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 Intended to symbolize the futility of human ambition and perhaps more specifically to criticize the spirit of commercialism then reigning in Antwerp, the panel also contains a new panoramic vista of a vast world.
Only distantly related to Bosch's cosmic landscapes, this new world view was to inform most of the artist's subsequent works. Whatever his reasons for leaving Antwerp, Bruegel took up residence in Brussels in , where he was to remain until his death in The Triumph of Death.
Order a Hand-Painted Reproduction of this Painting. Click here for more. Popularity Alphabetical. The Hunters in the Snow Winter The Tower of Babel The Peasant Dance Bruegel, in contrast emphasized their similarities, the nature, 'begotten, not made' element in man. The fact that Bruegel lived during politically troubling times has also compounded speculation over the interpretation of his work.
In the mids, the modern-day Netherlands, along with Belgium and Luxembourg - collectively known as the Low or Netherlandish Countries - consisted of a series of provinces under the rule of the Hapsburg dynasty. In , possession of the territories passed to King Phillip II of Spain, who attempted to impose a stricter form of Catholic rule, sending the Duke of Alba to lead a brutal military campaign in Brussels to suppress Protestant rebellion.
According to art historians Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen, Bruegel's consistent eschewal of the iconography of Catholic saints and martyrs, in spite of the religious focus of much of his work, can be seen as a coded rejection of the philosophy and bloodthirsty campaigns of the Counter-reformation. One story which suggests that Bruegel was quite conscious of the political significance of his work is told by Van Mander: not long before the artist's death, his biographer states, Bruegel asked his wife to burn certain works, believing that their content might put her in danger.
Little is known about the circumstances of Bruegel's death, though in , the final year of his life, the city council of Brussels released him from the obligation of working with a guard of Spanish soldiers stationed in his home, suggesting that the politically subversive content of his work was well understood. No paintings exist from this year, implying that Bruegel died from illness, but there is no way of ruling out a more sinister explanation.
In any case, Bruegel's relatively early demise, even for the period in which he lived, must be viewed as one of the tragedies of Renaissance art history. During his lifetime, Pieter Bruegel was seen to have made a significant break from the popular Italian Renaissance style, creating works that focused on landscape and contemporary life rather than the grand narratives favored by the Mediterranean masters of the past century.
In so doing, he helped to ensure that Renaissance art in Northern Europe would unfold in its own, unique direction, contributing to a Northern Renaissance style that inspired subsequent artists such as Peter Paul Rubens and Rembrandt. Bruegel's paintings have influenced a range of developments in modern art.
The contemporary critic Wilfried Seipel writes that "[b]eyond all psychological and iconological interpretation and independent of biographical and contemporary historical preconditions, Bruegel's surviving paintings form a cycle, indeed an epic of human existence in its helplessness not only in the face of nature but also when confronted with the apparently immutable course of world history.
During the twentieth century, poets such as W. Auden and William Carlos Williams were equally inspired by Bruegel's egalitarian vision, the latter dedicating a ten-poem cycle to Bruegel in his final collection, Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems Content compiled and written by Jessica DiPalma. The Battle about Money Pieter van der Heyden. Citation Wisse, Jacob. See on MetPublications Stechow, Wolfgang.
Pieter Bruegel, the Elder. New York: Abrams, Rome and Southern Italy, — A.
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