The Fight Between Carnival and Lent

The Fight Between Carnival and Lent was painted by Pieter Bruegel the Elder in 1559. It is a panorama of contemporary life in the Southern Netherlands. While the painting contains nearly 200 characters, it is unified under the theme of the transition from Shrove Tuesday to Lent, the period forty days before Easter.

History
The literary theme of the struggle between personifications of Shrove Tuesday and Lent dates as far back as the year 400 with the Psychomachia. The 13th Century French poem La Bataille de Caresme et de Charnage describes a symbolic battle between different foods, meat against fish. A likely graphic precursor of the painting is a 1558 Frans Hogenberg print in which the personifications of lean and fat are driven together on carts by their supporters. The supporters attack each other with fish, waffles, cookies and eggs.

Also in 1559, Bruegel produced a series of prints of the Seven Virtues, which have formal similarities: an allegorical figure, against a background with a high horizon line, is surrounded by a crowd of figures who carry out various activities related to the subject. In the same year, Bruegel painted Netherlandish Proverbs, also modelled on a print by Hogenberg. The following year he produced Children's Games. These three works are closely related, each forming a catalogue of folk customs. The works mark the transition of Bruegel from draughtsman to the painter of grand panels for which he is now known.

Composition
It is typical of the world landscape style, in which an imaginary panoramic landscape is seen from an elevated viewpoint. The horizon is high in the picture, giving the viewer a bird's eye view of the scene. The physical canvas is large, and the characters are small, which means that nearly 200 characters fit into the scene, mostly in groupings.

A market square of an unspecified village in the Netherlands is shown. Themes in the scene would have been nostalgic for contemporary viewers, since it depicts an older and more rural style of improvised celebration, in contrast to the highly organized professional processions which would have been seen at that time in Antwerp.

The spectacle is divided into two halves, and framed by two buildings: the inn on the left, the church on the right, which gives it the character of a scene in a stage show. The left side of the sprawling canvas depicts the Carnival, the right side, Lent. The boundary is not sharply defined, however, and in several places the followers of Lent and Shrove Tuesday invade each other's space.

The painting depicts different times of year. Barren, wintery, trees on the left hint at the winter, while the budding trees of the churchyard's lenten side hint at a burgeoning spring.

In the foreground is the battle itself: the two opponents, pulled and pushed and accompanied by supporters, are about to meet.

The painting does not present either side as being better than the other, but presents both sides as extremes of the human experience.