The Brueghel

His work is so natural that he frequently does not seem to have set out with the preconceived idea of painting a particular moral lesson or proverb.

particularly Hieronymus Bosch, who lived less than half a century before Bruegel. Yet a rapid examination of Bruegel’s work convincingly shows that he worked through direct observation; he studied the spectacles of daily life more than the paintings of his predecessors.

Bruegel’s art is not the result of any particular school in the strict sense of the word. The best of his students, his son Pieter, known as the ‘Hell Brueghel’, simply copied him. Pieter Bruegel the Elder occupies an exceptional place in the history of Flemish painting, as much for the creative power of his genius as for his personal technique.

The philosophy of death in Bruegel’s work is not thrown into such relief. Rather, death is featured without the foil of life.

Orcagna’s fresco in Pisa conveys the sentiment of the perishable; Bruegel’s painting throws us into death’s arms.

groups or individually, exhibited their own stigmata.

Thirty years of Lutheranism had thrown their spirits into disarray and cast doubt into their hearts.

while the violence and cunning ever present in the Flemish character, which no longer maintained any discipline, became

the new rules to live by.

The arrival of an original artist whose work could summarise this critical moment in his people’s history was inevitable.