The Bentvueghels - rivalling drunk university students

My last essay for the Courtauld involved researching an Italian follower of Pieter van Laer, Michelangelo Cerquozzi (1602-1660).  During the research of Van Laer and his followers, many of whom were foreigners in Rome, I discovered the existence of a society called the Bentvueghels (Birds of a Feather).  This ‘flock’ of foreign artists in Rome had fantastically raucous parties, mocked antiquity and the Roman gods, and generally irritated the Academy of San Luca they were opposed to.

Anonymous, Bacchus with Bent members, drawing,
Museum Boymans, Rotterdam

The Bentvueghels seem to have been formed in 1623 as a way of socially gathering Dutch and Flemish artists in Rome for mutual support in an alien city.  Primarily, however, their aim was to get hammered.  Males, aged 20-25, a similar age to university students, showed an equally similar propensity to drink and cause havoc.  A contemporary biographer states that their binges would sometimes last '3 days and 3 nights’ with feasting, drinking and prostitutes.  The parties would end in a drunken stumble to the church of Sta Constanza where they ‘paid homage’ to what they believed to be the grave of Bacchus, the God of Wine.  On either side of the sarcophagus, members scratched their names, which can still be viewed today.  Their homage of Bacchus can be seen in this drawing of a Bent feast by an unknown artist; the naked figure with leaves on his head in the centre is Bacchus, offering wine to a member.  The names scrawled beneath the drawing are the Bent nicknames of the artists involved.

Understandably, this behaviour somewhat irritated the more academic theoreticians and artists at the time and there was a huge backlash against the Bentvueghels for dishonouring the profession of artists.  Artists such as Salvator Rosa were also disgusted at members of the Bent for producing paintings called ‘bambocciades’ of crude every-day life occurrences which often sold for high sums of money, undermining the artistic dominance of religious and history paintings.  The Bentvueghels never seemed too bothered by this criticism though.   Evidence shows that they continued their merrymaking until 1720 when the society was dissolved by Papal decree.

Roeland van Laer, An Induction Celebration of the Bent, 1626, oil on canvas, 88.5x147.5cm, Museo di Roma, Rome.

A painting by Roeland van Laer (Pieter’s brother) shows an example of one of their ‘initiation’ or ‘baptism’ ceremonies.  These ceremonies involved a feast in honour of the new member who received his bent name, normally a demeaning, mocking name; Pieter van Laer was il bamboccio or ‘big ugly puppet’ because of his physical deformity.  The fellow standing stiffly in black on the right is probably the one being initiated (possibly looking so unimpressed because, as the new member, he would have been lumped with the bill at the end of the celebrations).  Around the inn, members are shown drinking, dangling off a ladder and engaging in amorous activity with the opposite sex (scandalous).  The table displays a group of revellers performing a visual theatre act in the style of the Dutch tableaux vivant.  A prostitute tops it off, balancing a wine flask on her head. 

Although there is hardly any literature on the Bentvueghels, their activities (illustrated in their art) are extremely interesting as an insight into the social context of foreign artists in Rome in the seventeenth century.  With their displays of drunken revelry, their propensity to be involved in brawls (the legal offences of the Bent are numerous) and their dress-up, it is hard not to compare them to the drunken activities of university students.  In particular the Bent initiation ceremonies are reminiscent of sports initiations (currently being banned across many UK universities), with the mocking of new recruits, name-calling and hours of drinking.

The ‘shockingly’ new phase of binge-drinking today thus appears to have a very old precedent.  I would advise the next students who get in trouble with their Guilds over initiations, to claim they were merely following the century-old example of foreign artists in Rome…