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Pieter Bruegel the Elder
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==Subjects== ===Peasants=== [[File:Pieter Brueghel the Elder - The Dutch Proverbs - Google Art Project.jpg|thumb|''[[Netherlandish Proverbs]]'', 1559, oil on oak wood]] [[File:Pieter Bruegel the Elder - Children’s Games - Google Art Project.jpg|thumb|''[[Children's Games (Bruegel)|Children's Games]]'', 1560]] [[File:Pieter Bruegel the Elder - Peasant Wedding - Google Art Project 2.jpg|thumb|''[[The Peasant Wedding]]'', 1566–69, oil on panel. A late peasant subject, with a more monumental treatment.]] Pieter Bruegel specialised in [[genre painting]]s populated by peasants, often with a landscape element, though he also painted religious works. Making the life and manners of peasants the main focus of a work was rare in painting in Bruegel's time, and he was a pioneer of the genre painting. Many of his peasant paintings fall into two groups in terms of scale and composition, both of which were original and influential on later painting. His earlier style shows dozens of small figures, seen from a high viewpoint, and spread fairly evenly across the central picture space. The setting is typically an urban space surrounded by buildings, within which the figures have a "fundamentally disconnected manner of portrayal", with individuals or small groups engaged in their own distinct activity, while ignoring all the others.<ref name="auto5">Franits, 203</ref> His earthy, unsentimental but vivid depiction of the rituals of village life—including agriculture, hunts, meals, festivals, dances, and games—are unique windows on a vanished folk culture, though still characteristic of Belgian life and culture today, and a prime source of [[iconography|iconographic]] evidence about both physical and social aspects of 16th-century life. For example, his famous painting ''[[Netherlandish Proverbs]]'', originally ''[[The Blue Cloak]]'', illustrates dozens of then-contemporary [[aphorism]]s, many of which still are in use in current Flemish, French, English and Dutch.<ref name="auto3">{{cite book|last=Stokstad, Cothren|first=Marilyn, Michael|title=Art History- Fourteenth to Seventeenth Century Art|year=2010}}</ref> The Flemish environment provided a large artistic audience for proverb-filled paintings because proverbs were well known and recognisable as well as entertaining. ''[[Children's Games (Bruegel)|Children's Games]]'' shows the variety of amusements enjoyed by young people. His winter landscapes of 1565, like ''[[The Hunters in the Snow]]'', are taken as corroborative evidence of the severity of winters during the [[Little Ice Age]]. Bruegel often painted community events, as in ''[[The Peasant Wedding]]'' and ''[[The Fight Between Carnival and Lent]]''. In paintings like ''The Peasant Wedding'', Bruegel painted individual, identifiable people, while the people in ''The Fight Between Carnival and Lent'' are unidentifiable, muffin-faced [[allegory|allegories]] of greed or gluttony. Bruegel also painted religious scenes in a wide Flemish landscape setting, as in the ''[[Conversion of Paul (Bruegel)|Conversion of Paul]]'' and ''The Sermon of St. John the Baptist''. Even if Bruegel's subject matter was unconventional, the religious ideals and proverbs driving his paintings were typical of the Northern Renaissance. He accurately depicted people with disabilities, such as in ''[[The Blind Leading the Blind]]'', which depicted a quote from the Bible: "If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch" (Matthew 15:14). Using the Bible to interpret this painting, the six blind men are symbols of the blindness of mankind in pursuing earthly goals instead of focusing on Christ's teachings. Using abundant spirit and comic power, Bruegel created some of the very early images of acute social protest in art history. Examples include paintings such as ''[[The Fight Between Carnival and Lent]]'' (a satire of the conflicts of the [[Protestant Reformation]]) and engravings like ''The Ass in the School'' and ''Strongboxes Battling Piggybanks''.<ref>Mayor, A. Hyatt (1971). ''Prints & People: A Social History of Printed Pictures''. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 426.</ref> In the 1560s, Bruegel moved to a style showing only a few large figures, typically in a landscape background without a distant view. His paintings dominated by their landscapes take a middle course as regards both the number and size of figures. ; Late monumental peasant figures <gallery widths="200px" heights="200px" perrow="4"> File:Pieter Bruegel d. Ä. 037.jpg|''[[The Land of Cockaigne (Bruegel)|The Land of Cockaigne]]'' (1567), [[Alte Pinakothek]], an illustration of the medieval mythical land of plenty called [[Cockaigne]] File:The Peasant and the Birdnester Pieter Bruegel the Elder 1568.jpeg|''[[The Peasant and the Nest Robber]]'' (1568), [[Kunsthistorisches Museum]], Vienna File:Pieter Bruegel The Peasant Dance.jpg|''[[The Peasant Dance]]'' (1568), [[Kunsthistorisches Museum]], Vienna, oil on oak panel File:Pieter Bruegel the Elder - The Cripples.JPG|''[[The Beggars (Bruegel)|The Beggars (The Cripples)]]'' (1568), [[Louvre]], Paris, oil on panel </gallery> ===Landscape elements=== [[File:Pieter Bruegel der Ältere - Landschaft mit der Flucht nach Ägypten.jpg|thumb|''[[Landscape with the Flight into Egypt (Bruegel)|Landscape with the Flight into Egypt]]'', 1563, 37.1 × 55.6 cm (14.6 × 21.9 in), owned by [[Cardinal Granvelle]]]] Bruegel adapted and made more natural the [[world landscape]] style, which shows small figures in an imaginary panoramic landscape seen from an elevated viewpoint that includes mountains and lowlands, water, and buildings. Back in Antwerp from Italy he was commissioned in the 1550s by the publisher [[Hieronymus Cock]] to make drawings for a series of [[engraving]]s, the ''Large Landscapes'', to meet what was now a growing demand for landscape images. Some of his earlier paintings, such as his ''[[Landscape with the Flight into Egypt (Bruegel)|Landscape with the Flight into Egypt]]'' ([[Courtauld Institute of Art|Courtauld]], 1563), are fully within the Patinir conventions, but his ''[[Landscape with the Fall of Icarus]]'' (known from two copies) had a Patinir-style landscape, in which already the largest figure was a [[genre painting|genre figure]] who was only a bystander for the supposed narrative subject, and may not even be aware of it. The date of Bruegel's lost original is unclear,<ref>about 1558 has been suggested</ref> but it is probably relatively early, and if so, foreshadows the trend of his later works. During the 1560s the early scenes crowded with multitudes of very small figures, whether peasant genre figures or figures in religious narratives, give way to a small number of much larger figures. ====Months of the year==== [[File:Pieter Bruegel the Elder - Hunters in the Snow (Winter) - Google Art Project.jpg|thumb|''[[The Hunters in the Snow]]'', 1565, oil on wood]] His famous set of landscapes with genre figures depicting the seasons are the culmination of his landscape style; the five surviving paintings use the basic elements of the world landscape (only one lacks craggy mountains) but transform them into his own style. They are larger than most previous works, with a [[genre scene]] with several figures in the foreground, and the panoramic view seen past or through trees.<ref>Silver, 39–52; Snyder, 502–510; Harbison, 140–142; Schama, 431–433</ref> Bruegel was also aware of the [[Danube School]]'s landscape style through [[old master print]]s.<ref>Wood, Chapter 5, especially 275–278</ref> The surviving five paintings are ''[[The Gloomy Day]]'' (February-March), ''[[The Hunters in the Snow]]'' (December-January), and ''[[The Return of the Herd]]'' (October-November) which are on display in the [[Kunsthistorisches Museum]] in [[Vienna]]; ''[[The Hay Harvest]]'' (June-July) is on display in the [[Lobkowicz Palace]] in [[Prague]]; and ''[[The Harvesters (painting)|The Harvesters]]'' which is on display at the Metropolitan in New York. The painting associated with the April-May seasonal transition is assumed to be lost. The series on the months of the year includes several of Bruegel's best-known works. In 1565, a wealthy patron in Antwerp, [[Niclaes Jonghelinck]], commissioned him to paint a series of paintings of each month of the year. There has been dispute among art historians as to whether the series originally included six or twelve works.<ref>Gibson, Walter S. (1977) :) . Bruegel. The World of Art Library. Thames and Hudson pp 147–148.</ref> [[Joseph Koerner]] in his 2018 book ''Bosch and Bruegel'' states that Archduke Ernst, who took possession of the paintings after Niclaes defaulted on taxes, had as early as 1569 inventoried only six paintings in this series during the year of Bruegel's death.<ref>Joseph Koerner. 2018. ''Bosch and Bruegel''. Princeton Univ. Press. Page 345.</ref> The collection is next inventoried to be in the possession of Archduke Leopold who in 1659 indicated that five of them were extant.<ref>Joseph Koerner. 2018. ''Bosch and Bruegel''. Princeton Univ. Press. Page 345.</ref> Only five of these paintings are known to have survived into the 21st century. Traditional Flemish luxury [[book of hours|books of hours]] (e.g., the {{lang|fr|[[Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry]]|italic=no}};<ref name="auto3"/> 1416) had calendar pages that included the [[Labours of the Months]], depictions set in landscapes of the agricultural tasks, weather, and social life typical for that month. Bruegel's paintings were on a far larger scale than a typical calendar page painting, each one approximately three feet by five feet. For Bruegel, this was a large commission (the price of a commission was based on how large the painting was) and an important one. In 1565, the Calvinist riots began and it was only two years before the Eighty Years' War broke out. Bruegel may have felt safer with a secular commission so as to not offend Calvinist or Catholic.<ref name="auto2">{{cite book|last=Foote|first=Timothy|title=The World of Bruegel|year=1968|publisher=Time-Life Library|location=Library of Congress}}</ref> Some of the most famous paintings from this series included ''[[The Hunters in the Snow]]'' (December–January) and ''[[The Harvesters (painting)|The Harvesters]]'' (August-September).
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