Bruegel and his oeuvre

Wisdom lies in silence, in the peace of nature, antidote to the wrath and folly of men. The landscapes of Bruegel reflect the immensity of space and time. He wants the landscape to be all-embracing, to reflect the whole world. The plains must stretch to the mountains, the water must blend with the air, the sky must merge with the earth, the seasons must ring their mighty changes in the ever-recurring cycle. He sees the peasants and consciously conform to the pattern of the seasons. He makes them as much creatures of the earth as of the flesh, akin to the world of plants and beasts. Against the background of eternity, he brings to vivid life the day-to-day ploys of puny men, fleetingly alive and disturbed. He depicts the simple life, not out of love for the picturesque, but because he sees in it perhaps the only prospect of happiness. Man feels small, weak, vulnerable. His house is a rat hole, a shelter from the violence of nature and the wickedness of man. Bruegel looks at animals with the eyes of a zoologist and his interest soon turns to friendship. The forms of branches, flowers and shrubs are the fanciful invention of nature. Sketching them, Bruegel enriches his own inventive spirit. His notebook teems with street scenes. To sketch from life is a working principle, a first step towards creation. According to his biographers, he spent many hours among humble folk. Accompanied by his faithful friend, Hans Frankert, he enjoys going to fairs and to village weddings, disguised as a peasant, bearing gifts like the other guests and posing as a kinsman of bride or groom. The pleasure he took in detail led him from intricate treatment to elaborate composition in the monumental. His contemporaries said of him that after swallowing hills and rocks in the course of his travels, on return he spat them out on canvas. Without neglecting the minutest detail, he constantly encompassed nature in all its majesty. He is the painter of crowds, of swarming humanity, of honeycomb compositions built up cell by cell, where man is omnipresent. Bruegel creates a type which is very much his own, uncouth, squat, hefty and earthy. In perfect contrast to the elongated aristocratic figures of teary boots or with the disembodied mystics of El Greco, rounded thighs, rounded chest, rounded gestures, round faces, round cheeks, round eyes. The dullness of life is dispelled by donning the mask of village fairs, of pageants, of mummery, by dizzy dancing and music making. Men seek oblivion in frivolous pleasures. The grimmer the times, the greater the revelry. For Bruegel, the fundamental urge to games and feasting is the deep need in man to cast away care, to return to childhood, to deny his very essence. Games played by children, those diminutive men, often as dull and loutish as their elders, futile pastimes as laughable as those of solemn grown-ups. The windmill game, choosing partners, ride a cock horse, playing at weddings, alley games, balancing, fighting blindfold, jousting, leapfrogging, unseating the rider, blind man's buff, playing at christenings, seesawing, riding pick-a-back, and many other games. The irreverent commoners ape the games of princes, the joustings of their lords and masters. Grown-up games, carnival and lenten joustings mock the buffoonery of the struggle for power. The bitterness of religious quarrels, the fights between fat and lean, between the haves and the have-nots.