With A. E. Popham’s publication in 1932 of Abraham Ortelius’s epitaph on Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the traditional figure of Droll Bruegel, of Peasant Bruegel, was soon replaced by Bruegel the peintre philosophe, as Charles de Tolnay characterized him in his monograph of 1935. It is thus understandable that scholars have sought to locate Bruegel’s “audience” among the intellectual circles of Antwerp, especially Ortelius and his colleagues, the classical scholars around Christophe Plantin, and the...