Word: foregrounded
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...Artists before him, in other centuries and other countries, came out of the countryside to paint vignettes of their memories, almost obsequiously, in the background of their portraits of princes or courtiers, martyrs or saints. Bruegel made the unprideful countryside central, something that was not merely an area for foreground drama but was itself an event...
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...
...foreground, weary pikemen trudge downhill with their discouraged hounds. One man carries a dead fox, symbolically, perhaps. The rebel emblem was a foxtail. But then again, fox pelts are thickest and glossiest in winter; that is the time to take them, hunters say. In the middle distance, a house burns out. Neighbors come running with buckets and ladders, trying to help. However, the whole earth is cold, like a dead body in its winding sheet of snow. The water mill hangs stiff with icicles. The rivers wait, as if struck by some icy thought. A woman with fagots...
...hope appears to balance, blindfold and invisible, upon a shaky raft. Something of that sort, surely, is implied by the accumulation of incidents in Bruegel's Dark Day. But there is realism in it too. That foreground bank of earth, where the peasants work, somehow seems much earthier than any other in world...
...SECOND episode's equally long tracks begin to place dark foreground objects before the characters, creating a more typical Ophuls space, even as we move from a light comedy (the soldier and the whore) toward more serious affairs. The third is a brilliantly played will-he-or-won't-he-fall skit, full of characters walking to and from each other through luxurious rooms, and using astounding angled shots and hard cuts. The fourth episode involves us in a more deeply felt assignation-and so the drama proceeds. Walbrook's appearances becoming rarer and shorter...