Word: bruegels
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...Bruegel makes one peer down through winter dusk like some half-frozen bird upon the wing. He gives the March floods room to rise, roaring about the dikes of Flanders in time of carnival and willow pruning on the dark, hard-budded land. He shows the earth veiled in blue boundlessness at haying time. Then in the fall comes the sacrifice of her apples, her grapes and human fruits as well. The herd plods home. A body dangles from a gibbet on a hill. Reality was his subject, and truth his object. Yet these paintings are not finickily meticulous...
Even in his own day, Bruegel must have been considered a superb technician, capable of representing anything. Foreground details exist down to the last bramble on a bush, while in the distance a minuscule brush stroke may distinctly show a man walking or working underneath a tree. Bruegel began with ships' timbers of seasoned oak. He set the planks edge to edge, smoothed them, and then brushed on a white gesso base. He drew his composition on the gesso in gray chalk. That done, he would start painting in egg tempera, thinly and swiftly. His first layers of color...
Some scholars believe Bruegel had no interest in or involvement with religion and politics. What prompts them, perhaps, is an unspoken feeling that "artists should be above" such touchy matters. The visual evidence is overwhelming, though, that Bruegel did involve himself. This is not to say that he was a Protestant, or even a devout Christian. Was he a patriotic Lowlander unalterably opposed to Spanish rule? Nobody knows. Bruegel's religious and political paintings simply point to things manifestly horrible and wrong in his own age-and every...
...Bruegel's most overtly political pictures are disguised by their ostensible subjects: The Massacre of the Innocents, The Sermon of Saint John the Baptist, The Road to Calvary, and The Conversion of Saint Paul. Safe themes-but not as handled by Bruegel. He trundled the terrible urgency of the Bible, like a siege tower, straight up against contemporary walls. His Massacre, for instance, takes place in a Flemish village of his own day. Walloon redcoats butcher baby after baby on the shining snow. Mothers and fathers pray, scream, struggle and reach out in vain. Spain's notorious "Edict...
...matter of fact, all Bruegel's art concerns itself with the changeless and the immediate at the same time. His Dulle Griet is nightmare, which presides, now and forever, in cellars of human sleep. He painted The Tower of Babel as an allegory of old Antwerp, but young Manhattan's towers might as well have been meant. Two Monkeys may be seen as just a humanist's sympathy for the misery of chained animals -or as a symbolist's protest against the plight of the Flemish provinces under the rule of Spain...