Bruegel Pieter - Peter Bruegel: the elder

c. 1525-1569

T he Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel sometimes called Peasant Bruegel, and usually distinguished from the other painters in his family as Pieter Bruegel the Elder was one of the greatest painters of the late medieval/early Renaissance period, whose The Hunters in the Snow and The Peasant Wedding are as accessible to a modern audience as they were some 500 years ago when he painted them.

Bruegel was the first great artist to paint scenes of ordinary peasant life and show the common man and woman as they went about their daily tasks and amusements. He is credited with bringing a humanizing spirit to paintingsomething that was lacking in medieval works and entirely absent from contemporary Renaissance paintings. His compositions are full of rich details and reward close examination; in fact, they are used by cultural historians as source material for old Flemish customs, styles of dress, cultivation, and many other aspects of sixteenth-century everyday life.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder was the father of three further generations of artists, most notably his sonsPieter Brueghel the Younger and Jan Brueghel the Elderand his grandson, Jan Brueghel the Younger, son of Jan Brueghel the Elder. There were other artists in the family, not least of which was Bruegels mother-in-law, Mayken Verhulst, a noted watercolorist who was acclaimed as one of the four best female artists of the time.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder spent his working life in Antwerp and Brussels in what was called the Low Countries, now Belgium and the Netherlands. Both cities were important trading ports and economic centers, and Antwerp was the main center of publishing in the Netherlands. The period in which he lived, the mid-1500s, was a turbulent time in history when the Low Countries were occupied by the Catholic Spanish Hapsburgs. Bruegel was born a few years after Martin Luther launched the Protestant Revolution, which initiated much agitation between the Roman Catholic Church and the Protestant Church. Bruegel, who for the period in which he lived made relatively few religious paintings, was not obviously religious.

When Bruegel began to paint, Italian Mannerism was the prevailing style. Initially, however, Bruegel deliberately reverted to the traditional late-Gothic style as exemplified by the Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch, who although he had died in 1516 was still fashionable and popular in the Low Countries. For a period, Bruegel was even known as the second Bosch.

Believed to be a self-portrait, c. 1565

Unfortunately, little detail is known about Bruegels life. The odd legal paper dates him to time and place, and his later paintings are very usefully dated, but much of the personal detail about him has to be inferred. He followed a profession that most considered skilled but artisanal, and therefore unworthy of special attention. He appears to have been something of an intellectual and was a noted humanist, who counted many scholars among his friends, but he did not leave any writings that could have thrown light on his thoughts.

The influence of Hieronymous Bosch and elements of his style persist in Bruegels compositions until around the early 1560s. Bruegel did bring Boschs hellish themes up to date by incorporating modern landscapes into the backgrounds as well as contemporary costumes combined with an altogether brighter palette using more structured and refined composition. His early works, although not overtly religious, worked the themes of good and evil, foolish and sinful, usually represented in allegorical form. With maturity, his paintings became more confidently contemporary and secular, showing eloquent commentaries on Flemish peasant life. On close inspection his paintings always carry a moral, and he uses symbols such as peacock feathers to convey vanity.

Bruegel was one of an elite group of intellectuals who pioneered humanist ideas in the Low Countries during the mid-sixteenth century and counted among his friends and patrons many of the leading intellectual lights of the age, including the scholar and cartographer Abraham Ortelius and the important Antwerp printer Christoph Plan tin. During his lifetime Bruegel had two principal patrons, the rich Antwerp merchant Nicolaas Jonghelinck and Cardinal Granvelle, although the latter is only known to have owned Landscape with the Flight into Egypt. His friend Ortelius also possessed a number of his works, but only his ownership of the grisaille (oil) titled The Dormition of the Virgin is known for certain.

In the light of the hostile Spanish occupation of the Low Countries, Bruegel had to be very careful not to openly criticize Spain for fear of emphatic retribution, so he hid his opinions within his paintings for viewers to interpret. For example, his Massacre of the Innocents, painted about 1566, was an apparently religious piece, but it was actually a criticism of the cruelties and atrocities of the Spanish Inquisition across the Low Countries, as evidenced by the contemporary Flemish village setting.

Bruegel was not interested in painting portraits of the rich and famous, or nudes, or classical scenes from antiquity. Instead, he was interested in everyday peasant life, in how ordinary people worked and passed their leisure time. He is credited with humanizing traditional subjects and personalizing them in a way that had not been attempted before. His only interest in landscapes was as a background for his peasant scenes. These scenes were not idealized, but were composed of people with realistic, coarse faces and dumpy, workmanlike figures. Bruegel was not a peasant himself, but he obviously enjoyed mixing with peasants and learning their routines and lifestyles and was the first painter to depict ordinary peasant life without sentimentalizing or sensationalizing it.