Along with the general evolution that painting underwent during the 16th century both in Flanders and in the northern part of the Netherlands, there was an important ‘individual’ phenomenon that differed notably from this impulse and that had fruitful consequences for painting in years to come, especially in the Flemish and Dutch schools that during the 17th century dedicated to evoke scenes of peasant life. The protagonist and promoter of this innovation was a Dutch artist by birth but trained in Antwerp (not exactly as a painter, but as a draughtsman), and who also traveled around Italy as did the so-called “Romanist” painters.
We are referring to Pieter Bruegel (or Brueghel, as at first he signed his last name), known in art history as Bruegel the Elder, for being the stem of a long-lasting family of painters who continued their artistic activity until the end of the 17th century. Probably born in the Dutch city of Breda (Netherlands), between 1525 and 1530, he died in Brussels in 1569.
Because of Bruegel’s idiosyncrasy, and even because of the way in which he revalued key aspects of Bosch‘s paintings in his works (which shows he had deep concerns for humanistic matters), this draughtsman and painter set himself apart from the artistic environment that prevailed during his lifetime in the country where he resided.
The first known document that refers to Bruegel concerns his apprenticeship in Antwerp, together with the “Romanist” painter Pieter Coecke van Aelst, and his entry after 1551 into the Antwerp painters’ guild. After joining that corporation, Bruegel made a trip to Italy in 1552-1553, during which he arrived in Sicily and lived for a year in Rome, where he was in contact with the illuminator Giulio Clovio (whom in turn met a few years later with El Greco). In the course of said trip Bruegel carried out some gouache* paintings on paper or parchment. These were maritime views of the Gulf of Naples and other Italian landscapes, which perhaps denote that his initial purpose was to dedicate himself to works of applied art.
Bruegel was back in Antwerp in 1555, and from the following year he devoted himself to draw compositions of satirical or moral intent on grotesque or fantastic subjects intended for engraving, which are very reminiscent of the style that Bosch employed in his symbolic compositions. Such designs were engraved by Hieronymus Cock, the most famous printmaker established in Antwerp at that time, with whom Bruegel collaborated until the end of his years. One of his earlier engravings Big Fishes Eat Little Fishes (London), shows the characteristic style of Bruegel’s work: the juxtaposition of entertainment with serious moral instructions. The style we see here is reminiscent of the art of Hieronymus Bosch. At the right of the print we see a man with a curious hat trying to slit-open a giant fish using an also large knife. As he opens the fish, from its wound and through its mouth spill more fishes that in turn carry smaller fishes on their mouths. In the boat in the first plane, we see another fisherman at work, and sitting in front of him father and son, the father seemingly talking to his small kid while pointing with his hand the giant fish on shore. The inscription on the print (but not in the drawing) clarifies us about the meaning of the image, which refers to the fierce competition in Antwerp at the time: “Look, my son, I’ve known for a long time that the big fish devours the little one.”
In this first engravings and drawings, Pieter Bruegel began to unearth Bosch’s style, which had had no other resonance during the 16th century than some superficial imitators of his profoundly meaningful painting, made by Jan Mandijn and some other artists.
Bruegel’s reputation as an engraver was confirmed by the publication in 1588 of the engraved series of his drawings of The Seven Deadly Sins (London), which evoke scenes of popular nature. This series included a total of seven engravings (prints), each portraying a different deadly sin in drawings full of fantastic figures and terrifying visions, all peopled by Boschian-style monsters: Anger, Avarice, Envy, Gluttony, Lust, Pride, and Sloth. His activity as an engraver lasted until 1565.
In 1563 he married the daughter of his teacher (who died in 1550) and moved to live in Brussels, perhaps with the purpose of getting closer to the circle of friends of Cardinal Granvelle, then president of the Council of State of the Netherlands, and who distinguished him with his protection. While in Antwerp, Bruegel who apparently belonged to the Schola Caritatis sect suspected of heresy in those years of ideological repression, had already made friends with intellectuals such as the humanist Abraham Ortelius and the printer and publisher Christophe Plantin. In Brussels, parallel to his work as a draftsman, he developed his activity as a painter, which begun a few years earlier, and for which he found the best encouragement in the study of old Bosch’s paintings.
The exercise that Bruegel practiced for so long as the author of drawings on popular types destined to be engraving, had directed his interest towards the representation of the human figure, especially in compositions including groups with numerous characters, and although he never disdained the study of the landscape, his fondness for Bosch’s art and his interest in the study of color, with a clear preference for pure nuances, reinforced the attraction he felt for the representation of man/woman, not as individuals but in their collective aspect, as an entity forming part of the whole of the society. These are paintings that generally meant to be plastic representations of parables, morals or popular sayings; hence, a large part of his painted works has the cryptic character that many of his engravings also show.
The pictorial production of Bruegel the Elder seems to have been very large, but currently his original works are known only in a reduced number; they may not exceed 30. We know that he painted other works thanks to old copies, such the Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, known through two versions, one of them in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels. According to Greek mythology told in a passage of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Icarus was the son of the master craftsman/engineer Daedalus. Both, father and son, were imprisoned by King Minos for revealing the secret to scape the Labyrinth of Crete to his enemy Theseus, who he had placed there. In order to scape, Daedalus built some wings using feathers, threads from blankets and clothes, and glued all together by using beeswax. Before scaping, Daedalus warned Icarus to fly neither too low nor too high, because the sea water will dampen the wings or the sun’s heat will melt the beeswax that held them together. The over-ambitious Icarus ignored his father’s warning not to fly too close to the sun, the wings fell apart when the beeswax melted, and Icarus fell from the sky, plunged into the sea, and drowned. In his interpretation of the story, Bruegel makes Icarus look ridiculous, depicting merely his helpless legs sinking in the water to the far right of the painting (see detail). Through the farmer, the shepherd, and the angler, he is enunciating Stoic ideas: one should not rebel against the laws of the cosmos, but should be content to fulfill one’s personal tasks. In this painting, Bruegel followed Ovid’s text accurately, the ploughman, fisherman and shepherd are all mentioned. The high horizon and the town seen in the distance are recurring features of Bruegel’s early landscape style.
Bruegel dealt with religious themes in a way that recalls Bosch‘s style, but in several cases his portrayals of biblical scenes appear blurred by the panoramic value he imprinted on the landscape and the bustle of the crowds represented in the paintings. Good examples of this are The census at Bethlehem (Brussels) or the Conversion of Saul (Vienna).
In a masterful synthesis of religious painting, genre scene, and landscape, in The census at Bethlehem (Brussels) Bruegel revisits the biblical story and sets it in everyday life as if it was a contemporary event. Pieter Bruegel was one of the first artists to paint snow scenes, a theme he returned to in other four of his paintings. At the time, the subject proved an immense success, with winter landscapes becoming a genre of their own. Seen from a high viewpoint, the snow-covered village stretches to a ruined castle at the far right and, beyond the pond, to a church in the distance at the left. The painting suggests a dampen atmosphere, made more limpid by the reddening disk of the setting sun on the horizon. With tiny highlights and subtle nuances of color, Bruegel works on the whites to evoke the snow in all its diversity: powdery and untouched, footprinted, grey and frozen in the places where the children have been sliding on it, slushy in others. The scene is sprinkled with tall trees whose thin and empty branches stand out against a clear sky, thinly painted to allow the background layer to show through (see detail).
With a few skillful brushstrokes Bruegel brilliantly portrays human silhouettes in spontaneous activities. We witness the village people performing their daily tasks: building a cabin, crossing the pond on foot, gathering around a fire, sweeping the snow… The children are playing, skating, spinning their tops, sledging, throwing snowballs. Towards the right hand foreground, a man with a large carpenter’s saw is leading an ox and an ass, the latter carrying a woman wrapped in an ample blue mantle. Without bringing much of attention, they make their way between the carts of beer barrels (see detail). They represent Joseph and Mary who, according to the Bible, have come to Bethlehem to be enrolled in the universal census ordered by Emperor Augustus. Joseph leads Mary and the animals in the direction of the inn where the tax collectors or census officials are. Bruegel associates the Gospel episode with a scene of contemporary tax payment: to the left, the crowd gathers in front of the tax office (see detail), which has been installed at the window of an inn, while at the same time in front of its door, a pig is being killed.
Despite the theme being a Gospel scene, no one in the painting is interested in the biblical figures. No one pays Joseph and Mary any attention; particularly, we focus on the children enjoying themselves on the snow and ice (see detail). Bruegel has included a reference to particular political events of the time: the severity of the Spanish administration in the southern Netherlands. The crest of the Spanish Habsburgs, with the double eagle, is in a plaque next to the hanging wreath, the traditional sign for an inn. Philip II in Madrid was of the House of Habsburg, and taxes are being collected here in his name.
In the Conversion of Saul (Vienna), the main theme of the painting is barely perceptible thanks to the grandeur of the mountainous landscape and the multitude of warriors that parade through it on the road that leads to the city of Damascus. Here, Bruegel shows Paul’s army on its way to Damascus wearing contemporary dress and carrying 16th century armor and weapons. Bruegel’s intention in representing biblical scenes in contemporary settings was to stress their relevance to his own time. In the midst of the persecution and counter-persecution of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the story of Paul’s conversion had especial significance at the time, thus this painting shows a biblical motif with political overtones. Bruegel set Saul’s conversion to Paul in a mountain landscape. We can see the sea in the far distance. It was precisely from the Italian coast, that the Spanish troops set off to cross the Alps in their intent to drive out the heretics and crush Netherlands efforts to obtain more freedom.
In 1565 Bruegel painted the beautiful series dedicated to the months of the year, with its best examples in Vienna: The hunters in the snow (January), Return of the herd (November), Gloomy day (February). However, what dominates in Bruegel’s production is the painting of easily intelligible parables or proverbs.
The Hunters in the Snow (Vienna) was the first of a series of paintings of the months of the year, of which only five remain. This painting may represent for the observer a natural view of the landscape, but in fact it reveals Bruegel’s great artistry in stylization. The painting is dominated by two “cold” colors: the white of the snow and the pale green of the sky and the ice. Bruegel represents the month of January focusing on winter’s firm grip on the countryside. In the foreground at the left, three hunters return with only a rabbit to show for their efforts. Their feet press into the powdery snow, their tired dogs seem to shake against the cold. Their movement leads the eye of the observer over the wide winter landscape to the tiny figures skating on the iced ponds and from there towards the snowcapped mountains on the distant horizon. Bruegel makes our eyes roam from a high vantage point in the foreground over an extensive, diverse landscape that goes from the cultivated foreground area to an ever wilder nature in the distance. In this winter, snow blankets the world. Bruegel skillfully dusted the bushes and tree branches in white. Leafless trees dot the countryside. The ponds below are frozen, and great icicles hand from the millwheel on the lower right. Bruegel subtle color palette with its muted earth tones perfectly evokes the season. Though the figures are not the painting’s primary subject, yet we, like the child at left (see detail), watch eagerly the roaring fire or with our eyes mentally join the skaters below in the pond.
The Return of the Herd (November) (Vienna), other painting from his series on the months of the year, shows how during this month the cattle return to their winter quarters from the summer pastures, here being driven towards the hill-top village. Many of Bruegel’s paintings show people not so much as the masters of nature but rather as a part of it. In this panel Bruegel’s remarkable technique can be studied at its best, both from the individual forms that are painted with the most simple elements, to the detailed, color nuances, and composition of the background landscape.
Gloomy Day (February) (Vienna) alludes to February which is shown as a dark, stormy month during which the peasants gather wood for their fires. The paper crown on the boy’s head (see detail) refers to Epiphany, the Feast of the Three Magi; waffles were commonly consumed at carnival time prior to Lent, as one of the kids does here. It was customary during this month to cut willow branches to be used for the construction of walls and fences. The mountains in the background to the left demonstrate the threatening proximity of cold and snow; another threat can be seen in the storm swirling up the waves and causing ships to sink in the sea. The Netherlanders were a seagoing people; they knew how dangerous the winter months are at sea. By using a particular color scheme, Bruegel held together water, mountains and the foreground scene, while the tall trees in the middle serve to anchor the agitated landscape. In the castle and mountains seen at the far left (see detail) we can appreciate Bruegel’s economy and spontaneity of technique: he has sketched the castle, the mountain tops, and the clouds with a few skillful strokes of white and blue pigments, using a lightly loaded, almost dry, brush on the light brown gesso ground of the panel.
The natural environment was as important for Bruegel as was the symbolic fact narrated in his paintings depicting parables or proverbs, see the Parable of the Blind leading the Blind (two versions, one in Naples and one in the Louvre), the Landscape with the Parable of the Sower (Washington), The Peasant and the Birdnester (Vienna). Or they can be paintings with a wide subject and proverbial meaning, including many people: the Netherlandish Proverbs (Berlin), the Children’s Games (Vienna); or masterful boisterous evocations of peasant festivals: The wedding banquet and Peasant Dance (both in Vienna).
Bruegel’s paintings received their titles later, long after their author was dead, and in consequence they have since being known under a number of names in the course of the centuries. The Parable of the Blind Leading the Blind (Vienna) refers to one of Christ’s parable concerning the Pharisees (Matthew 15:14): “And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch”, meaning inner blindness to true religion. In this painting Bruegel gives visual expression to Christ’s words by means of a truly tragic image. The static procession of six blind men in the immediate foreground reaches an agonizing climax in the terrified expression of the second, who is falling. In contrast to this crumbling line of humanity is the church behind them, standing strong and solid, symbolizing the faith which gives true vision. Bruegel here gives a particular and realistic interpretation to a Christian moral. The blind were a subject of special fascination to him. He introduced groups of blinds in other of his works. In Bruegel’s time blind people roamed the country in groups, begging; they were part of the street scene. Bruegel painted them with no trace of sympathy, but so accurately.
The panel of Landscape with the Parable of the Sower (San Diego) is among the earliest signed paintings by Bruegel. It is thought that by painting the peasant in the left-hand foreground, Bruegel was presumably thinking of the Parable of the Sower, who sows his seed on good soil and bad ground (Matthew 13).
Painted in the year before Bruegel’s death, The Peasant and the Birdnester (Vienna), like other of his late works such as The Peasant Dance and The Peasant Wedding, is dominated by monumental figures. In these late works Bruegel shows his knowledge of Italian art and in particular the art of Michelangelo through the representation of the human body in large scale. The subject-matter of this painting apparently illustrates a Netherlandish proverb: “He who knows where the nest is, has the knowledge; he who robs it, has the nest”, a proverb distinguishing between active and passive people. 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 Bruegel intended the peasant’s gesture as a parody of the gesture of Leonardo’s St John. In this painting, we notice that is not the birdnester whom Bruegel has placed in the first plane but the pensive man, who has not noticed that he is about to fall into the creek.
Although individual proverbs and groups of proverbs had been represented in Flemish art before, the Netherlandish Proverbs (Berlin) is the first painting to create a whole world of them. These traditional sayings are of two principal types. First, those which turn reason upside down, thereby showing the absurdity of human behavior; these are symbolize by the world turned upside-down, represented by the upturned orb on the house-sign on the left (see detail). The second type, which have a more serious, moralizing tone, illustrate the dangers of folly, which can lead to sin (for example, the woman who hangs a blue coat on her husband, that is, she cuckolds him) and, just above, the man ‘lighting candles for the devil’ (see detail). The collecting of proverbs was one of the many encyclopedic undertakings in the 16th century. Here, Bruegel is offering more than a simple catalogue: he presents us with an upside down world, with the Devil seen in the center of the picture hearing someone’s confession (see detail). With this painting, Bruegel gives us an almost subversive manifesto of human folly represented by all the swarm of miniature men, women, children, animals, and props representing near 126 Netherlandish proverbs and idioms.
The panel known as Children’s Games (Vienna) is colloquially called the “encyclopedia of Flemish children’s games”. It represents about 84 games, some of them practiced until present days. Bruegel has portrayed over 250 children on this painting. These children are playing with pieces of wood, with bones, with hoops and barrels, as specially crafted toys were rare in the 16th century. The children, who range in age from toddlers to adolescents, are shown in a variety of activities: rolling hoops, walking on stilts, spinning tops, riding wooden horses, staging mock tournaments, playing leap-frog and blind man’s buff, performing handstands, inflating pigs’ bladders and playing with dolls and other simple toys (see detail). We even see them taken over the large building that dominates the square: it may be a town hall or some other important civic building, probably meaning that the adults who direct civic affairs are as children in the sight of God. The crowded scene is relieved by the landscape in the top left-hand corner; but even here we glance at children bathing in the river and playing on its banks. As a counterpart of this country landscape, on the right we see a street that stretches to the horizon, widening the perspective. Bruegel’s intention here seems to be more serious than simply to compile an illustrated encyclopedia of children’s games, he probably wanted to show the children absorbed in their games with the same seriousness displayed by adults in their apparently ‘more important’ pursuits and activities. Thus, the moral Bruegel probably intended to communicate with this painting is that in the mind of God children’s games possess as much significance as the activities of their parents.
Painted about 1567, Peasant Wedding (Vienna) has traditionally been thought of simply as a depiction of peasant life. However, it seems likely that, in addition to this obvious theme, the image has a moral dimension: the celebration of the sacrament of marriage has simply become here an excuse for self-indulgence. The wedding feast is dominated by the figure of the bride who presides over the table in front of the traditional cloth of honor hanging on the wall reserved for her place, she also sits under her bridal crown; it is unclear which of the others is the bridegroom. He may be the man in black, with his back to the spectator, leaning back on his stool, mug in hand, asking for more wine. The feast takes place in the barn, the wall behind the guests consisting of stacked-up straw. Two bundles of straw with a rake remind us of working in the harvesting. In the first plane to the right we see two men carrying the plates around on a door taken off its hinges. The principal form of nourishment in those days consisted of bread, porridge, and soup.
The Peasant Dance (Vienna) was painted at about the same time as The Peasant Wedding, that is, about 1567. The sizes of the two paintings are the same and they may have been intended as a pair or as part of a series illustrating peasant life. They are the two most outstanding examples of Bruegel’s late style, which is characterized by his use of monumental Italian-style figures. The square dance practiced in the villages had nothing in common with the formal dances performed at court or in bourgeois circles. Like The Peasant Wedding, it is probably that Bruegel intended this painting to have a moral sense rather than only being a nice portrayal of peasant life. Gluttony, lust, and anger can be identified in the scene. The man seated next to the bagpipe player wears a peacock feather in his hat, a symbol of vanity and pride. The occasion for the peasants’ party is a saint’s day, but the dancers turn their backs on the church and pay no attention whatsoever to the image of the Virgin which hangs on the tree trunk to the right. The prominence of the tavern makes it clear that they are preoccupied more with material rather than with spiritual matters.
Other works by Bruegel the Elder have a double meaning because of their tumultuous aspect, like the Battle between Carnival and Lent (Vienna), or the large painting called Dulle Griet (Antwerp). An exceptional painting because of its terrible symbolism that appears close to the visions Bosch painted before, is the Triumph of Death (Madrid), with its groups of horrifying scenes.
The battle between Carnival and Lent (Vienna) is, together with The Netherlandish Proverbs also painted in 1559, the first in a series of allegories of human wickedness and foolishness which are based on the work of Hieronymus Bosch. For example, the high viewpoint and the multitude of small figures show strong compositional similarities to Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. This painting takes as its subject the traditional annual carnival which was held in Flemish towns and villages in the week before Lent. A half-religious, half-secular festival, it provided an excuse for excesses of drinking and sex. Bruegel very originally represented the opposition between the traditional enemies, Carnival and Lent, by portraying their conflict as a tournament. The two adversaries (the obese Carnival, seated riding a barrel and with a roaster for a lance, and the thin emaciated figure of Lent, seated in a cart, using a baker’s shovel as her weapon and crowned with a beehive, see detail) come to blows in the square of a small Flemish town. The fat Lord of the Carnival astride the barrel is intended to represent the Protestants, the melancholic, lean figure resembling a Boschian witch represents the Catholics. Bruegel is caricaturing both equally harshly. In this painting we see certain motifs frequent in other works by Bruegel. The group of cripples and beggars on Carnival’s side of the square can be seen again (with some variations) in The Cripples of 1568, one of the artist’s last paintings. In the middle of the painting, we also see a fool (jester) leading two people; he has lit his torch, even though it is still day, a representation of an upside down world (see detail).
Dulle Griet, also known as Mad Meg, is a figure of Flemish folklore. In 1563 Bruegel made her a protagonist of one of his panels known as Dulle Griet (Mad Meg) (Antwerp). Although it seems that Bruegel gave the painting a hidden allegorical or religious meaning, its true essence remains a mystery. Many experts have devoted their energies to solve this problem, but none has ever succeeded entirely in explaining the painting. Most of them focus on the possible symbolism of the tall woman in the foreground, wearing suit of armor, sword, cutlery and money-box. She has been variously interpreted as a symbol of heresy or violence, the personification of human evil or even as an allegory of instability. It has also been proposed that Meg symbolizes Madness. It is at all possible that Bruegel’s allegory was intended as an attack on both human nature and the political and religious situation in 16th-century Antwerp. Whatever its meaning may be, the work never fails to fascinate. No one can fail to appreciate its apocalyptic vision. While her female followers loot a house, Griet advances towards the mouth of Hell through a landscape populated by Boschian monsters. They represent the sins that are punished in Hell. Griet wears male armor (a breastplate, a mailed glove and a metal helmet). A knife hangs from her side, while in her right hand she carries a sword. This painting contains a world filled with strange, diabolical figures, often made up of dissimilar parts.
In an apocalyptic vision, Bruegel presents us with The Triumph of Death (Madrid). We see the skeletons of death mowing down the living and resistance is useless. Trees and grass are withered; the fires of Hell blaze behind the hills. Here the Christian promise of resurrection and redemption is absent. The crowded composition is filled by bustling groups; only the couple playing music at the lower right corner of the painting seems to be in a state of tranquility (see detail). A young woman sings from a musical score, while a seated knight looking at her accompanies on the lute. This is a small island of youth, beauty, and harmony in the midst of a destructive, raging landscape. The flute lying next to them is a traditional erotic symbol: these two are lovers. Death, however, is already behind them. He uses his instrument as if it were a viola da braccio, an ancient violin. He disturbs the idyll and mocks the art of the two lovers. In this Bruegel’s vision of the inevitability of death, a dinner has been broken up by the intrusion of the army of Death and the attendants are putting up a futile resistance. They have drawn their swords in order to fight the skeletons; hopelessly, a jester takes refuge under the dinner table. The backgammon board and the playing cards have been scattered, while a skeleton thinly disguised with a mask empties away the wine jars (see detail). Above, a woman is being embraced by a skeleton in a hideous parody of after-dinner love. For all men and women, there is no escape from the army of Death, which advances inexorably across Bruegel’s burning landscape. The painting is filled with a multitude of striking and horrifying individual images: the boat of death carrying its cargo of skeletons draped in their winding-sheets and with skulls at the port-holes; the wagon-load of skulls and bones pulled along by an emaciated horse ridden by a skeleton tolling a bell and carrying a lamp. A woman has fallen in the path of the death cart; she holds in her hand a spindle and distaff, classical symbols of the fragility of human life (see detail). Just below her, a cardinal is led towards his fate by a skeleton who mockingly wears his red hat, while a dying king’s barrel of gold coins is looted by another skeleton. Here, Bruegel has portrayed the end of life in brutal fashion: as an event that it is never peaceful, always violent.
Other works by Bruegel stand out for the novelty of their fantastical subject, such as the two versions of the Building of the Tower of Babel (in the Rotterdam Museum and in the Vienna Museum), or stand out for the crudeness of their anecdote, such as the plaintive vision of the Cripples (or the Lepers) of the Louvre, a sad human subject that Bruegel knew how to treat almost humorously and with splendid use of color.
Bruegel painted the subject of the Tower of Babel at least three times, but today only two of these works remain. The Christian tradition interprets the tower, that was supposed to reach up to heaven, as a symbol of arrogance. Here, in the version at Rotterdam known as The “Little” Tower of Babel we see an almost invisible church procession ascending the ramps under a red baldachin (see detail). Here Bruegel seems to criticize the Catholic Church.
In Bruegel’s other version of The Building of the Tower of Babel (Vienna), he placed the tower in a coastal landscape (the Netherlanders acquired most of their wealth from maritime commerce) and it is also situated near a river (in those days it was along the waterways, rather than by the then unpaved country roads, that the majority of goods were transported). In both of his Tower renderings, Bruegel shows marked similarities to the Colosseum and other Roman monuments, which he most probably saw during his stay in Italy ten years earlier. The parallel of Rome and Babylon (the original setting of the Tower in the Biblical account) had a particular significance in the time of Bruegel. Rome was the Eternal City, intended by the Caesars to last forever, and its decay and ruin were seen as to symbolize the vanity and transience of earthly efforts. The hectic activity of the engineers, masons and workmen represented in the painting also points to a second moral: the futility of much human endeavor. Bruegel’s knowledge of building procedures and techniques is correct in detail. He has also given the biblical account many realistic features, among them the city panorama (see detail). In the lower right corner of the painting we see King Nimrod (the ruler who commissioned the Tower of Babel) paying a visit to the building site, while stonemasons go down on their knees before him.
Though small in scale, The Cripples (Paris) expresses Bruegel’s sarcastic, anguished, but ultimately sympathetic view of the human condition. Here we can see a powerful impression of the physical misery and the moral isolation of these outcasts. In this painting, Bruegel depicts the cripples in isolation. A woman is leaving to the right, maybe she just brought them food. The group of cripples appear excited, but we can’t notice why. It has been suggested that the different headwear could indicate the various social levels: red miter (clergy), fur hat (citizen), cap (peasant), helmet (soldier), crown (aristocrat).
Of the painters who were direct descendants of Bruegel the Elder, we can only take into consideration his two sons: Pieter Bruegel the Younger (1564-1637), called ‘Bruegel d’Enfer’, and Jan Bruegel de Velours (1564-1625), simply because although they never met their father, they made several copies of his lost paintings. But both were artists who belonged to another era and whose production, despite the paternal influence, was then completely removed from the mental climate in which the art of their father developed in the 16th century.
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Gouache: (Also known as opaque watercolor). A water-medium paint consisting of natural pigment, water, a binding agent (usually gum arabic or dextrin), and sometimes additional inert material. Gouache is designed to be opaque. Gouache is similar to watercolor in that it can be re-wetted and dried to a matte finish, and the paint can become infused into its paper support.
The Artistic Adventure of Mankind 