at: P = 6 + I = 9 + E = 5 + T = 1 + E = 5 + R = 8 = 34 = 3 + 4 = 7. In both cases, the sum reaches 7 as the total of the two types of virtues.

Such numerological systems were not only found in the writings of occultists like Agrippa and John Dee but also circulated widely throughout all layers of humanistic culture. It is possible that Bruegel intended to mock these systems by applying them as a mere riddle concerning his own name (it is known how J. S. Bach frequently employed such practices¹⁰). We do not know if Bruegel had such a trick in mind. He must have thought that this curious arrangement of numbers on the faces of his dice would be noticed by someone—someone who would, in some way, react to it.

Did he mean to suggest that the apparent chaos of the painting was the result of the artist’s will? Or that the surname with which he began to sign himself that day was the result of a choice? Or perhaps that these seemingly deliberate decisions were merely the effects of a concealed roll of the dice?

Author’s bio:

Ignazio Piangatelli was born in 1993, is a freelance writer and editorial consultant. Since he was a child he spent a lot of time thinking in front of Bruegel’s paintings.