Sunday, June 29, 2014

Pieter Bruegel The Elder And His Paintings

By Darren Hartley


Pieter Bruegel the Elder was astonishingly independent of the dominant artistic interests during his time, despite his taking the requisite journey to Italy for purposes of study. He deliberately revived the late Gothic style of Hieronymus Bosch as the point of departure from Italian mannerism for his own highly complex and original art.

While Karel van Mander, a Dutch biographer, claims that Pieter Bruegel the Elder was born in a town of the same name near Breda, most recent authorities follow the Italian writer Guicciardini in designating Breda itself as the birthplace of Pieter. It is inferred that Pieter was born between 1525 and 1530 on the basis of the fact that Pieter entered the guild of Antwerp painters in 1551.

By way of the Alps, Pieter Bruegel the Elder returned to Antwerp around 1555. This return resulted to a number of exquisite drawings of mountain landscapes. Forming the basis for many of his later paintings, these sketches were not records of actual places but composites made for the investigation of the organic life in forms of nature.

Unlike Big Fish Eat Little Fish, a pen drawing by Pieter Bruegel the Elder in 1557 that carried the name of Hieronymus Bosch, the series Seven Deadly Sins, engraved in 1558, carried the own signature of Pieter. It was a sign of the increasing importance of Pieter during the time.

The 1959 Combat of Carnival and Lent, one of the earliest signed and dated painting of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the influence of Hieronymus Bosch was still strongly felt. Derivatives from the earlier Dutch master included the high-horizoned landscape, the decorative surface patterning and many of the iconographic details.

The two most phantasmagoric works of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the Dulle Griet and the Triumph of Death were related in conception to his encyclopaedic paintings. Both paintings were presumed to have been executed in 1562. The Tower of Babel of 1563 was the last of the great figurative anthologies by Pieter.




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