Pieter Bruegel Research Articles

Symbolism of Fair Plots in Genre Painting of Peter Bruegel the Elder

The purpose of the article is to analyse the use of fair plots in the works of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, to reveal their symbolism in presenting the panorama of contemporary society. The methodology of the work consists in the application of such scientific research methods as: historical – when examining the artist's paintings in the context of the historical era in which he lived and worked; analytical, which made it possible to single out works with a fair plot from the artist's creative heritage; synthetic, thanks to which observations acquired through analysis became the basis for formulating a general conclusion; comparative art analysis is applied to reveal the specifics of Bruegel's genre painting depicting fairs. The scientific novelty of the work consists in the actualisation of the study of the work of the Dutch artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder, which presents fair scenes that enabled the artist to comprehensively present the motley society of that time in an artistic manner specific to the artist. Conclusions. Pieter Bruegel the Elder's paintings are filled with hidden meaning, the depicted events are connected with history, contemporary politics, reflect the thoughts and ideas of the author, that is, they are symbolic. Bruegel is one of the founders of Dutch genre painting – a direction of fine art in which the painter's attention is devoted to ordinary, everyday, multifaceted life, in the centre of which are people. Using fair plots, the artist discovered new themes and images for art. With the help of fair scenes, Bruegel depicted a generalised picture of the life of society, recorded the traditions and daily life of his contemporaries. The artist's paintings are historical documents that make it possible to track the activities of his compatriots. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, thanks to his creative, innovative abilities, a keen sense of the urgent problems of his people, acquired many followers who copied his paintings, in particular from fair themes, developed his plots. For the artist, the fair plots became a conceptual basis that contributed to the comprehensive artistic reproduction of the national characteristics of the Dutch people, as well as a means of figuratively embodying his creative ideas. The fair theme of the paintings allowed the artist to depict the peculiarities of the modern multifaceted life and activities of the Dutch people, to demonstrate the transformational processes that took place among different layers of the population, to present his own vision of the panorama of the contemporary society, the miniature format of which was the fairs.

Rediscovering Bruegel: Art and History in Michael Frayn’s Headlong

British playwright and novelist Michael Frayn’s 1999 novel Headlong centers on an art historian’s discovery of the lost sixth painting from the collection Months or Seasons that Flemish painter, Pieter Bruegel is believed to have painted in 1565. Throughout the novel, driven by a quest to authenticate and possess the painting, the protagonist Martin Clay is engrossed in a thoughtful and thorough examination of Bruegel’s art renowned for busy tableaus of peasants, harvesters, hunters engaged in daily and rural activities. From religious conflicts, biblical conventions to allegorical landscapes, labors of the months within the framework of changing seasons, Bruegel’s artistic milieu has been interpreted and elicited in diverse and opposite ways. For that reason, Clay’s speculations about the political, intellectual and symbolic history behind the painting are not only the substance of the book, but the lengthy and diligent research he takes on also provides historical backdrop of the Netherlands in early sixteenth century, a time of atrocity and oppression as a result of Spanish rule. In view of that, this study aims to examine and understand how Martin’s journey turns into a headlong venture carrying thematic elements found in Bruegel’s works delving into the complexities of human behavior. Frayn not only brings the missing masterpiece to life with relevant descriptions projecting Bruegel’s idiosyncratic style and legacy, he also explicates its iconography-iconology in a political, and art historical context showing affinity with the narrative and artistic traditions of Dutch genre paintings.

<흥부전>의 ‘밥 먹는 대목’에 대한 비교예술학적 접근

In order to deepen our literary understanding of the rice eating scene in <Heungbujeon>, this paper compares <Heungbujeon> with paintings depicting a meal scene. The paintings of The Last Supper, which recreates the event of the Last Supper as recorded in the Christian Bible, and <Peasant Wedding>, painted by the 16th century Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel, were examined. Eating is both a material cycle of nature that mediates life and an act of human civilization. I considered this duality as an important clue to understanding the uniqueness of the work, which deals with the overcoming of materiality and the isolation of the figure. ‘Overcoming Materiality’ is a discussion of how the figures overcome the materiality of the act of eating to achieve a level of civilization, and what that means. In the paintings of The Last Supper, the figures are reverent in the presence of food and isolate the betrayer Judas. The paintings of the Last Supper thus suggest that humans, as spiritual beings, should be oriented toward a community of faith. In <Peasant Wedding>, people eat, drink, and rejoice. In this way, human beings are not limited to spiritual beings, but physicality and social solidarity are affirmed. In <Heungbujeon>, Heungbu's family members cut gourds and eat gluttony. As such, they are seen as regressive beings. However, unlike Imugi and Nolbu, Heungbu's hunger is inherent in a moral tension, as Heungbu's family is committed to ethical eating. Thus, gluttony is understood as an act of satisfying the moral hunger inherent in hunger and rejoicing in the rewards of morality. If eating is an act of expressing and pursuing civilized meaning, that meaning will be realized differently for different people. This is because civilizational meaning belongs to the realm of the mind, and people are in different situations. In Leonardo da Vinci's <Last Supper>, Jesus is isolated. Jesus' calmness expresses that he is the savior and divine providence is transcendence. In Pieter Bruegel's <Peasant Wedding>, the bride is isolated. However, the distinction between the bride and her guests is only temporary, and the bride's smile expresses that the reception in the peasant community is an embodiment of humanity that should be respected. In <Heungbujeon>, Heungbu is isolated. He does not find sympathy from the rest of the family for his family's integrity, his belief in humanity, or his ethical obligation to wait for the wicked to be reformed. However, the good fortune of his brother shows that his isolation is not in vain. His isolation expresses his simple trust in humanity and the difficulty of that trust.

The stone of madness: Charcot’s interest in a copy after Pieter Bruegel Sr. as referred to by Henry Meige

ABSTRACT Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893) is known to have possessed interesting works of art, e.g. Jan Steen’s Marriage at Cana. In 1899, his pupil and colleague Henry Meige (1866–1940) wrote that Charcot had been interested in a painting (after a drawing) by Bruegel, named Les Arracheurs de Pierres de Teste. At the time the painting belonged to Charcot’s contemporary Ernest Mesnet (1825–1898). When Charcot visited Mesnet, he offered him a considerable amount of money. The owner did not want to sell it, but promised to leave it to Charcot in his will. As Charcot died earlier than Mesnet, the painting went to the latter’s heirs. In 1899, it was possessed by dermatologist dr. Paul de Molènes-Mahon (b. 1857). Meige published an article, in which he criticized the quality of the copy. Surgeon Henri Gaudier (1866–1942) wrote about the original painting in the Museum of St. Omer and confirmed Meige’s opinion about the copy. I will illustrate the St. Omer painting and describe Meige’s and Gaudier’s comments by comparing it with the black & white copy in Meige’s 1899 article. My study looks at Charcot as a collector of paintings, which is a minimally studied topic. He may have been interested in the Paris Bruegel copy for clinical and medical-historical reasons, rather than on aesthetic grounds.

О живописных претекстах у Тарковского

The broad topic “Tarkovsky and painting” contains commonalities, such as the director’s citing of the paintings by Pieter Bruegel or Leonardo da Vinci, but there are also less explored aspects. The latter include A. Tarkovsky’s method of working with images based on the work principles of the old masters of painting; implicit references and allusions not just to individual paintings, often not yet described, but to the entire worlds of certain authors or movements; and a total commitment to quotation together with a skilful and deliberate disguise of the technique, also described by the director in theoretical works. Tarkovsky was an artist in the very first sense of the word — a student of an art school, author of film sketches and storyboards, paintings, and even art history works. However, the main thing regarding the topic “Tarkovsky and painting” is his application of the very vision of a painter in his own work. He worked with frame structures in complex ways, often appealing to the repetition of the recursion technique, like great artists did in their works. He used iconographic repetitions in plots, themes, individual images, details, and motifs of his works. He often implicitly alluded to reference pictorial sources in such a way that without the testimony of colleagues the reference is impossible to guess. He applied the entire philosophical concepts assigned to individual artists and artistic movements and was not afraid to mix eras, using the elements and techniques of his predecessors to create his own film painting, finely crafted but full of anachronisms.

Bruegel według Majewskiego. Literackie i malarskie problemy adaptacji

Lech Majewski’s The Mill and the Cross (2011) is a full-length feature film, a screen adaptation of Pieter Bruegel’s painting The Way of the Cross (1564). Majewski proves to be an excellent interpreter of Bruegel’s art, whom he considers a philosopher, an epic, and a poet. He relies on the research of Michael F. Gibson, and in his plotting he draws on a long-standing tradition of literary experience and digital technology (without this, it would have been impossible to faithfully reproduce the overall plan and realities of the painting). Majewski exposes the palimpsest nature of the narrative and shapes the film like a contemporary novel of space. In order to make the ideas of the screened painting comprehensible and to emphasize the fictionality of the depicted world, he introduces various versions of “literature about literature”. In the film, he perfectly integrates painterly features (word reduction, stop motion, long static camera shots) and literary features (the structure of an episodic novel of manners).

Drawings by Cornelis Moninckx in the Hermitage collection

The article analyses three drawings by the Dutch artist of the middle of the 17th century Cornelis Moninckx (1623–1666) from the collection of the State Hermitage Museum. Cornelis Moninckx (1623–1666) from the collection of the State Hermitage Museum are analysed. The sheets presented are published for the first time. The drawings come from three different collections, which are important components of the museum’s graphic collections. They are executed in a technique characteristic of the artist: black chalk on parchment; two drawings are signed by the author, and another was attributed by the author of this article on the basis of the stylistic features of Cornelis Moninckx’s work. Only a corpus of genre drawings, a few engravings and a design for a sculpture have survived from the master’s artistic legacy. Three finished and large-format sheets from the Hermitage collection considerably expand the known field of the master’s works. The study of Moninckx’s works from the national collection gives grounds for assumptions about the reading of the subjects. The themes chosen by the master are inextricably linked with pictorial tradition and folk humour. Moninckx turned to the work of the masters of the 16th century, in particular Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and was interested in the work of his contemporaries: Adriaen Braughel the Elder, Adriaen Brauwer, Adriaen van Ostade and others. In this scientific article, the master’s drawings are analysed from both the point of view of iconography, and formal and stylistic method, and a comparative analysis is applied. The works are put in line with other known works by the artist.

ТИПЫ ЭКФРАСИСОВ МАЙКЛА ФРЕЙНА В РОМАНЕ «ОДЕРЖИМЫЙ» И ИХ РОЛЬ В ОРГАНИЗАЦИИ ТЕКСТА

The article is devoted to the intermedial analysis of the novel “Headlong” by Michael Frayn. The plot of the novel is an adventure of a connoisseur of art who is looking for a lost painting by a famous Flemish artist. The research focuses on the ekphrastic descriptions of Pieter Bruegel’s paintings in the literary text with the aim of identifying the types of mimetic and non-mimetic ekphrases used in the novel. The text contains ekphrastic descriptions of both real and imaginary works of art, which can be full and complete or short and precise. Different types of ekphrasis contribute to the integrity and authenticity of the plot, its dynamism and thrill. The composition of the complete mimetic and non-mimetic ekphrases is similar and represents the same key issues.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Tower of Babel (1563). From Art to Architecture

Aim. This paper examines the meaning of The Tower of Babel (1563), Pieter Bruegel’s painting, as a physical, cultural, social, and architectural herald of the modern skyscraper. The interpretation generated will form the background for a contemporary analogy to the modern skyscrapers. These large-scale aesthetic structures, form the sensation of an unnerving lack of space and does not correspond with the existing urban outline. Similar to the tower at the painting, that is a symbol of the lack of connection between nations and peoples, the skyscraper follows in the footsteps of its predecessor that symbolized the confounding of the languages. Methods. Four theoretical approaches will be utilized: (a) Examining the place of the painting within common approaches to the biblical text, based on familiar examples; (b) Converting the biblical story into a painting; (c) Analyzing and evaluating the painting from an aesthetic perspective; (d) In order to overcome the alienation and lack of community we shall utilize the phenomenological notion of place and space, which opens a path to architectural experiencing that promises to connect the individual to the environment, the world, and the community. Results. Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s approach to the biblical story and its artistic portrayal teaches us that The Contemporary Torah (2006, Genesis 11:1-9) is a timeless and universal story that illustrates human pretense, a lack of adequate self-evaluation, arrogance, and stupidity. Conclusion. The artist understood all this very well and possessed the originality and the daring to represent it even in contradiction of contemporary conventions.

Daedalus and Icarus in Verbal and Visual Frames: A Comparative Reading of Bruegel, Auden and Ağıl

ABSTRACT The myth of Daedalus and Icarus has been the subject of numerous literary texts as well as artworks in the Western tradition. The Turkish poet Nazmi Ağıl’s two ekphrastic poems ‘Bruegel: The Landscape as Icarus Falls’ and ‘Auden’s Icarus’ are retellings of the myth with reference to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, and W. H. Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’. If ekphrasis is the representation of a work of art in literature, then Ağıl’s poems are re-representations of both verbal and visual frames by critiquing Auden’s interpretation from the mouth of a storyteller Kamil in the former poem and Daedalus in the latter. Ağıl’s aim in alluding to the Western sources is to highlight political issues in Turkey. This paper, then, argues how Ağıl’s poems complicate the reading process by playing with verbal and visual frames.

Ruth MacKay. Life in a Time of Pestilence: The Great Castilian Plague of 1596–1601.

Good governance during an epidemic looked about the same in 1600 as it does today. It involved the coordination of responses among leaders, disseminating the best medical information, counting the sick, figuring out who had been exposed, ensuring sanitation, and generating regular reports. Bad actors, Ruth MacKay’s fascinating study shows, have been pulling the same unfortunate stunts for centuries: blaming vulnerable people for spreading the disease, arguing that the economy is too fragile to withstand decisive action, or claiming that the disease—in this book, probably bubonic plague—is not dangerous. The book may be timely, but the author’s eye for detail makes it fascinating. MacKay is interested in particularity and specificity; she deftly weaves together documentary evidence from archives across Castile to create vivid tableaux of individual experiences during an epidemic that claimed the lives of one in ten Castilians. Iberian responses to early modern diseases from plague to pox were well documented in contemporaneous pamphlets and books. Epidemics were already a staple of Spanish historiography in 1802 when Joaquín de Villalba summarized and excerpted published works in his Epidemiología Española. In this sense, MacKay treads familiar ground. However, the book’s tenor and methodology situate it within the broader reconsideration of early modern Spanish social and medical history that has taken place over the last two decades. The tenor is typified by MacKay’s measured analysis of the problem with treating epidemics as metaphors of a disintegrating political order. Early modern authors—physicians and philosophers alike—tended to write and publish about disease as a fable, a means to understand social problems. Introspection suited their moment but, centuries afterward, historians often echoed the moralizing of their early modern sources. MacKay—building on methodological advances of Claudia Stein, Cristian Berco, and Kristy Wilson Bowers, among others—avoids moralizing in part by drawing on archival rather than print documents. She describes her approach as inspired both by the great twentieth-century historian Bartolomé Bennassar and by Pieter Bruegel the Younger.

Pieter Quast’s drawings in the collection of the State Hermitage Museum

The article analyses five drawings by the Dutch painter Pieter Quast (circa 1606– 1647) from the collection of the State Hermitage Museum. The sheets shown are unpublished. They are executed in the artist’s characteristic technique: in black chalk on vellum; some sheets are signed and dated. They come from three different collections, four of the drawings came into the museum in the 18th century and one is a late acquisition and was purchased in 1972. The little-known master’s diverse body of work is represented in museum collections and private collections mainly by graphic material, including numerous drawings. The artist’s passion for drawing seems to have also been caused by his poor financial situation. Although Quast’s biography is known in fragments, published archival materials reveal the artist’s complex creative path. A study of his works from the national collection confirms their authorship and gives grounds for speculation about the reading of the subjects. The themes chosen by the master are inextricably linked with the pictorial tradition: the work of the 16th century masters, in particular Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and Quast’s contemporaries Adriaen Braouwer, Adriaen van Ostade and others. The artist relied heavily on theatrical representations, both biblical and humorous folk sketches, as an important source of inspiration. This research paper analyses the master’s drawings both in terms of iconography and using the formal and stylistic method, using comparative analysis and putting the works in line with the artist’s other famous works.

The Art of Old Artists as a Source of Inspiration in the Bookplates by Konstantin Kalinovich

Konstantin Yuryevich Kalinovich (b. 1959), an artist and illustrator who demonstrates exclusive techniques and a high degree of detail in the field of printed graphics, is the owner of a large number of international awards, prestigious art prizes and the title of Corresponding Member of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers of the United Kingdom (1992). K.Yu. Kalinovich’s professionalism is also convincingly manifested in small forms — in the art of ex-libris. The artist’s formation as an etcher began in the Leningrad period of his studies in the experimental lithographic workshop of the Leningrad Institute of Civil Engineering under the guidance of G.P. Pakharevsky, and then continued at the Faculty of Graphics of the Ivan Fyodorov Ukrainian Polygraphic Institute. The creative heritage of A. Brunovsky and personal acquaintance with the Slovak master had a great influence on the formation of the individual graphic style. The artist’s bookplates, made in etching, are often homages in memory of old masters: the images created by H. Bosch, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, A. Dürer, H. Avercamp, J. Vermeer, and Rembrandt excite and inspire him to visual interpretation. The chosen range of artistic means is miniature, synthesis, printmaking as an independent expression of ex-libris. The technique is etching, less often watercolor, gouache. The type is a plot bookplate with the preserved function of belonging to a private library and the implementation of the customer’s idea. To the depth, picturesqueness and wide tonal range of etching, the artist adds original technical features: a dial from an old clock is selected as an etching board, and details of the clock mechanism are involved in the image base, correcting and warping the format and field of the etching with blind impressions. The plot echoing with the great artists and the meticulous thoroughness of K.Yu. Kalinovich’s technique generate original stories about the joy and pain of being, framed by a high form of appreciation for the art of the past. In the works of Kalinovich, the involvement in the composed metaphysical world, the visual images of which are fantastically realistic, monstrously attractive and historically filled, is clearly accentuated. The homage to the old artists’ art in Kalinovich’s bookplates is his world, forcing the viewers to reach for a magnifying glass so as not to miss a single line, while mastering the knowledge of the world art history.

브뤼헐의 종교화에 나타난 저항의 소리풍경 연구

The purpose of this study is to examine how Pieter Bruegel de Oude uses sound in his work to secretly and effectively lead his own resistance to the foreign powers of Spain and Catholicism through the analysis of the soundscape of resistance in his religious paintings. Of the total of 45 paintings by this artist, 20 are religious paintings, of which 10 are allusive to the subject of resistance. First, in these paintings, he achieves the purpose of covert resistance through art by marginalizing the “sacred noise” by letting the secular sounds of everyday life bury the noise in it. He also effectively uses sacred noise and secular sounds of everyday life to mask or reinforce the subject of resistance by appropriately placing them in the “figure” or “ground.”

A Dialogue of Creative Systems of Nikolai Gogol and Pieter Bruegel the Elder in the Context of Carnival Culture: Personality and Carnival

The article explores the specifics of the functioning and transformation of carnivalesque aesthetics in the paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder and in the “Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka” by Nikolai Gogol. The similarities in the transformations that are found in the works of the authors are revealed. The results obtained are conceptualized accounting global separation of the individual out of the community and nature as well as the specifics of the cultural situation.

Paso a paso se va muy lejos: Traveling the Path with AFS

<i>Paso a paso se va muy lejos</i>: Traveling the Path with AFS

Art and pediatric orthopaedics: Pieter Bruegel and children’s games

Pieter Bruegel’s “The Children’s Games” demonstrates a wide age range of children participating in a known therapeutic and preventative measure --outdoor play. An interpretation of captivating oil-onwood masterpiece in the context of recent pediatric and pediatric orthopedic literature is given. Keywords: art; outdoor play; vitamin D; parent-children relations; pediatric orthopedics.

Between Dog and Wolf

Abstract Taking its cue from the novel’s title, this essay examines various forms of inbetweenness, or intermediacy, in Sasha Sokolov’s Between Dog and Wolf, especially as related to liminality, metamorphoses, hybridity, and unboundedness. It claims that the novel, which is primarily about language, creates a verbal tapestry that is depicted as a landscape of words engaging images of weaving and reweaving that produce inbetweens and result in an indeterminate narrative. The labyrinthine narrative moves back and forth in time and space, including between life and death, producing multiple meanings. All these questions are exemplified by close readings of the text (from Latin texere – “to weave”). The visual source of Sokolov’s novel is Pieter Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow, represented as an ekphrasis; the painting serves as the primary source of the visual arts in Between Dog and Wolf. Other important topics are parody and intertextuality. (For a plot synopsis of Between Dog and Wolf, please consult the introduction.)

ТАК СУДЬБА СТУЧИТСЯ В ДВЕРЬ: “ЖИРНАЯ И БЕДНАЯ КУХНИ” ПИТЕРА БРЕЙГЕЛЯ СТАРШЕГО КАК МЕТАФОРА СОЦИАЛЬНОЙ МОБИЛЬНОСТИ

The engravings "The Fat Kitchen" and "The Thin Kitchen" (1563), based on drawings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (circa 1525-1569), immediately became very popular in the Netherlands and remained popular throughout the second half of the 16th and the first half of the 17th centuries. They were copied and served as a source of inspiration; their composition and individual motives were borrowed both in graphics and in painting. The secret of their success was a combination of an original and vivid artistic program with already known motives, tackling urgent problems of society alongside with scenes from the everyday life of peasants and ordinary townspeople that were growing ever more popular then. In this article, I show that the iconographic analysis of engravings based on drawings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder enables us to interpret them as a metaphor for social mobility. The artist shows us how a person's actions affect his social status. The engravings were designed both for those who could identify themselves with those depicted (wealthy peasants or artisans), and for those who belonged to the new bourgeois elite of the Netherlands. By placing “The Fat Kitchen” and “The Thin Kitchen” in the context of the contemporary and subsequent visual tradition and identifying iconographic borrowings, allusions and innovations, it is possible to clarify the form in which the the mid-16th century Netherlandish art expressed the values and norms of the emerging middle class.

Collins, Bruegel, and the Games They Play.

William Collins and Pieter Bruegel the Elder in their respective paintings, "Happy as a King" and "Children's Games" show children playing outdoors. The types of injuries these children could sustain in the 16th and 19th centuries are contrasted with sports related pediatric fractures in the present day.