However, it should be recognised that Bruegel is considered the most important painter from the Netherlands of the latter half of the sixteenth century. He was born in the Dutch town of Breda in or around with the birth name of Brueghel, he later dropped the "h" from his name signing his works Bruegel.
He was the head of a painting dynasty which included his two sons, the artists, Pieter Brueghel the Younger and Jan Brueghel the Elder. Pieter the Younger, also had an artist son, Ambrosius, while Jan was a father to Jan the younger, who was also a painter confusing isn't it?
Bruegel was married to Mayken the daughter of the Flemish artist Pieter Coecke van Aelst it is known that he travelled to France and also spent some time in Italy, eventually, he was accepted as a master in the painter's guild of Antwerp.
Despite Bruegel's nickname "Peasant Bruegel", he was not just a painter of everyday comical peasant life. He also painted religious subjects often in an unconventional manner and was greatly influenced by the painter Hieronymus Bosch. The good Angel's are shown in white driving the monstrous-animal-like fallen Angels from heaven.
These strange deformed figures fill the bottom half of the painting and are depicted as writhing mass of evil entities. The doomed tower lurches to the left and seems to be partially under construction, part complete and part already in ruin.
The poor construction methods seem lost on the officials and Bruegel has shown them finely dressed but ignorant to the obvious failings of the building.
At first glance, The Adoration of the Kings would appear to be a conventional painting of a popular religious subject with the Virgin Mary placed in the centre of the composition cradling the infant Jesus. However, on closer inspection, the gathering king's and others seem to focus on the wealth of fabulous gifts on offer rather than the Virgin and Child.
There are no halo's to be seen, rather the gathering enviously gaze at the magnificent golden bowl that is offered to the infant Christ. Instead, he deliberately revived the late Gothic style of Hieronymus Bosch as the point of departure for his own highly complex and original art. Our major source of information concerning Bruegel is the Dutch biographer Karel van Mander, who wrote in This near-contemporary of the painter claims that Bruegel was born in a town of the same name near Breda on the modern Dutch-Belgian border.
Most recent authorities, however, follow the Italian writer Guicciardini in designating the painter's birthplace as Breda itself. From the fact that Bruegel entered the Antwerp painters' guild in , we may infer that he was born between and Between and Bruegel went to Italy, probably by way of France.
He visited Rome, where he met the miniaturist Giulio Clovio, whose will of lists three paintings by Bruegel. These works, which apparently were landscapes, have not survived. About Bruegel returned to Antwerp by way of the Alps, which resulted in a number of exquisite drawings of mountain landscapes.
These sketches, which form the basis for many of his later paintings, are not records of actual places but "composites" made in order to investigate the organic life of forms in nature. In Bruegel entered the house of the Antwerp publisher Hieronymus Cock as a designer for engravings. His pen drawing of that year entitled Big Fish Eat Little Fish was published in as an engraving by Cock, who substituted Bosch's name for Bruegel's in order to exploit the fashion for Bosch's works then current at Antwerp.
The series Seven Deadly Sins, engraved in , however, carries the artist's own signature, a sign of Bruegel's increasing importance. In these works Bruegel, unlike any of his Antwerp contemporaries, achieved a truly creative synthesis of Bosch's demonic symbolism with his own personal vision of human folly and depravity. Despite efforts to dismiss these engravings as "fascinating drolleries," there is evidence to suggest that Bruegel was attempting to substitute a new and more relevant eschatology for Bosch's traditional view of the Christian cosmos.
In Bruegel's earliest signed and dated painting, the Combat of Carnival and Lent , the influence of Bosch is still strongly felt. The high-horizoned landscape, the decorative surface patterning, and many of the iconographic details derive from the earlier Dutch master. There is, however, a new sensitivity to color, particularly in the use of bright, primary hues, and a rhythmic organization of forms that is uniquely Bruegel's.
This painting, the Netherlandish Proverbs , and the highly involved Children's Games form the body of the early "encyclopedic" works which, despite their superficial gaiety, have been shown to be allegories of a foolish and sinful world. Also related in conception to the encyclopedic paintings are Bruegel's two most phantasmagoric works: the Dulle Griet and the Triumph of Death both probably executed in The Dulle Griet is still related to Bosch stylistically, but unlike the works of that painter it is not intended so much as a moral sermon against the depravity of the world as a recognition of the existence of evil in it.
This capacity to see evil as inseparable from the human condition carries over into the Triumph of Death, which has also been interpreted as a reference to the outbreak at that time of religious persecutions in the Netherlands.
The last of Bruegel's great "figurative anthologies" is the Tower of Babel Wisse, Jacob. Orenstein, Nadine, ed. Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Drawings and Prints. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, See on MetPublications. This work has been the subject of much moral speculation, revolving especially around the various figures who remain ignorant of Icarus's plight, only the shepherd glancing up towards the sky, and not even towards the relevant spot.
The displacement of Icarus from center-stage has been interpreted as a directive to remain focused on one's own daily life. William Dello Russo has even suggested that the painting may illustrate a well-known Netherlandish expression, "one does not stay the plow for one who is dying. In one of his more lurid and chaotic paintings, Bruegel offers us a dense allegorical representation of the competing drives underpinning human character by showing the customs associated with two festivals closely aligned in the early-modern calendar.
To the left, the figure of the Carnival holds sway: a fat man astride a beer barrel with a pork chop pinned to its front, spit-roasting a pig and wearing a meat pie as a helmet.
He presides over a scene populated by jesters, revelers, musicians, thieves, and beggars. To the right, the gaunt figure 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 canvas, 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 pain, judgement and redemption, finds its most obvious precedent in the work of an older Netherlandish master, Hieronymus Bosch. What is notable, however, is the lack of any implied supernatural subtext to Bruegel's scene: where Bosch shows us 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 home country. In the Low Countries, in possession of the vastly powerful Habpburg dynasty, passed to King Philip II of Spain, who sought to bring it under a more direct and stricter form of Catholic rule.
At the same time, the Netherlandish countries were close to the heart of the unfolding Reformation movement, which viewed Catholic festivities such as Lent with profound suspicion. The carnivalesque energy of the left-hand side of the painting stands not so much for the emergent spirit of Protestantism - which tended to be more repressive of the traditional festive calendar than Catholicism - but for the obdurate pagan customs and rebellious character of an oppressed culture.
This painting shows Bruegel's mastery of complex composition, often based on strong diagonal lines bringing overall cohesion to a large number of intersecting focal points. In The Netherlandish Proverbs , a village setting is chosen as the location for a variety of eccentric and superstitious rituals. The actions undertaken by the villagers represent approximately different Netherlandish proverbs, all related to the oddities of human behavior. In the left foreground a man bangs his head against a brick wall, representing the tendency of a fool to continue attempting the impossible; to the right, a figure leans distraught over a pot of spilt porridge, reminding the viewer that completed actions cannot be undone.
Bruegel is noted for his busy compositions, involving many groups of figures engaged in small interactions. These individual compositions in turn establish an overall theme, often satirical or didactic, a compositional approach which has had a profound impact on art history.
The influence of Bruegel's allegorical tableaux can be sensed, for example, in the work of the Dutch Symbolist and Expressionist James Ensor, who uses a similar compositional style in Christ's Entry into Brussels and The Baths at Ostend Bruegel's significance as a forerunner of modern art lies not only in his breaking away from the ordered vanishing-point perspectives and carefully-managed figurative arrangements of the Italian Renaissance, but also from the idealized moral style and grandiose subject-matter which those features implied.
By depicting the foibles of everyday human life, Bruegel expanded the range of subjects available to the Renaissance painter with characteristic, irreverent wit.
A vast, partially constructed tower dominates Bruegel's extraordinary work The Tower of Babel. Surrounding the structure 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 Babel. In so doing, he chose a story intended to provide a moral directive around the dangers of over-reaching ambition.
In the original narrative from the Book 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 project with an entourage of sycophantic courtiers, while enfeebled subjects crawl 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 ambition in Bruegel's day. As with so much of Bruegel's work, the moral message also has a contemporary resonance.
Living at a time when mainland Europe was being ravaged by rival religious factions - on the one hand, the Catholic empires of the south, on the other the dissenting Protestant cultures of the north - the story of a once morally united, monoglot religious society fracturing into rival groupings was a pertinent one; particularly as one of the founding causes of Protestantism was the translation of the Bible into modern script.
Bruegel was sympathetic with the Protestant culture of his home country, and another version of the painting, The Little Tower of Babel " c.
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