Bruegel the Elder, Pieter Aertsen, and the Beginnings of Genre

Abstract

“Genre” has its origins at Antwerp in the mid-sixteenth century with Bruegel the Elder's Ice Skating before the Gate of St. George. In this groundbreaking work, Bruegel treats a scene from daily life as an independent pictorial category. An analysis of the creative process involved suggests that stoicism and satura (satire)—two traditions inherited from the ancient world in which the observer is accorded a primary place—were the catalysts that made this innovation possible. Their importance is underscored by their use in Bruegel's Seven Virtues, a series that drew on Aertsen's Meat Stall, with its own debt to satura.