A whole village is crowded into one panel, with a tower, a river and the sea behind it, and almost every figure is doing something absurd. In the center a young woman in a red dress drapes a blue cloak over the shoulders of her old husband. Around them a woman ties the Devil to a pillow, a man hangs a huge bell on a cat, and a monk ties a flaxen beard on a figure of God.

Houses, barns and fields stretch back to a hazy shore. No one in it is a portrait. The Gemäldegalerie reads the figures as typical representatives of the social estates rather than as individuals, and the village includes not only peasants but also noblemen and clergy. The blue cloak was a common symbol of deceit: the wife is fooling her husband.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder signed and dated the panel 1559, and it acts out about a hundred proverbs and sayings. The village serves as a metaphor for the world as a whole. The picture was once known as The Blue Cloak and as The Upside-Down World. The museum bought it in 1914 from English ownership.

It is in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin.