Before Bruegel

Peasant festival imagery began in sixteenth-century Nuremberg, when the city played host to a series of religious and secular festivals. The peasant festival images were first produced as woodcut prints in the decade between 1524 and 1535 by Sebald Beham. These peasant festival prints show celebrating in a variety of ways including dancing, eating and drinking, and playing games. In Before Bruegel, Alison Stewart takes a fresh look at these images and explores them within their historical and cultural contexts, including the introduction of the Lutheran Reformation into the town's institutions and the accompanying re-evaluation of the town's popular festivals. Stewart goes beyond the black-and-white approaches of previous interpretations, to examine the festival prints in a more complex manner. In the first publication of its kind, Stewart makes the case for a range of meanings these works held for a sixteenth-century audience and for Beham's pictorial inventiveness and his business savvy. Beham is credited with inventing the subject of peasant festivals in Northern Renaissance art and for creating a market for the subject by the middle of the sixteenth century, with his large-scale woodcuts at Nuremberg and with tiny engravings at Frankfurt. Stewart shows that the market Beham created for prints with the theme of peasant festivals paved the way for Pieter Bruegel's Netherlandish paintings of the same theme, dating but a few years later.

Peasant festival imagery began in sixteenth-century Nuremberg, when the city played host to a series of religious and secular festivals. The peasant festival images were first produced as woodcut prints in the decade between 1524 and 1535 by Sebald Beham. These peasant festival prints show celebrating in a variety of ways including dancing, eating and drinking, and playing games. In Before Bruegel, Alison Stewart takes a fresh look at these images and explores them within their historical and cultural contexts, including the introduction of the Lutheran Reformation into the town's institutions and the accompanying re-evaluation of the town's popular festivals. Stewart goes beyond the black-and-white approaches of previous interpretations, to examine the festival prints in a more complex manner. In the first publication of its kind, Stewart makes the case for a range of meanings these works held for a sixteenth-century audience and for Beham's pictorial inventiveness and his business savvy. Beham is credited with inventing the subject of peasant festivals in Northern Renaissance art and for creating a market for the subject by the middle of the sixteenth century, with his large-scale woodcuts at Nuremberg and with tiny engravings at Frankfurt. Stewart shows that the market Beham created for prints with the theme of peasant festivals paved the way for Pieter Bruegel's Netherlandish paintings of the same theme, dating but a few years later.

A fresh account of the life, ideas, and art of the beloved Northern Renaissance master. In sixteenth-century Northern Europe, during a time of increasing religious and political conflict, Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel explored how people perceived human nature. Bruegel turned his critical eye and peerless paintbrush to mankind’s labors and pleasures, its foibles and rituals of daily life, portraying landscapes, peasant life, and biblical scenes in startling detail. Much like the great humanist scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam, Bruegel questioned how well we really know ourselves and also how we know, or visually read, others. His work often represented mankind’s ignorance and insignificance, emphasizing the futility of ambition and the absurdity of pride. This superbly illustrated volume examines how Bruegel’s art and ideas enabled people to ponder what it meant to be human. Published to coincide with the four-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of Bruegel’s death, it will appeal to all those interested in art and philosophy, the Renaissance, and Flemish painting.

The question of how to understand Bruegel’s art has cast the artist in various guises: as a moralizing satirist, comedic humanist, celebrator of vernacular traditions, and proto-ethnographer. Stephanie Porras reorients these apparently contradictory accounts, arguing that the debate about how to read Bruegel has obscured his pictures’ complex relation to time and history. Rather than viewing Bruegel’s art as simply illustrating the social realities of his day, Porras asserts that Bruegel was an artist deeply concerned with the past. In playing with the boundaries of the familiar and the foreign, history and the present, Bruegel’s images engaged with the fraught question of Netherlandish history in the years just prior to the Dutch Revolt, when imperial, religious, and national identities were increasingly drawn into tension. His pictorial style and his manipulation of traditional iconographies reveal the complex relations, unique to this moment, among classical antiquity, local history, and art history. An important reassessment of Renaissance attitudes toward history and of Renaissance humanism in the Low Countries, this volume traces the emergence of archaeological and anthropological practices in historical thinking, their intersections with artistic production, and the developing concept of local art history.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Art Discourse in the Sixteenth-Century Netherlands examines the later images by Bruegel in the context of two contemporary discourses - art theoretical and convivial. The first concerns the purely visual interactions between artists and artistic practices that unfold in pictures, which often transgress the categorical boundaries modern scholars place on their work, such as sacred and profane, antique and modern, and Italian and Northern. In this context, the images themselves - those of Bruegel, his contemporaries and predecessors - make up the primary source material from which the author argues. The second deals with the dialogue that occurred between viewers in front of pictures and the way in which pictorial strategies facilitated their visual experience and challenged their analytical capabilities. In this regard, the author expands his base of primary sources to include convivial texts, dialogues and correspondences, and texts by rhetoricians and Northern humanists addressing art theoretical issues. Challenging the conventional wisdom that the artist eschewed Italianate influences, this study demonstrates how Bruegel's later peasant paintings reveal a complicated artistic dialogue in which visual concepts and pictorial motifs from Italian and classical ideas are employed for a subject that was increasingly recognized in the sixteenth century as a specifically Northern phenomenon. Similar to the Dutch rhetorician societies and French Pl?de poets who cultivated the vernacular language using classical Latin, the function of this interpictorial discourse, the author argues, was not simply to imitate international trends, a common practice during the period, but to use it to cultivate his own visual vernacular language. Although the focus is primarily on Bruegel's later work, the author's conclusions are applied to sketch a broader understanding of both the artist himself and the vibrant artistic dialogue occurring in the Netherl

Unique survey of best works by16th-century Flemish printmaker presents 64 engravings and one woodcut, each accompanied by an informative essay. Subjects include landscapes, ships and the sea, peasants, humor, and religion.

Known largely for his sweeping landscapes and depictions of rowdy peasant life, Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel was first recognized for his odd, often comic, allegorical engravings. In fact, his paintings only became known after his death. This biography charts Bruegel's life—from his apprenticeship in Brussels and steady work for an Antwerp printer to his renowned landscapes, paintings of peasants, and religious-themed surreal phase. Generously illustrated with examples of Bruegel's work, readers will understand how his legacy inspired so many great artists and filmmakers that followed.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525/30-1569) was a remarkable draftsman and designer of prints as well as a great painter. His independent drawings and designs for engravings and etchings, which were carried out by the leading printmakers of his day, have fascinated scholars and the general public alike since they were created. They have recently been the subject of research that has given rise to a reevaluation of the parameters of Bruegel's oeuvre. The new scholarship has been brought to bear in the texts of the present volume, which accompanies a major exhibition of 140 of Bruegel's prints and drawings to be shown at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, from May to August 2001 and at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from September to December 2001. An international group of experts discusses the new Bruegel who has emerged from recent studies, in essays on the artist's life, his contributions as a draftsman and as a printmaker, the survival of his art, and his relationship to the humanism of his day. They also illuminate his genius in entries on all the works in the exhibition. Every work is illustrated and rich comparative illustrations are included. Provenances an