Pieter Bruegel (self portrait)
Pieter Bruegel, the Elder, byname Peasant Bruegel, Dutch Pieter Bruegel De
Oudere or Boeren Bruegel,
Bruegel also spelled Brueghel or Breughel, was born c. 1525, probably in Breda, duchy of Brabant (now in the Netherlands) and died in
September 5th or ninth, 1569, Brussels (now in Belgium), 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.
There
is but little information about his life. According to Carel van Mander's Het Schiderboeck (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 mileieu. 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 watercolor or tempera, a suspension of pigments in egg yolk or
a glutinous substance, on linen. The technique was widely practiced in her
hometown of Michelen (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 set off 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, Ciulio Covio, 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 drawing of 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 Hiëronymus 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 whose works 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; he turned then to Flemish villages and, in 1562, to townscapes
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 numbers 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 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 Hiëronymus 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 Antione Perrenot Cardinal de Granville.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 are concentrated in the Vienna Kunshisorisches 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 antecents 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 Labors 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 works as 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 monumentalize
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
somber 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 with
almost 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, the other undated).
The Rottertdam 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 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.
It has
recently been shown how closely many of Bruegel’s works mirror the moral and
religious ideas of Dirck Coornhete,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 de Granvelle.
________________________________________
More Painting by Pieter Bruegel
