Gluttony (Land of Cockaigne) (1560s): Art, History and Details

Gluttony (Land of Cockaigne) (1560s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Peeter Baltens (Flemish, 1526/28–before 1584).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This copperplate was engraved with a lozenge-section burin in Antwerp (in present-day Belgium)—an important center for print publishing—in the 1560s. The subject is an imaginary land of ease and luxury, where food falls from trees (the Land of Cockaigne, or Luilekkerland in Dutch). To engrave, a copperplate is balanced on a sandbag. The sandbag allows the engraver to adjust the plate’s position while slowly guiding the burin to remove the copper. Rather than moving the hand in a pushing motion, the engraver forces the copperplate into the tool, rotating or tilting on the sandbag as necessary, while keeping the hand relatively still.

Object facts

• Title: Gluttony (Land of Cockaigne)
• Date: 1560s
• Creator attribution: Peeter Baltens (Flemish, 1526/28–before 1584)
• Culture: Flanders
• Type: Plate
• Technique: engraved copper plate
• Collection: PR - Apparatus
• Department: Prints
• Accession number: 1925.598

Collection credit

Gift of FitzRoy Carrington

Further reading listed by the museum

• Jürgen Müller, Thomas Ulrich Schauerte, and Abigail Ryan Prohaska. Pieter Bruegel: The Complete Works. Cologne : Taschen, 2018.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.