Each Pieter Bruegel the Elder oil painting is hand-painted with oil on linen canvas, created by one of HandmadePiece's professional painters. Museum quality with preview before shipment. Global free shipping.
c. 1525/30 - 1569 • Flemish • Painter • Northern Renaissance
"No one except through envy, jealousy or ignorance of that art will ever deny that Pieter Bruegel was the most perfect painter of his century. But whether his being snatched away from us in the flower of his age was due to Death's mistake in thinking him older than he was on account of his extraordinary skill in art, or rather to Nature's fear that his genius for imitation would bring her into contempt, I cannot say." - Abraham Ortelius, cartographer, 1574
Little documentation about Pieter Bruegel the Elder survives, and the homage paid by his friend Ortelius, quoted above, is the only contemporary source about him. It is known that Bruegel was in the Antwerp GUILD in 1550, and that he traveled over the Alps and visited Italy in the following years. Like DORER, he made wonderful drawings along the way, but unlike Durer and other Northern artists, he was not greatly influenced by the Italian masters. On the contrary, he remained resolutely interested in the landscape and lore of his own homeland, and represented both with gusto. He introduced the winter landscape as an independent category, and it was taken up by others, including his son Jan BRUEGEL and de MOM PER. If Pieter Bruegel looked to any authority, it was that of BOSCH, but only early in his life when Bosch's sense of irony and the bizarre appealed to Bruegel. Comparing Bruegel's Battle Between Carnival and Lent (1559) with Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1504), one can almost imagine that Bruegel portrays the very scene Bosch had been looking at before closing his eyes and transforming it into a demonic nightmare. The elements of excess that concerned Bosch, from inebriation to fornication, are also present in Bruegel's rollicking scenario. Bruegel's Battle is seen from high overhead, a PERSPECTIVE he often employed to astounding effect. This is especially true in Fall of Icarus (c. 1553-60), a picture of the moment in Ovid's Metamorphoses when the wax that attached Icarus's wings melted and the boy plunged into the sea. The viewer is placed in the sky, where Icarus's father, DAEDALUS, who made the wings, might be-though his image was rubbed out in one version, he is present in another. A peasant is plowing beneath us, and then the land falls off to the sea far below where Icarus splashed down-only his feet are visible. W. H. Auden describes this painting in a poem entitled Musee des Beaux Arts (1938). He remarks on how insignificant this catastrophe is to the plowman, or to those on the ship who must have been amazed at what they saw: The tragedies of failure and death are personal to those who suffer them. For the rest of the world life goes on. It is uncertain what effect the Protestant Reformation or the Counter Reformation may have had on Bruegel, and whether his religious references are specifically directed to one or the other. Perhaps his cynical perspective was cast on religion in general. The intention of his peasant scenes is similarly conjectural. Were they moralizing, or comic merely for the sake of comedy? Or perhaps they were meant to validate a Flemish national tradition in the face of oppressive Spanish rule. All that may be said with some certainty is that these pictures were not painted for the peasants themselves.