Pieter Bruegel. Victoria Charles
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withstood his stays in large cities, his contact with elite circles of scholars and artists, and his encounters with Italian landscapes and masterpieces. None of this would come to change Bruegel’s powerful originality, as it resisted influence like a diamond resists the marks of other stones.
The Last Judgement
1558
Pen and brown ink, 23 × 30 cm
Graphische Sammlung, Albertina, Vienna
Although Bruegel found lasting pleasure in the portrayal of the lives of the peasantry, it is not a sufficient reason to reduce this illustrator of life to the specialised label of genre painter. His characters, be they rustic or bourgeois, must be seen in the light of the appetites, ulterior motives, material needs, and moral aspirations that were reflections of their time.
Twelve Flemish Proverbs
1558
Tempera on oak, 74.5 × 98.4 cm
Museum Mayer van den Bergh, Antwerp
With a sudden glow, each face, by the hundreds in certain canvasses, illuminates anecdotes from Van Vaernewyck’s memoirs: blinking eyes in a face creased with malice, others with angular, hastily composed features possessing a carved marionette’s strange wooden steadiness, or a particular flat-browed profile with a lipless gash of a mouth. The group compositions reveal the depth of Bruegel’s genius even more than their individual faces.
Skaters before the Gate of Saint George
1558-1559
Pen and brown ink, 21.3 × 29.8 cm
Private collection, United States
The Massacre of the Innocents represents all of the arrogance, insolence, and the unbearable burden of foreign domination at the hands of these mercenaries, clustered together like a block of steel, contemptuous and invulnerable, pushing before the chests of their horses, the hounded flock of unfortunates. These mothers, these peasants clasping their hands, these women collapsed in suffering, are those that Bruegel saw begging for their husbands, themselves, or even for their children to be spared.
Charity, from the series Seven Virtues
1559
Pen and brown ink, 22.4 × 29.9 cm
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam
These are the unfortunate women he found weeping alongside the road, under the same December sky and in the same atmosphere of inexpressible sadness that envelops The Massacre of the Innocents. Yet the whole of Bruegel’s work is far more vast, boldly executed, and teeming with movement than these examples.
Netherlandish Proverbs
1559
Oil on wood panel, 117 × 163.5 cm
Staatliche Museen, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin
What was Bruegel’s position in relation to the other painters of his time? In 1525, a few years before the probable date of Bruegel’s birth, Jan Gossaert, known as Mabuse or Maubeuge, returned from his stay in Italy. He was the first Flemish painter to admire the masterpieces accumulated for over two centuries in the churches and palaces of Rome and Florence.
Netherlandish Proverbs (detail)
1559
Oil on wood panel, 117 × 163.5 cm
Staatliche Museen, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin
This was the era of Michelangelo, Raphael, and Leonardo da Vinci, who represented the most blinding brilliance of the blazing light of the Italian Renaissance. Yet, less than fifty years before, the Italians had borrowed aspects of the Flemish method of painting from nature, and the taut and powerful technique used by Jan de Bruges (as they called the elder Van Eyck), Hugues van der Goes, and Rogier van der Weyden.
Netherlandish Proverbs (detail)
1559
Oil on wood panel, 117 × 163.5 cm
Staatliche Museen, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin
These borrowed techniques enabled the blossoming of Florentine art under Masolino da Panicale, Masaccio, and Andrea del Verrocchio, who were the direct precursors of the great Italian masters of the first half of the 16th century.
Bruegel’s art is not the result of any particular school in the strict sense of the word. The best of his students, his son Pieter, known as the ‘Hell Brueghel’, simply copied him.
The Fair at Hoboken
1559
Pen and brown ink, 26.5 × 39.4 cm
Courtauld Institute of Art, Lee Collection, London
Pieter Bruegel the Elder occupies an exceptional place in the history of Flemish painting, as much for the creative power of his genius as for his personal technique. It would be fair to consider him an extreme, a crowning achievement of the realist tendency that characterises Netherlandish painting.
The Fight between Carnival and Lent
1559
Oil on oak panel, 118 × 164.5 cm
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
He applies himself to his subjects which are drawn from the daily lives of the Flemish people with a primary concern for sincerity before satire. It was only after completing a scene of daily life that he would attach a proverb or a certain moral sense to it. His work is so natural that he frequently does not seem to have set out with the preconceived idea of painting a particular moral lesson or proverb.
The Fight between Carnival and Lent (detail)
1559
Oil on oak panel, 118 × 164.5 cm
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Beginnings
Nothing is less certain than Bruegel’s date of birth, but there are also many questions regarding where he was born. Because he is recorded in the liggeren or ‘Record of Artists’ of the guild of Saint Luke in Antwerp under the name of ‘Peeter Brueghels’, it is concluded that he was from the village of Bruegel. Nevertheless, one fact is well known, Bruegel was the son of a peasant.
The Fight between Carnival and Lent (detail)
1559
Oil on oak panel, 118 × 164.5 cm
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Only three dates are certain in the life of Bruegel the Elder: the date of his acceptance as a master in the Guild of Saint Luke, the date of his marriage, and that of his death. Only hypotheses exist regarding Bruegel’s date of birth. It was in 1551 that Bruegel was added as a master to the liggeren of