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Pieter
Bruegel the Elder, nicknamed ‘Peasant Bruegel’ was probably the most significant
and exciting painter in the Northern Europe during the middle part of the
sixteenth century. His nickname “Peasant Bruegel” indicates to his subjects:
peasant life, proverbs and genre scenes, the New Testament topics set among
common folks of contemporary Flanders.
The date and place of Bruegel’s birth are uncertain, most of the scholars
consider he was born near Breda in the period between 1525- 1530. Until
1559 he spelt his name ‘Brueghel’, then as ‘Bruegel’, the reason for this
change is unknown and his sons retained ‘h’ in their names.
Very probably the young Bruegel was apprenticed to Pieter Coeck van Aelst
(1502–1550), a leading Antwerp artist, sculptor, architect, and designer
of tapestry and stained glass, whose daughter Bruegel would later marry.
In 1551 Bruegel became a Master of the Antwerp Guild. In 1552, 1553 and
possibly for part of 1554 he traveled abroad. In 1552 he was in the south
of Italy, visiting Reggio Calabria, Messina, Palermo and Naples, and in
the following year he was in Rome, where he came into contact with a well-known
painter and miniaturist of the time, Giulio Clovio, who created a small-scale
picture of the Tower of Babel on ivory, and a View of Lyons (France). Both
works are now lost. On his return journey to the Netherlands, Bruegel evidently
spent some time in Switzerland, where he made many drawings of the Alps.
Back in Antwerp (late 1554-1555) Pieter Bruegel started working for Hieronymus
Cock (1510-1570), the Antwerp engraver and publisher of prints. His Alpine
sketches formed the basis of a number of elaborate landscape designs (dated
from 1555 onwards), which were actually engraved by other artists. Cock
was apparently pleased with Bruegel’s work for he was soon employing him
on figure compositions as well. Of these, the serious of The Seven
Deadly Sins (1556-7) and the famous Big
Fish Eat Little Fish (engraved by Van der Heyden in 1557) are
typical early examples. For the rest of his life Bruegel was active as
both a painter and designer of prints, and the two activities were closely
linked.
In 1563 Bruegel married Mayken, the daughter of Pieter Coeck and Mayken
Verhulst Bessemers. His mother-in-law was also a painter, engaged in miniatures.
Later, after the death of her son-in-law, she would give the first lessons
in painting to his sons, Pieter and Jan. The couple settled in Brussels.
In 1564 their first son, future painter Pieter Bruegel
the Younger (d. 1638) was born. At that time Bruegel acquired a patron
and friend, Nicolaes Jonghelinck, a wealthy Antwerp merchant, who would
eventually made a collection of 16 Bruegel’s works. Thus he commissioned
a series of the Months, unfortunately only 5 of 12 paintings survived,
The
Hunters in the Snow (January),
The
Gloomy Day (February), Haymaking
(July),
The Corn Harvest (August),
The
Return of the Herd (November).
In 1568 his second son, Jan, also a future painter, Jan
Bruegel the Elder, ‘Velvet’ Bruegel (d.1625) was born.
During the last six years of his life Bruegel was much influenced by
Italian Renaissance art, whose monumentality of form he found increasingly
sympathetic. This influence is evident in The
Peasant Wedding, The Peasant
Dance and The Peasant and the
Birdnester: the figures are now larger in scale and closer
to the spectator, the viewpoint is lower and there is less concern with
the setting. In spite of these radical developments, however, Bruegel continued
to produce paintings in his old style, with tiny figures in a panoramic
space.
In September 1569 Bruegel died, and was buried in Notre Dame de la Chapelle,
Brussels; in 1578 died Mayken Bruegel, the orphaned children were brought
up by their grandmother.
The
surviving pictures of Bruegel are few in number – under fifty.
“Although Bruegel was famous in his own lifetime, the archaic tone
of much of his imagery and his refusal to adopt the idealized figure style
evolved by Italian Renaissance artists had, in sophisticated circles, an
adverse effect on his reputation both during his life and after his death”
(Keith Roberts). Bruegel’s works did not agree with current aesthetic theories
of his time, but they wonderfully match to the tastes of our contemporaries.
Landscape with Christ Appearing
to the Apostles at the Sea of Tiberias is Bruegel's earliest known
painting.
See: Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Landscape
with Christ Appearing to the Apostles at the Sea of Tiberias.
Landscape with the Fall
of Icarus. The literary source is the myth about the great Greek engineer
Daedalus, who, as a slave, worked for King Minos at Crete, and among other
things constructed the famous Labyrinth for him. His most passionate desire
was to get freedom, he constructed wings for his son, Icarus, and himself
to fly away from Crete. Icarus ignored his father’s warning not to fly
high; there the sun melted the wax, which fastened the feathers of the
wings, and Icarus fell into the sea. Only the legs of Icarus could be seen
in the right bottom corner of the painting. The painting also refers to
the Flemish proverb ‘No plough stops because a man dies’.
See: Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Landscape
with the Fall of Icarus.
The Fight between Carnival
and Lent. This painting takes as its subject the traditional annual
carnival, which was held in Flanders in the week before lent. A half-religious,
half-secular festival, it provided an excuse for excesses of drinking and
sex: contemporary moralists condemned it as the devil’s week.
See: Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The Fight
between Carnival and Lent.
The Flemish Proverbs is an allegorical
painting with the whole world of proverbs; among the others, Bruegel illustrates
the following: “He blocks up the well after the calf is drowned”; “One
shears the sheep, another the pig”; “One holds the distaff, which the other
spins”; “The pig has been stuck though the belly”; “He throws roses to
the swine”; “He brings baskets of light into the daylight”.
See: Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The Flemish
Proverbs.
Children’s Games. Children absorbed
with their games and toys, as seriously as adults in their ‘grown-up’ businesses,
is perhaps an allegory of the moral that adults are still children in the
sight of God.
See: Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Children's
Games.
‘Dulle Griet’ (Mad Meg). Griet
was a disapproving name given to any bad-tempered, shrewish woman, about
which there are many Flemish proverbs: ‘She could plunder in front
of hell and return unscathed’, ‘One woman makes a din, two women a lot
of trouble, three an annual market, four a quarrel, five an army, and against
six the Devil himself has no weapon’. Bruegel’s Griet and her companions
are preparing to storm the mouth of Hell itself. The painter is thus making
fun of noising, aggressive women.
See: Pieter Bruegel the Elder. 'Dulle
Griet' (Mad Meg).
The Land of Cockaigne. In Dutch the
Land of Cockaigne is Luikkerland, the land of lazy and gluttonous:
All you loafers and gluttons always lying about
Farmer, soldier and clerk, you live without work.
Here the fences are sausages, the houses are cake,
And the fowl fly roasted, ready to eat.
See Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The
Land of Cockaigne.
The Peasant and the Birdnester
is thought to illustrate a Flemish proverb: “He who knows where the nest
is, has the knowledge; he who robs it, has the nest”. The painting presents
a moralizing contrast between the active, wicked individual and the passive
man who is virtuous in spite of adversity. It has been suggested that,
with his knowledge of Italian art, Bruegel intended the peasant’s gesture
as a profane parody of the gesture of Leonardo’s St.
John the Baptist.
See: Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The
Peasant and the Birdnester.
The Parable of the Blind.
In this tragic image Bruegel gives visual expression to Christ’s words
about people’s inner blindness to true religion: “they are blind guides,
and if one blind man guides another they will both fall into the ditch.”
(Matthew 15:14).
See: Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The
Parable of the Blind.
The Magpie on the Gallows is
also an allegorical painting. Keith Roberts considers that “it refers to
the transience of pleasure, and the threat of extinction which hangs over
all mortals. The gallows are a memento mori, which throws a long shadow
over the gaiety of the peasants’ dance and the beauty of the sunlit landscape’.
See: Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The
Magpie on the Gallows.
The Misanthrope. The hooded misanthrope,
who refuses to look at the world, is being robbed by the small figure in
a glass ball, a symbol of vanity. The inscription on the painting reads:
‘because the world is perfidious, I am going into mourning’. The moral
of the painting is that this belief brings only harm and first of all to
its owner. It’s immoral to live in the world and abandon responsibility
for it.
See: Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The
Misanthrope.
Bibliography:
Pieter Bruegel the Elder. by S. Lvov. Moscow. 1971.
Bruegel. by N. Gershenzon-Tchegodayeva. Moscow. 1983.
Painting of Europe. XIII-XX centuries. Encyclopedic Dictionary.
Moscow. Iskusstvo. 1999.
Pieter
Bruegel the Elder: Prints and Drawings. by Nadine M. Orenstein
(Editor), Metropolitan Museum of Art, Pieter Bruegel. Yale Univ Pr, 2001.
Pieter
Bruegel the Elder at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna
by Pieter Bruegel (Editor), Wilfried Seipel (Editor), Kunsthistorisches
museu. Skira, 1999.
Pieter
Bruegel: The Elder (Masters of Art Series) by Wolfgang Stechow,
Pieter Bruegel. Harry N Abrams, 1990.
Pieter
Bruegel by Philippe Roberts-Jones. Harry N Abrams , 2002.
Pieter
Bruegel the Elder's Netherlandish Proverbs and the Practice of Rhetoric
(Studies in Netherlandish Art and Cultural History) by Mark A. Meadow.
.V. Waanders Uitgeverji , 2004.
Inside
Bruegel: The Play of Images in Children's Games by Edward A.
Snow. North Point Press, 1997.