Some of the earliest surviving works of the Flemish luminary Pieter Bruegel the Elder are not his detail-rich peasant scenes that furnish art history courses the world over, but painted serving plates, or roundels. (A 1557 example was attributed to Bruegel in 2000, making it his oldest surviving genre painting, according to Elizabeth Alice Honig.) The twelve scenes here, dated to 1558, use the follies of life as pathways toward profundity — and while they may spark insight, they certainly do not whet the appetite. Another kind of digestion is at play, as the mind macerates these cryptic proverbs for moral and message. A man with his back turned pisses against a crescent moon — a commentary on time-wasting endeavors? Another fills in a well only after, the inscription tells us, his calf has drowned — a warning to take action before disaster strikes? Some of these scenes would be repeated in Bruegel’s Netherlandish Proverbs (1559). Others would inspire the next generation of Flemish artists, such as Jan Wierix. Now mounted together in a frame, the roundels are thought to have been originally intended to be used and reused like any other workaday set of decorative tableware — chargers, trivets, runners — in greater proximity to the pleasure-seeking mouth than the cold aesthetic eye.

Wooden roundels or “trenchers” (teljoren in Dutch) were a not uncommon fixture of middling and well-to-do dinner parties in sixteenth-century Europe. And, as with the backgrounds for Bruegel’s Twelve Proverbs, they were often “uniformly painted in red”. In an era when sugar was becoming more accessible and affordable than ever before, sweet confections and marzipan figurines are thought to have been served on the plain, unpainted side of the plate. Riding a postprandial glucose high, guests would then be invited to flip over the roundel and contemplate the images while reading aloud the inscriptions on their tableware. “Trenchers have been almost entirely neglected within historical and art historical fields”, wrote Victoria Yeoman in 2017, but they should be studied as much as any other art object, not least because trenchers constituted a kind of performance. As diners rotated, deciphered, and meditated upon the relationship between text and image, they would also reveal their own learning, opinions, manners, and beliefs — prompted by wildly divergent subject matter, depending on the roundel set: “biblical verse and commentary, erotic tales, marriage advice, figural proverbs, the labours of the months, memento mori reminders, clashes of religious ideologies (they are especially anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish), peasant life, anti-papal sentiments and contentious, topical events”.

Yet what’s most present in Bruegel’s images, especially to a contemporary viewer, is the shelf life of wisdom. Proverbs that may have at one time been instantly recognizable to a Netherlandish audience are now partly veiled beneath the passage of history. Or, like the sweet treats that might have once adorned these roundels, lost on the tongues of generations past.