Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Encyclopaedia Britannica
born c. 1525, , probably Breda, duchy of Brabant [now in The
Netherlands]
died Sept. 5/9, 1569, Brussels [now in Belgium]
by name Peasant Bruegel, Dutch Pieter Bruegel De Oudere, or Boeren
Bruegel, Bruegel also spelled Brueghel, or Breughel the greatest
Flemish painter of the 16th century, whose landscapes and vigorous,
often witty scenes of peasant life are particularly renowned.
Since Bruegel signed and dated many of his works, his artistic
evolution can be traced from the early landscapes, in which he shows
affinity with the Flemish 16th-century landscape tradition, to his
last works, which are Italianate. He exerted a strong influence on
painting in the Low Countries, and through his sons Jan and Pieter
he became the ancestor of a dynasty of painters that survived into
the 18th century.
Life
There is but little information about his life. According to Carel
van Mander's Het Schilderboeck (Book of Painters), published in
Amsterdam in 1604 (35 years after Bruegel's death), Bruegel was
apprenticed to Pieter Coecke van Aelst, a leading Antwerp artist who
had located in Brussels. The head of a large workshop, Coecke was a
sculptor, architect, and designer of tapestry and stained glass who
had traveled in Italy and in Turkey. Although Bruegel's earliest
surviving works show no stylistic dependence on Coecke's Italianate
art, connections with Coecke's compositions can be detected in later
years, particularly after 1563, when Bruegel married Coecke's
daughter Mayken. In any case, the apprenticeship with Coecke
represented an early contact with a humanistic milieu. Through
Coecke Bruegel became linked indirectly to another tradition as
well. Coecke's wife, Maria Verhulst Bessemers, was a painter known
for her work in watercolour or tempera, a suspension of pigments in
egg yolk or a glutinous substance, on linen. The technique was
widely practiced in her hometown of Mechelen (Malines) and was later
employed by Bruegel. It is also in the works of Mechelen's artists
that allegorical and peasant thematic material first appear. These
subjects, unusual in Antwerp, were later treated by Bruegel. In 1551
or 1552, Bruegel setoff on the customary northern artist's journey
to Italy, probably by way of France. From several extant paintings,
drawings, and etchings, it can be deduced that he traveled beyond
Naples to Sicily, possibly as far as Palermo, and that in 1553 he
lived for some time in Rome, where he worked with a celebrated
miniaturist, Giulio Clovio, an artist greatly influenced by
Michelangelo and later a patron of the young El Greco. The inventory
of Clovio's estate shows that he owned a number of paintings and
drawings by Bruegel as well as a miniature done by the two artists
in collaboration. It was in Rome, in 1553, that Bruegel produced his
earliest signed and dated painting, “Landscape with Christ and the
Apostles at the Sea of Tiberias.” The holy figures in this painting
were probably done by Maarten de Vos, a painter from Antwerp then
working in Italy.
The earliest surviving works, including two drawings with Italian
scenery sketched on the southward journey and dated 1552, are
landscapes. A number of drawings of Alpine regions, produced between
1553 and 1556, indicate the great impact of the mountain experience
on this man from the Low Countries. With the possible exception of a
drawingof a mountain valley by Leonardo da Vinci, the landscapes
resulting from this journey are almost without parallel in European
art for their rendering of the overpowering grandeur of the high
mountains. Very few of the drawings were done on the spot, and
several were done after Bruegel's return, at an unknown date, to
Antwerp. The vast majority are free compositions, combinations of
motifs sketched on the journey through the Alps. Some were intended
as designs for engravings commissioned by Hieronymus Cock, an
engraver and Antwerp's foremost publisher of prints.
Bruegel was to work for Cock until his last years, but, from 1556
on, he concentrated, surprisingly enough, on satirical, didactic,
and moralizing subjects, often in the fantastic or grotesque manner
of Hieronymus Bosch, imitations of whoseworks were very popular at
the time. Other artists were content with a more or less close
imitation of Bosch, but Bruegel's inventiveness lifted his designs
above mere imitation, and he soon found ways to express his ideas in
a much different manner. His early fame rested on prints published
by Cock after such designs. But the new subject matter and the
interest in the human figure did not lead to the abandonment of
landscape. Bruegel, in fact, extended his explorations in this
field. Side by side with his mountain compositions, he began to draw
the woods of the countryside, turned then to Flemish villages, and,
in 1562, totownscapes with the towers and gates of Amsterdam.
The double interest in landscape and in subjects requiring the
representation of human figures also informed, often jointly, the
paintings that Bruegel produced in increasing number after his
return from Italy. All of his paintings, even those in which the
landscape appears as the dominant feature, have some narrative
content. Conversely, in those that are primarily narrative, the
landscape setting often carries part of the meaning. Dated paintings
have survived from each year of the period except for 1558 and 1561.
Within this decade falls Bruegel's marriage to Mayken Coecke in the
Church of Notre-Dame de la Chapelle in Brussels in 1563 and his move
to that city, in which Mayken and her mother were living. His
residence recently was restored and turned into a Bruegel museum.
There is, however, some doubt as to the correctness of the
identification.
In Brussels, Bruegel produced his greatest paintings, but only few
designs for engravings, for the connection with Hieronymus Cock may
have become less close after Bruegel left Antwerp. Another reason
for the concentration on painting may have been his growing success
in this field. Among his patrons was Cardinal Antione Perrenot de
Granvelle, president of the council of state in the Netherlands, in
whose palace in Brussels the sculptor Jacques Jonghelinck had a
studio. He and Bruegel had traveled in Italy at the same time, and
his brother, a rich Antwerp collector, Niclaes, was Bruegel's
greatest patron, having by 1566 acquired 16 of his paintings.
Another patron was Abraham Ortelius, who in a memorable obituary
called Bruegel the most perfect artist of the century. Most of his
paintings were done for collectors.
Bruegel died in 1569 and was buried in Notre-Dame de la Chapelle in
Brussels.
Artistic evolution and affinities
In addition to a great many drawings and engravings by Bruegel, 45
authenticated paintings from a much larger output now lost have been
preserved. Of this number, about a third is concentrated in the
Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum, reflecting the keen interest of the
Habsburg princes in the 16th and 17th centuries in Bruegel's art.
In his earliest surviving works, Bruegel appears as essentially a
landscape artist, indebted to, but transcending, the Flemish
16th-century landscape tradition, as well as to Titian and to other
Venetian landscape painters. After his return from Italy, he turned
to multifigure compositions, representations of crowds of people
loosely disposed throughout the picture and usually seen from above.
Here, too, antecedents can be found in the art of Hiëronymus Bosch
and of other painters closer in time to Bruegel.
In 1564 and 1565, under the spell of Italian art and especially of
Raphael, Bruegel reduced the number of figures drastically, the few
being larger and placed closely together in a very narrow space. In
1565, however, he turned again to landscape with the celebrated
series known as “Labours of the Months.” In the five of these that
have survived, he subordinated the figures to the great lines of the
landscape. Later on, crowds appear again, disposed in densely
concentrated groups.
Bruegel's last works often show a striking affinity with Italian
art. The diagonal spatial arrangement of the figures in “Peasant
Wedding” recalls Venetian compositions. Though transformed into
peasants, the figures in such worksas “Peasant and Bird Nester”
(1568) have something of the grandeur of Michelangelo. In the very
last works, two trends appear; on the one hand, a combined
monumentalization and extreme simplification of figures and, on the
other hand,an exploration of the expressive quality of the various
moods conveyed by landscape. The former trend is evident in his
“Hunters in the Snow” (1565), one of his winter paintings. The
latter is seen in the radiant, sunny atmosphere of “The Magpie on
the Gallows” and in the threatening and sombre character of “The
Storm at Sea,” an unfinished work, probably Bruegel's last painting.
He was no less interested in observing the works of man. Noting
every detail withalmost scientific exactness, he rendered ships with
great accuracy in several paintings and in a series of engravings. A
most faithful picture of contemporary building operations is shown
in the two paintings of “The Tower of Babel” (one 1563 [see
photograph], the other undated). The Rotterdam “Tower of Babel”
illustrates yet another characteristic of Bruegel's art, an
obsessive interest in rendering movement. It was a problem with
which he constantly experimented. In the Rotterdam painting,
movement is imparted to an inanimate object, the tower seeming to be
shown in rotation. Even more strikingly, in “The Magpie on the
Gallows,” the gallows apparently take part in the peasants' dance
shown next to them. The several paintings of peasant dances (see )
are obvious examples, and others, less obvious, are the processional
representations in “The Way to Calvary” and in “The Conversion of
St. Paul.” The latter work also conveys the sensation of the
movement of figures through the constantly changing terrain of
mountainous regions. This sensation had appeared first in the early
mountain drawings and later, in different form, in “The Flight into
Egypt” (1563). Toward the end of his life, Bruegel seems to have
become fascinated by the problem of the falling figure. His studies
reached their apogee in a rendering of successive stages of falling
in “The Parable of the Blind.” The perfect unity of form, content,
and expression marks this painting as a high point in European art.
The subject matter of Bruegel's compositions covers an impressively
wide range. In addition to the landscapes, his repertoire consists
of conventional biblical scenes and parables of Christ, mythological
subjects as in “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” (two versions),
and the illustrations of proverbial sayings in “The Netherlands
Proverbs” and several other paintings. His allegorical compositions
are often of a religious character, as the two engraved series of
“The Vices” (1556–57) and “The Virtues” (1559–60), but they included
profane social satires as well. The scenes from peasant life are
well known, but a number of subjects that are not easy to classify
include “The Fight Between Carnival and Lent” (1559), “Children's
Games” (1560), and “Dulle Griet,” also known as “Mad Meg” (1562).
It has recently been shown how closely many of Bruegel's works
mirror the moral and religious ideas of Dirck Coornhert, whose
writings on ethics show a rationalistic, commonsense approach. He
advocated a Christianity free from the outward ceremonies of the
various denominations, Roman Catholic, Calvinist, and Lutheran,
which he rejected as irrelevant. In an age of bitter conflicts
arising out of religious intolerance, Coornhert pleaded for
toleration. Bruegel, of course, castigated human weakness in a more
general way, with avarice and greed as the main targets of his
criticism that was ingeniously expressed in the engraving “The
Battle Between the Money Bags and Strong Boxes.” This would have
been in keeping with Coornhert's views as well, which permitted
taking part outwardly in the old forms of worship and accepting the
patronage of Cardinal Granvelle.
