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"If he refused to portray humanity according to some platonic of formal beauty or in a light of a religious view of the universe, this is because he penetrated to the inner existence of human being and discovered its essential reality."

"In a wonderful manner Nature found and seized the human who in his turn was destined to seize her magnificently, when in an obscure village in Brabant she chose from among the peasants, as the delineator of peasants, the witty and gifted Pieter Bruegel and made him a painter to the lasting glory of our Netherlands."

"[Bruegel] painted much that simply could non be painted. All of the works by our Bruegel always imply more than they depict."

"Equally a result of his creative ability, formed by his own expertise, his own impressions and his own experiences, Pieter Bruegel was to get one of the swell poets in the portrayal of mural, nature, and man."

"In Bruegel's portrayal of men, multifariousness has been brought into harmony with nature; the individual has been captivated into a nifty whole that stands backside and above everything."

Summary of Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Pieter Bruegel the Elder was an artist of the Northern Renaissance whose visually engrossing paintings offer a commemoration of the common mass of humanity, in contrast to the pious religious painting which dominated much Renaissance art of the previous century. Built-in in what is now the Netherlands in the 1520s, reputedly into a peasant family unit, his piece of work focuses on themes such as rural working life, faith and superstition, and the political and social intrigues of his mean solar day. These themes were tackled with an unmistakable, droll and oft grotesque humor, an interest in the collective over the private, and a healthy skepticism for narratives of dandy deeds and men. From the Dutch Gold Age painters of the following century to the Realists of nineteenth-century France and across, any creative person who has cast their eye over their subject field with an honesty debunking mythology works in the spirit of the homo sometimes known equally "Peasant Bruegel".

Accomplishments

Bruegel's virtually distinctive stylistic contribution to art history was a form of narrative composition in which a sprawling landscape is filled with a teeming mass of humanity, figures grouped together across the sheet to form various intersecting focal points. Reminiscent of his older countryman Hieronymus Bosch's surreal hellscapes, this approach set Bruegel apart from many Renaissance artists who favored more visually harmonious compositions, offering a snapshot of a lingering medieval view of homo society equally chaotic and unruly.
In accord with his preference for large group compositions, Bruegel produced a serial of mythological or historical paintings in which attending is fatigued away from the nominal subject of the work towards the everyday life continuing all around it. In his Mural with the Fall of Icarus, only a desultory pair of legs sinking into the water in the middle distance records the tragic hero's downfall. This represents a departure from the focus on heroic individuals mutual in Renaissance art, and suggests a sympathy with the mutual lot of humanity which has been recognized by artists and writers e'er since.
Bruegel was as well a pioneer of what would get known as "genre painting", scenes of everyday working life captured with honesty, empathy, and occasional bathetic humor. While he is loath to pay homage to Biblical and mythical heroes, he has far less compunction about representing peasant revelers at a wedding, for example, or a procession of blind beggars. In the centuries to come up, notably through the work of Dutch artists of the following century, this focus on everyday life would become the footing of the artistic ethos known as Realism.

Biography of Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Though he is considered one of the greatest artists of the Northern Renaissance, trivial data exists near the babyhood of Pieter Bruegel. All that is known for sure is that he was born Peeter Brueghel, into what many believe was a peasant family, in or near Breda in kingdom of the netherlands, between 1525 and 1530.

Important Art past Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Progression of Art

c. 1558

Mural with the Fall of Icarus

One of Bruegel'due south best-known paintings, Landscape with the Autumn of Icarus incorporates a mural in the foreground with an expansive seascape stretching away towards the horizon. Closest to united states of america, a farmer pushes a turn and horse. To his correct, on a lower plateau of land, a shepherd tends to his flock. In the right foreground, a fisherman with his dorsum to the viewer casts his net at the h2o's border, while close to the shore in the bottom-right, 2 legs kick in the air: a comically minute reference to the titular narrative, which therefore seems to unfold in the background of the scene.

This is i of two paintings by Bruegel, which describe the story of Icarus as told in Ovid'south Metamorphoses. These were the only two works which Bruegel created on mythological themes, in marked contrast to his contemporaries' focus on heroic narratives. The story revolves around the death of Icarus, the male child who wanted so badly to wing that he synthetic wings out of wax and feathers. Failing to heed his father'southward alarm not to fly too shut to the dominicus, his wings melted and he plunged into the sea. We might await that this tragic denouement would form the focal signal of Bruegel's painting, but instead it becomes 1 incident woven into an all-encompassing representation of mutual rural life, the demise of the hero rendered about laughable in its head-beginning ignominy. The composition is both irreverent and subtly philosophically resonant, expressing a clear skepticism for the bombastic mythological painting that had dominated the previous century of Renaissance art.

This piece of work has been the discipline of much moral speculation, revolving especially around the various figures who remain ignorant of Icarus's plight, merely the shepherd glancing up towards the sky, and non even towards the relevant spot. The displacement of Icarus from center-phase has been interpreted every bit a directive to remain focused on i's ain daily life. William Dello Russo has even suggested that the painting may illustrate a well-known Netherlandish expression, "1 does not stay the turn for 1 who is dying." Mural with the Fall of Icarus was given its most famous twentieth-century treatment past the poet West.H. Auden, whose poem Musée des Beaux Arts (1938) considers how suffering and personal drama take identify in a wider context of ongoing life.

Oil on sheet - Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Kingdom of belgium

1559

The Fight between Carnival and Lent

In i of his more lurid and chaotic paintings, Bruegel offers us a dumbo allegorical representation of the competing drives underpinning human graphic symbol by showing the community associated with two festivals closely aligned in the early-modern calendar. To the left, the figure of the Carnival holds sway: a fatty man astride a beer butt with a pork chop pinned to its forepart, spit-roasting a sus scrofa and wearing a meat pie every bit a helmet. He presides over a scene populated by jesters, revelers, musicians, thieves, and beggars. To the right, the gaunt effigy of Lent, in the habit of a nun, extends a platter of fish, in defiance of his richer offerings. Behind her, hooded figures emerge from the archway of a church, in which the artworks are shrouded in the custom of the season of abstinence. To the other side of the canvass, the tavern provides an equivalent backdrop, standing for the sins and pleasures of the flesh.

Bruegel's complex symbolic representation of contrasting states of sin and piety, pleasure and hurting, judgement and redemption, finds its about obvious precedent in the work of an older Netherlandish principal, Hieronymus Bosch. In his proto-Surrealist triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights (c.1495-1505) Bosch offers a sequence of landscapes populated by figures in relative states of grace and perdition. What is notable, however, is the lack of any implied supernatural subtext to Bruegel's scene: where Bosch shows united states the dire consequences of human error, Bruegel presents the spirit of the Carnival as a force of rebellion and subversion without seemingly offering any positive judgement either way.

The battle between Carnival and Lent stood partly for a contemporary struggle unfolding in Bruegel's domicile country. In 1556 the Low Countries, in possession of the vastly powerful Habpburg dynasty, passed to King Philip II of Spain, who sought to bring it nether a more than straight and stricter form of Cosmic rule. At the same time, the Netherlandish countries were shut to the eye of the unfolding Reformation movement, which viewed Catholic festivities such equally Lent with profound suspicion. The carnivalesque energy of the left-hand side of the painting stands not and then much for the emergent spirit of Protestantism - which tended to be more repressive of the traditional festive calendar than Catholicism - but for the obdurate heathen customs and rebellious character of an oppressed civilization.

Oil on panel - Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

1559

The Netherlandish Proverbs

This painting shows Bruegel'due south mastery of complex composition, often based on stiff diagonal lines bringing overall cohesion to a large number of intersecting focal points. In The Netherlandish Proverbs, a hamlet setting is chosen as the location for a variety of eccentric and superstitious rituals.

The actions undertaken by the villagers represent approximately 120 dissimilar Netherlandish proverbs, all related to the oddities of human being behavior. In the left foreground a man bangs his head against a brick wall, representing the trend of a fool to proceed attempting the impossible; to the right, a figure leans distraught over a pot of spilt porridge, reminding the viewer that completed deportment cannot be undone. Bruegel is noted for his busy compositions, involving many groups of figures engaged in minor interactions. These individual compositions in turn establish an overall theme, often satirical or didactic, a compositional approach which has had a profound bear upon on art history. The influence of Bruegel'due south allegorical tableaux can be sensed, for example, in the work of the Dutch Symbolist and Expressionist James Ensor, who uses a like compositional style in Christ's Entry into Brussels (1888) and The Baths at Confirm (1890).

Bruegel's significance as a forerunner of modernistic art lies not just in his breaking away from the ordered vanishing-point perspectives and advisedly-managed figurative arrangements of the Italian Renaissance, but also from the idealized moral mode and grandiose subject-matter which those features implied. By depicting the foibles of everyday man life, Bruegel expanded the range of subjects available to the Renaissance painter with characteristic, irreverent wit.

Oil on wood - Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, Federal republic of germany

1563

The Tower of Babel

A vast, partially synthetic belfry dominates Bruegel'due south extraordinary 1563 work The Tower of Boom-boom. Surrounding the construction is a landscape dotted with tiny figures, some of whom march in procession around its curving stories, while others toil at the scaffolds along its sides. To the right, ships unload building materials; in every respect of detail, the painting is minutely, naturalistically accurate.

This is one of three paintings Bruegel created around the Biblical tale of the Tower of Boom-boom. In so doing, he chose a story intended to provide a moral directive around the dangers of over-reaching appetite. In the original narrative from the Volume of Genesis, God prevents King Nimrod from building a tower designed to reach to the heights of heaven, cursing the builders so that they are unable to communicate in the same language. In this painting, Nimrod is presented in the foreground discussing his projection with an entourage of sycophantic courtiers, while enfeebled subjects clamber around his feet. The structure behind him is, in part, intended to be reminiscent of a Roman amphitheater, the Roman Empire being a symbol of the hubris of human appetite in Bruegel's day.

As with so much of Bruegel's work, the moral message too has a contemporary resonance. Living at a time when mainland Europe was existence ravaged by rival religious factions - on the one hand, the Catholic empires of the southward, on the other the dissenting Protestant cultures of the north - the story of a once morally united, monoglot religious social club fracturing into rival groupings was a pertinent i; peculiarly as one of the founding causes of Protestantism was the translation of the Bible into modern script. Bruegel was sympathetic with the Protestant civilisation of his home country, and another version of the painting, The Little Tower of Babel" (c. 1568) provides a direct critique of Catholic ceremonial pomp. On 1 of the ramps extending upwardly the tower, a grouping of figures marches under a line of crimson canopies, generally understood to exist a veiled reference to the customs of the Catholic church, on whose behalf the Duke of Alba was brutally subduing Bruegel'due south homeland during the 1550s-60s.

Oil on panel - ‎Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

1565

The Hunters in the Snow

In a snow-covered landscape, three hunters atomic number 82 their dogs through a picturesque, sprawling hamlet. Vivid silhouettes of winter copse dominate the left-paw side of the composition, and, along with the management of the hunters' movement, lead the eye towards the busy scene at the eye, a happy gathering of people on a frozen river. In the background, buildings and snow-covered mountains recede into the distance beneath a blue-gray winter sky.

I of a series of paintings that Bruegel created to depict dissimilar seasons of the year, this work demonstrates his unique aptitude for capturing the spirit of the natural earth. William Dello Russo describes The Hunters in the Snow as "one of the best-loved works by Bruegel", and "undoubtedly the best-known image of winter in Western art [...] Never before had a painter managed to create such a convincing representation of the coldness, the silence, and the torpor of the wintertime landscape." Bruegel's approach moves well beyond the characteristic landscape-painting techniques of his era, offering complex compositions that rely on color harmonies to convey the mood of the scene and season. Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen suggest that "the picture is dominated by two 'common cold' colors, the white of the snow and the stake green of the sky and ice. Every living affair is dark. This stands in contradiction to the customary color associations connected with existence alive, and heightens the impressions of misery and privation." However, the number of people in the painting, and their state of decorated activity, suggests liveliness and collectivity in the midst of the frozen landscape, indicating a community not dominated past their surroundings but making their lives inside it.

Early in his career, Bruegel drew influence from the Flemish landscape creative person Joachim Patinir, who also created paintings which seem to recede telescopically away from the eye. Expanding on Patinir'due south mode, Bruegel's focus on landscape as a self-sufficient field of study-thing had a profound impact on the development of modernistic fine art, including landscape painting of the Romantic and Naturalist movements. The exaggerated perspectival style of works like Hunters in the Snow, meanwhile, prefigures all subsequent landscape painting in which the conventional, postal service-Renaissance 3-dimensional perspective is eschewed.

Oil on wood - Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria

1566

The Wedding Trip the light fantastic toe

Bruegel's life-affirming scene of peasant wedlock is crowded with happy, inebriated revelers. In the background, a table is set with food, while the wedding guests dance, drink, and kiss, forming an unruly circle which fills the central space of the composition. One figure to the right, continuing in front of a tree in a black hat and orangish shawl, seems detached from the scene even while integrated into the joyful spiral, his demeanor of quiet reflection leading some critics to posit that this is a self-portrait of the artist himself.

This painting is one of many created by Bruegel showing rural peasants in scenes of leisure and celebration. The prevailing thought amid artists of the Renaissance was that but religion, mythology, and the lives of great men were fit subjects for painting. According to Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen, "no painter before [Bruegel] had dared to produce such works. Contemporary art mostly regarded peasants equally figures of mockery, because them stupid, gluttonous, drunken, and prone to violence."

Besides making these gluttonous and volatile figures worthy of creative representation, Bruegel's decision to focus on scenes and aspects of peasant life also drew attention to the lot of the working homo and woman for perhaps the offset fourth dimension in art history. The same motive would get more conspicuous in the piece of work of modern artists inspired by his example, including painters of the French Realist school such every bit Gustave Courbet and Honoré Daumier, who used their paintings to make politically subversive statements on the living and working conditions of the poor.

Oil on wood - Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan

1567

The Conversion of Paul

A mountainous wood landscape dominates Bruegel's painting The Conversion of Paul. Moving in a diagonal sweep from the middle foreground to the correct background, a oversupply of people, including a number of soldiers in armor, swarm into a gap in the rockface. In the left background, backside the crest of the mountain, a calm trunk of water stretches away.

While this work is nominally focused on the Biblical story of St. Paul'southward conversion on the road to Damascus, Bruegel radically departed from conventional painterly approaches to religious narrative by making the mural, and the mass of humanity populating it, the central subject of the piece of work. I has to look closely among the figures traveling the mountain path to pick out the catechumen thrown from his horse, lying on the ground as God strikes him blind. Indeed, without the interpretive hint provided past the title, ane might fail to recognize what is taking place. As with his 'Icarus' landscapes, Bruegel detracts further from the import of the central narrative by setting the scene in a contemporary context, using the mural of his domicile country as a backdrop, suggesting an irreverent, appropriative attitude to his source-textile.

This painting as well makes a subtle political statement. Amongst all the figures represented, the viewer's eye is fatigued to a man dressed in black riding a white horse with his dorsum to the viewer. Many believe this figure to be based on the Duke of Alba, responsible for the persecution of many Protestants in Brussels during Bruegel's lifetime, as role of a Spanish crusade to bring the Low Countries under stricter Catholic yoke. Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen fifty-fifty propose that the painting may exist intended to invoke a like conversion of Alba as overcame Paul, bringing an terminate to his murderous campaign. Whether or not this precise message can be inferred, the piece of work certainly indicates the extent to which Bruegel was willing to use his fine art to reflect on the religious and political ability-structures of his day.

Oil on woods - Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria

1568

The Blind Leading the Blind

Five bullheaded men trudge across the centre of this canvass, canes in mitt, arms stretched out hopelessly for guidance. The starting time member of the procession has already tumbled over, and lies on his back in the dirt. The man directly behind him is mid-stumble, while the steep downwards curve of the path behind him suggests that the four post-obit him will suffer the same fate. In the background, various features of a typical Bruegel landscape are visible: a church steeple, low thatched roofs, and a curving, tree-lined hillside.

Though its focus on the poor and destitute is typical of Bruegel'south egalitarian concerns, this painting is marked out by its singled-out compositional structure and mood. William Dello Russo has pointed out that the earthy color-palette represents a departure from Bruegel's typical tonal range - generally involving brighter colors - every bit does his use of tempera paint, which allows a less brash, saturated appearance than oil. As regards the visual composition, The Blind Leading the Bullheaded is arguably a very early instance of Realist genre painting, focusing closely on a pocket-sized number of human figures engaged in everyday activities rather than one of the sprawling, densely populated landscapes which occupy the artist'southward others works.

This painting reflects Bruegel'due south ability to create captivating allegorical works based on both religious doctrine and common maxims. The painting illustrates a passage institute in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke -"[a]nd if the bullheaded lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch" - but the phrase would take had the currency of a mutual proverb, as it even so does, and the curious mixture of empathy and grim amusement that the blind men'southward plight elicits needs no scriptural grounding. It emanates from that same elementary sense of the pathos and absurdity of human experience that the artist himself drew from. As art historian Max Dvorák wrote in 1928, "[the painting's] novelty lies in the very fact that such an insignificant occurrence with such insignificant heroes becomes the focus of this view of the world."

Tempera on canvass - Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples, Italy

1568

The Magpie on the Gallows

A lush woodland landscape dominates this work from the penultimate year of Bruegel'south life. In the groundwork are the gables and tiled roofs of a Netherlandish hamlet, while in the foreground to the left, a group of immature peasants plays in the fields, unmoved past the construction to their right, on which a lone magpie perches.

Bruegel was non an overtly political artist. Merely this work, like The Conversion of Paul, indicates his ability to offer oblique commentaries on contemporary society. The gallows would take been a recognizable symbol of oppression during the Castilian campaign in the Low Countries, with hanging a fate pending many religious agitators, who were often exposed by the gossip or betrayal of friends. The petty bird at the center of the piece thus takes on a grim emblematic relevance via a common Netherlandish expression: "to gossip like a magpie". At the aforementioned time, the slice strikes a note of defiance, the male figure defecating in the bushes in the firsthand foreground suggesting the artist's attitude towards the Spanish occupation, and calling to mind another mutual expression of the Low Countries, "to shit at the gallows", pregnant to defy authorization and expiry.

There is some speculation that Bruegel himself might take been a victim of malicious gossip towards the end of his life, although no specific narrative supports this theory. It is known, however, that he left this work to his married woman, and Karel van Mander has argued that the gesture was a loaded one: "he was referring by the magpie to the gossips, whom he would like to see hanged."

Oil on forest - Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt, Germany

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Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Greg Thomas

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Content compiled and written past Jessica DiPalma
Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Greg Thomas
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Start published on 30 Jul 2018. Updated and modified regularly
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