What was Pieter Bruegel the Elder known for? What did Pieter Bruegel believe? What nationality was Bruegel? How did Pieter Bruegel change the world? Why was Bruegel called Peasant Bruegel? When was Pieter Bruegel death? Who is the owner of the Triumph of Death? Is the triumph of death about the Black Plague? Who painted the Triumph of Death? Where is the triumph of death? What effect did the black plague have on art?
What were some of the long term effects of the Black Plague of ? How did the Black Death affect religion? His reputation as one of the greatest of all Netherlandish painters is mainly founded upon the works of this brief but highly productive period.
The Road to Calvary inaugurates this phase, in which man is increasingly subordinated to the rhythms and patterns of nature. A lower horizon and a new feeling for atmospheric perspective are important stylistic features of this panel, which is one of the few surviving religious works in Bruegel's oeuvre. In Bruegel was commissioned to execute a series of pictures of the months for Niclaes Jonghelinck of Antwerp.
Based upon the medieval idea of the labors of the seasons as seen, for example, in cathedral sculpture or the illuminations of late Gothic books of hours, Bruegel's series represents a magnificient culmination of this tradition.
Of the original group, five paintings have survived. De Tolnay has very plausibly suggested that each panel portrayed the activities of 2 months, so that only the painting for April and May is lost. In these beautifully conceived and executed panels Bruegel has achieved a moment of resolution of the previously existing duality between man and nature.
The central theme of the cycle is that man, if he follows the order of nature, can avoid the folly for which he is otherwise destined. The role of mankind is portrayed by peasants - anonymous symbols of humanity - who live and work close to the soil in a state of beneficent unity with nature. The months of December and January are represented by the Hunters in the Snow.
A work of great compositional unity, it demonstrates that the activities of men, in order to be good, must conform to the seasonal patterns of nature. In both panels broad panoramic landscapes dominate visually as well as in terms of content the affairs of men, which once again accord with the will of nature. The months of August and September are portrayed by the golden-hued Wheat Harvest, one of the most lyrical panels in the series.
Here Bruegel achieves a greater degree of spatial and figural integration than in the previous paintings, as well as heightened atmospheric effects. The most brilliant panel in the series is the Return of the Herd, which represents October and November. A magnificent composition, organized along a sequence of intersecting diagonal movements, this painting evokes with unparalleled actuality the scope and grandeur of the natural world.
Through the striking beauty and originality of these seasonal pictures Bruegel enunciated a new coherency in man's relationship to the natural scheme. Casting off the established order and hierarchy of the medieval and Renaissance cosmologies, he substituted a view of a dynamically evolving world that is fundamentally modern in its conception.
Van Mander thought Bruegel's Massacre of the Innocents ca. In view of the artist's deliberate use of the setting of a contemporary Flemish village to stage the events, this view has gained acceptance from most recent authorities.
Similar in conception, though differing in spirit, is the Numbering at Bethlehem In this instance, however, Bruegel contemporizes the religious events in order to investigate the varieties of rural life in a winter setting. Here again the religious theme is at best a pretext for Bruegel's basically secular art.
The Peasant Dance ca. In this work the painter changed to a "large-figure" style in which highly animated peasants are organized to convey the rhythms and patterns of the dance.
Also, by reducing forms to their elemental essences Bruegel achieved a clarity of design and coloration that has seldom been rivaled in Western painting. At about the same time Bruegel completed one of his most famous and beloved works, the Peasant Wedding Feast.
Conceived in a spirit of sympathy and affection for country folk, this panel reveals the artist's delightfully droll sense of humor as well as his genius in making universal even the most trivial events. One of Bruegel's most bizarre works is the Land of Cockaigne The composition is made up principally of three recumbent figures - a knight, a peasant, and a burgher - whose forms radiate outward from the center of the picture and are intended to produce a sensation of nausea and dislocation in the spectator.
Vivid silhouettes of winter trees dominate the left-hand side of the composition, and, along with the direction of the hunters' movement, lead the eye towards the busy scene at the center, 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.
One of a series of paintings that Bruegel created to depict different seasons of the year, this work demonstrates his unique aptitude for capturing the spirit of the natural world.
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 [ Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen suggest that "the picture is dominated by two 'cold' colors, the white of the snow and the pale green of the sky and ice.
Every living thing is dark. This stands in contradiction to the customary color associations connected with being alive, and heightens the impressions of misery and privation. Early in his career, Bruegel drew influence from the Flemish landscape artist Joachim Patinir, who also created paintings which seem to recede telescopically away from the eye.
Expanding on Patinir's style, Bruegel's focus on landscape as a self-sufficient subject-matter had a profound impact on the development of modern 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, post-Renaissance three-dimensional perspective is eschewed.
Bruegel's life-affirming scene of peasant matrimony 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, standing in front of a tree in a black hat and orange 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 amongst artists of the Renaissance was that only 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 generally regarded peasants as figures of mockery, considering them stupid, gluttonous, drunken, and prone to violence. A mountainous forest landscape dominates Bruegel's painting The Conversion of Paul.
Moving in a diagonal sweep from the center foreground to the right background, a crowd of people, including a number of soldiers in armor, swarm into a gap in the rockface. In the left background, behind the crest of the mountain, a calm body of water stretches away.
While this work is nominally focused on the Biblical story of St. Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus, Bruegel radically departed from conventional painterly approaches to religious narrative by making the landscape, and the mass of humanity populating it, the central subject of the work. One has to look closely amongst the figures traveling the mountain path to pick out the convert thrown from his horse, lying on the ground as God strikes him blind. Indeed, without the interpretive hint provided by the title, one 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 landscape of his home country as a backdrop, suggesting an irreverent, appropriative attitude to his source-material. This painting also makes a subtle political statement. Amongst all the figures represented, the viewer's eye is drawn to a man dressed in black riding a white horse with his back 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 part of a Spanish crusade to bring the Low Countries under stricter Catholic yoke. Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen even suggest that the painting may be intended to invoke a similar conversion of Alba as overcame Paul, bringing an end to his murderous campaign. Whether or not this precise message can be inferred, the work certainly indicates the extent to which Bruegel was willing to use his art to reflect on the religious and political power-structures of his day.
Five blind men trudge across the center of this canvas, canes in hand, arms stretched out hopelessly for guidance. The first 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 downward curve of the path behind him suggests that the four following 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's egalitarian concerns, this painting is marked out by its distinct 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 - as does his use of tempera paint, which allows a less brash, saturated appearance than oil.
As regards the visual composition, The Blind Leading the Blind is arguably a very early example of Realist genre painting, focusing closely on a small number of human figures engaged in everyday activities rather than one of the sprawling, densely populated landscapes which occupy the artist's others works.
This painting reflects Bruegel's ability to create captivating allegorical works based on both religious doctrine and common maxims. The painting illustrates a passage found in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke -"[a]nd if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch" - but the phrase would have had the currency of a common saying, as it still does, and the curious mixture of empathy and grim amusement that the blind men's 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. A lush woodland landscape dominates this work from the penultimate year of Bruegel's life.
In the background are the gables and tiled roofs of a Netherlandish village, while in the foreground to the left, a group of young peasants plays in the fields, unmoved by the structure to their right, on which a lone magpie perches.
Bruegel was not an overtly political artist. But this work, like The Conversion of Paul , indicates his ability to offer oblique commentaries on contemporary society.
The gallows would have been a recognizable symbol of oppression during the Spanish campaign in the Low Countries, with hanging a fate awaiting many religious agitators, who were often exposed by the gossip or betrayal of friends. The little bird at the center of the piece thus takes on a grim allegorical relevance via a common Netherlandish expression: "to gossip like a magpie". At the same time, the piece strikes a note of defiance, the male figure defecating in the bushes in the immediate foreground suggesting the artist's attitude towards the Spanish occupation, and calling to mind another common expression of the Low Countries, "to shit at the gallows", meaning to defy authority and death.
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