Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s winter landscapes were the first snowscapes depicted in European art. In Hunters in the Snow, there are figures skating on frozen rivers, playing early versions of ice hockey and some people even trying to catch birds. They seem to be making the most of the freezing weather and having a lot of fun - but that might not be the whole picture. For the artist and the ordinary people in Bruegel’s works, these images weren’t just about having an enjoyable winter, this cold weather would have been scary and threatening to their very existence. When these paintings were made, Europe was living through a period of intense climate change now known as the “Little Ice Age.” The term was first used in 1939 to describe a period of 4 thousand years, but it’s since been narrowed down to identify a period of intense cooling between roughly 1400 and 1850. Within this timeframe, many say the 1560s was the first decade of extreme weather, and the winter of 1564–65 is said to be the coldest winter of the century. Hunters in the Snow and Bruegel’s other famous snow scenes—including “Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap” and “The Census at Bethlehem” were all painted around that freezing winter. The theologian Johannes Molanus recorded that winter as being “harsh beyond measure”.
During the 1560s, food shortages were almost yearly and there were riots and illness throughout Europe. Because most people were still extremely religious, many thought the destruction of their crops or the death of their children were punishments from God - and some blamed witchcraft for their terrible luck. Over 30 years later, King James I’s treatise on witchcraft, Demonology, mentioned the use of magic to make the weather worse. In Hunters in the Snow we can see some of this hardship. Three men and their dogs are trudging home from a hunting expedition - they’re soggy, exhausted, and hunched against the cold. Their body language gives us a really good idea of how they’re feeling both emotionally and temperature-wise.
Very little is known about Pieter Bruegel the Elder and his background. One of his biographers assumed he came from a peasant background which would justify his fascination with peasant life and why there are so many ordinary people in his work. More recent scholars believe Bruegel was “a townsman and a highly educated one” and that he would have moved in highly educated circles. Although this is likely it would seem that "he hadn’t mastered Latin", and he relied on other people to add the Latin captions to some of his drawings. It’s thought he began his artistic training around 1545, when he was in his early twenties - and after 6 years of being an apprentice, he became a master painter and he joined the artist’s union, the guild of St Luke in Antwerp. Not long after becoming a master artist, Bruegel took a journey across Italy to study the masters of the Italian Renaissance, which was a fairly common excursion for Northern Renaissance artists. It seems as though he wasn’t impressed by their dramatic scenes, idealised figures and their love of classical architecture. However, on his journey home, Bruegel took a route back through the alps and these incredible mountains seemed to impress him a lot more. After Bruegel’s death in 1604, the biographer, Van Mander wrote “While he visited the Alps, he had swallowed all the mountains and the cliffs, and, upon coming home, he had spit them forth upon his canvas and panels.” Whilst on the road, Bruegel did a lot of drawings and sketches which he used for later paintings and from this moment on, nature and man’s relationship with it seemed to fascinate him. This influence can be seen in Hunters in the Snow where Bruegel has painted alpine mountains in the background. The low countries are very flat so Bruegel has invented these peaks to make the composition seem more dramatic.
Happy New Year and welcome back to my channel. I'm Georgina and this is Art History Girl.
Today we're talking about the mini ice age that happened in 16th century Europe and how Bruegel,
a Flemish artist, reacted to this crazy weather and basically invented the idea of a white Christmas
or a winter landscape in art. And when you see one, you can't help feeling festive. I'm sure
you'll have seen Bruegel's winter landscapes on plenty of Christmas cards. In Hunters in the Snow
there are figures skating on frozen rivers, playing early versions of ice hockey and some
people even trying to catch birds. They seem to be making the most of the freezing winter
and having a lot of fun. But that might not be the whole picture. For the artist and the ordinary
people living in Bruegel's works, these images weren't just about having an enjoyable winter.
This cold weather would have been scary and threatening to their very existence.
When these paintings were made, Europe was living through a period of intense climate change,
now known as the Little Ice Age. The term was first used in 1939 to describe a period of roughly
4,000 years, but it's since been narrowed down to identify a period of intense cooling between
roughly 400 and 1850. Within this time frame, many say the 1560s was the first decade of extreme
weather and the winter of 1564-5 is said to be the coolest winter of the century. So absolutely
freezing! Hunters in the Snow and Bruegel's other famous snow scenes were all painted around that
freezing winter. The theologian Johannes Molanus recorded that winter as being harsh beyond measure
and it was a time of terrible flooding in the region of Brabant where it's thought Bruegel
was born. He wrote about paupers getting frostbite and losing noses and even hands to the
cold and birds falling dead from the sky. During the 16th century, locals were able to open rent-free
marketplaces on frozen rivers. The 17th century English diarist John Evelyn wrote that when the
Thames froze over, people treated it as a carnival of winter and in this painting you can see what
Evelyn means. There are fashionable dandies gliding across the solid river while there are
visiting booths and tents set up and children playing ball games in the foreground. But for
Bruegel and his contemporaries, it was a difficult time as well. During the 1560s, food shortages
were almost yearly and there were riots and illnesses throughout Europe. Because most people
were still extremely religious, many thought the destruction of their crops or the death of their
children were punishments from God and some blamed witchcraft for their terrible luck. Over 30 years
later, King James I's treatise on witchcraft mentioned the use of magic to make the weather
worse. In Hunters in the Snow, we can see some of this hardship. Three men and their dogs are trudging
home from a hunting expedition. They're soggy, exhausted and hunched against the cold. Their body
language gives us a really good idea of how they're feeling both emotionally and temperature-wise.
The viewer is also looking over their shoulder, seeing the view as they see it, having returned
from their hunt and following in their snowy footprints. As they reach the edge of the hill,
we catch a glimpse of the winter wonderland in the valley below them. The merchant Nicolaus
von Himmlich commissioned hunters as part of a sequence of six panels about the seasons to hang
in the dining room of his home near Antwerp. Each painting illustrates two months of the year,
although only four of the paintings in the group survive today. Hunters is meant to illustrate the
mid-winter months of December and January and all the others show ordinary people involved in all
kinds of agricultural work, so mostly planting and harvesting. But Hunters creates a pause in the
series. It's one that reflects the winter holiday Flemish communities took when there was no work
for farmhands or labourers. The human figures are frozen both by the weather and by the slow pace of
the agricultural off-season. We see this reflected in the hunters too. They've trekked out into the
woods to catch some food, only to return with one small scrawny fox. There's also a stooped figure
carrying brittle firewood over a bridge. This person is thought to be a mockery of the women in
on their heads in the warm summer months of June and July, and the contrast shows how barren the
winter months really are. In Hunters, Bruegel's subjects are adapting. This was the coldest winter
they'd ever seen, but they're still managing to find joy from the bitterly cold environment.
And similarly, Bruegel has found beauty in this scene, even though it would seem like a very
strange subject matter at the time, to show a community struggling for food and trying to stay
warm. Very little is known about Peter Bruegel the Elder and his origin. One of his biographers
assumed he came from a peasant background, which would justify his fascination with peasant life
and why there are so many ordinary people in his work. More recent scholars believe Bruegel was a
and that he would have moved in humanist society. Although this is likely, it would seem that he
hadn't mastered Latin and he relied on other people to add the Latin captions to some of his
drawings. It's thought he began his artistic training around 1545, when he was in his early
20s, and after six years of being an apprentice, he became a master painter and he joined the
in Antwerp. Not long after becoming a master painter, Bruegel took a journey across Italy
to study the masters of the Italian Renaissance, which was a fairly common excursion for northern
Renaissance artists. His trip lasted two years in total. He spent time in Rome and explored parts
of southern Italy. But unlike his contemporaries, Bruegel was unmoved by the work of Raphael,
Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. It seems as though he wasn't impressed by their dramatic
scenes, idealized figures and their love of classical architecture. But on his journey home,
Bruegel took a route back through the Alps, and these incredible mountains seem to impress him
a lot more. After Bruegel's death, the biographer van Mander wrote, while he visited the Alps,
he had swallowed all the mountains and the cliffs, and upon coming home, he had spit them
forth upon his canvas and panels. Whilst on the road, Bruegel did a lot of drawings and sketches,
which he used for later paintings, and from this moment on, nature and man's relationship with it
seemed to fascinate him. This influence can also be seen in Hunters in the Snow, where Bruegel has
painted alpine mountains in the background. Now, the lower countries like Flanders were very flat,
so Bruegel has invented these peaks to make the composition seem more dramatic. When he returned
to Antwerp in 1555, it was his mass-produced engravings which started to take off. A set of
twelve prints, known as the Large Landscapes, first made Bruegel famous, and because it was a series,
they were popular and appealed to collectors. Antwerp was the centre of printing in the Northern
Renaissance, and Bruegel was working for Hieronymus Kloch, one of the most important
print publishers at the time. He continued to design prints for Kloch, but a few years after
returning from Italy, he also started painting, and perhaps unsurprisingly, landscape became a
huge part of his style. Bruegel also started setting scenes in the landscapes, but they were
very small and looked like the figures had been included almost by accident, as though he was
painting a landscape and they just happened to be there. Here we can see Christ with his disciples,
but the figure on the left is dominated by the huge landscape, and in Landscape with the Fall
of Icarus, all you can see of the boy is a leg and a half, lost in a coastal landscape. In this
painting, Mary and Joseph can be seen trudging through an enormous landscape, and they look
extremely insignificant. The Italians would have made any of these events the main subject
of their paintings, glorified them and made them look very obviously special, but Bruegel's works
completely reject the Italian approach. As you can see in Census of Bethlehem, the Holy Family
are just insignificant figures in a Flemish village. Bruegel painted snow scenes five times
after the winter of 1565, and to our modern eyes it doesn't seem like a radical move, but no one had
really painted properly snowy landscapes before him. There are only two known earlier examples.
One is a fresco of January in Trent in Italy. It was painted in 1405 by an unknown artist,
and it shows some wealthy people having a snowball fight. Then in the Book of Hours by
the Limbourg brothers, there's a picture for February showing a snowy scene with people
sheltering from the cold, and a man driving a donkey up the hill. One article I read suggested
Bruegel is the J.M.W. Turner of snow, and I like to think he did for snow what Constable did for clouds.
He has the ability to recreate snow in all its different forms, with various textures. In his
first attempt at translating snow in paint, Bruegel almost entirely obscures Mary, Joseph, and the
infant Jesus with a blizzard, but he captures weightlessness, the magical quality of snow,
surprisingly well as it falls on the Holy Family. Similarly, if you look at the hunter's footprints,
you can feel the weight of the man closest to us as he sinks into the snow. He also applied the
snowballs in Census at Bethlehem after the painting had dried, so they stuck out off the canvas and were
three-dimensional. After Bruegel's snowscapes were so successful, a whole tradition emerged in Dutch
art of painting snowscapes and ice bears, and it lasted for several centuries. So we've discussed
that Bruegel loved landscapes, but what's clear from his work is that he was also fascinated by
people. That can be seen in Census at Bethlehem, where we see Mary and Joseph arriving in Bethlehem
just before Christ is born. The scene takes its inspiration from a passage in Saint Luke's Gospel
which describes Joseph's return to his home city to pay tax to the Holy Roman Emperor.
They went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed, everyone into his
own city. And Joseph also went unto Judea, unto the city of David which is called Bethlehem,
to be taxed with Mary, his espoused wife, being great with child. So here again it's not obvious
that Mary and Joseph are the main characters because the painting is so covered in people.
There's a group killing a pig, walkers on the ice, and children even having a snowball fight.
Bruegel has transposed the scene into a 16th century Flanders village, and this might have
helped people understand the story better because they'd be able to see the story taking place in
familiar surroundings. And everywhere you look a new scene emerges in this painting and it's such
a cross-section of life. Something which would have also been familiar to a contemporary audience
is the fact that Mary and Joseph had to pay tax. Philip II of Spain ruled over the Low Countries
and he was famous for heavy taxes and waging wars which cost a lot of money to fund. And you can
see his flag hanging above the building in the painting. So the census is a cleverly chosen and
very relevant subject for the Flemish people. And also choosing to include a religious subject was
quite a big statement because Flanders had been in religious turmoil for over 10 years.
Philip II was a Catholic and he was intent on stamping out the Protestant Reformation which
was a very prevalent movement in Flanders. Because there were a lot of executions, because
obviously he was trying to stamp out the Protestants, there was also a high degree of fear within
society and Bruegel often shows gallows in his work which suggests they were part of everyday life.
In Massacre of the Innocents, another of his winter snowscapes, Bruegel has chosen to depict
the biblical scene where Herod orders all children under two years old, actually I think it's boys
under two years old, to be killed in an attempt to eliminate Christ before he becomes a threat.
And in this image Bruegel has cast the soldiers as Spanish in recognisable black armour with spears.
So he's clearly trying to make a comment about Philip II needlessly slaughtering innocent
Protestants. Just to link these two paintings back to snow, I think Bruegel really makes these
scenes feel relevant and relatable to people living at the same time as him. They've all lived
through such difficult winters so these paintings really convey that uncertainty and threat to life
which would have been associated with the snow. So there you go, I hope you enjoyed that video on
Bruegel and winter landscapes. He pretty much invented white Christmases so I think we've got a lot
to thank him for. And I also just wanted to mention before I go that, something else I
didn't have space to include, if you couldn't afford to pay your taxes you often were made to
pay through livestock so it's thought that the pig being slaughtered here was a form of payment in
Flanders. So yes, I hope you've enjoyed it and I hope you haven't had snow like us recently.
In Glasgow we had snow last week and it was really cold and actually we didn't even have any water
for a day because our pipes froze. Obviously that's nothing compared to how cold Bruegel and
all of his friends must have been. So anyway, thank you very much for watching, I'll see you again soon.
