BRUEGELIAN MYTHS

CHAPTER 1.

The general public's perception of the artist changes frequently over time. Nearly five centuries separate us from Bruegel the Elder. In the early 21st century, many still believe him to be a painter of popular, peasant or village scenes.

Genre scenes are what come to mind most frequently when we think of Bruegel's work, as in this detail from The Census at Bethlehem where the inhabitants of a Brabant village go about their daily life on the night before Christmas.

While the "Bruegel the Peasant" myth has long since been disproved by historians, it persists in the minds of the general public. The number of Bruegel's works which fit this traditional image of "Bruegel the Peasant" is, however, relatively limited in comparison to the size of the myth.

Several historical reasons explain this lasting myth.
This first is the description published by Bruegel's first biographer, Karel van Mander. In his famous Schilder-Boeck, published in 1604, the writer describes Bruegel as being born "among the peasants".

"Accompanied by Franckert, Bruegel liked to visit the peasants, for weddings or fairs. The two men would dress as peasants and, like the other guests, would take presents and behave like they were part of the family or were guests of the bride or groom. Bruegel entertained himself watching the peasants' morals, their table manners, their dances, their games, their ways of courtship, and other entertaining things that they would indulge in, and that the painter knew how to reproduce, with much sensitivity and humour. »

This description of the painter would greatly influence the view that enthusiasts and art historians would hold of him over the following centuries.

The second key explanation for this myth's long-standing nature is found in the pictorial output of his oldest son, Pieter Brueghel the Younger. He had already reproduced a significant number of his father's paintings, but nearly all of them had peasant life as a dominant theme.

These copies later created considerable confusion in the perception of the Flemish master's work – even more so given that, already in his lifetime, Bruegel the Elder's works were part of private European collections that were relatively inaccessible to the public. The general public could only come to learn about his work through the copies on the market at the time.

Much has been written about this perception of the artist.

Experts are often at odds over one question: can this be interpreted as a satirical view of the peasant world, a distanced description or is it possible to see it as a view influenced by humanism?

While satirical representation of peasant life was a popular genre in the 16th century in Germany and the Netherlands, this idea has now been dismissed as Bruegel does not take a disdainful or mocking stance in his work. Whilst his work does sometimes have hints of irony, it shows above all an intrinsic love for these scenes of peasant life which he paints with pleasure and humour. Like, for example, his famous cycle of the seasons, including The Harvesters, now held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Over the last decades, this issue has also been the subject of great debate between specialists. Indeed, Manfred Sellink, author of a recent monograph about Bruegel and expert on his drawings, asked himself "to what extent can we see in Bruegel's work allusions to contemporary political and religious events, hidden to a greater or lesser extent?”

Numerous experts think Bruegel intended to use his work to comment on the events of his time. Whilst this interpretation is supported by the complexity of the Flemish master's work, it must be approached with care as there are no sources to prove this thesis.

Such is the case for his Massacre of the Innocents. Some authors see his soldiers dressed in red as references to the Spanish troops of the Duke of Alba or the soldiers of the regent Margaret of Parma whose objective was to restore calm following the iconoclastic attacks in 1566 and the subsequent heretical revolts.

As Manfred Sellink explains "the turbulent political and religious situation in the Low Countries in the 1560s and, in particular, the merciless response received by those who dared voice rebellious opinions, must have generally speaking encouraged caution in an artisan whose career depending on contacts with the ruling and financial elite, and he was not short of commissions: he certainly was not encouraged to make comment, hidden or not, on the events of the time. It would be surprising to find critical allusions in direct contradiction to the established order in works belonging to painters such as Jonghelink, Noirot and certainly the Cardinal de Granvelle."

This was even more true for prints whose dissemination was closely supervised by the authorities.