Bruegel: sophistication, awareness and pictorial rebellion

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Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Art Discourse in the Sixteenth-Century Netherlands

Todd M. Richardson

Everybody loves Bruegel.  His art seems so accessible and clear.  Bruegel did not actually invent the familiar art categories of landscape and genre pictures – in his case, focusing on peasants, often with an eye for droll detail – but he certainly established those popular images in mid-16th-century Flanders, and he spawned a host of imitators, including his own painter sons.  Yet a rash of recent books on the artist has striven to show Bruegel's sophistication and self-awareness (Ashgate itself just issued Margaret Sullivan's Bruegel and the Creative Process, 1559-1563, focusing on not only Bruegel's relation to Bosch but also his works for collectors).

Now Todd Richardson, professor at the University of Memphis, joins the ranks of Bruegel interpreters.  He sticks close to genre works, especially later works, as he addresses the artist's relation to contemporaries in both Flanders and France, painting and poetry.   He begins with the premise that art emerges from earlier art, so Bruegel's inventiveness lies chiefly in creative variation on the 'art discourse' of the title.  Specifically, Richardson notes how Bruegel engages in a subtle dialogue with recent Renaissance art from Italy, advancing his own theory through self-conscious practice of adaptation and resistance.  In the process, a Dutch vernacular imagery emerges as a separate but equal pictorial formula of forms and, especially, rustic subjects. 

The presentation of rural figures at the heroic scale of religious figures was indeed a pictorial rebellion, or at least a clever revision, of norms.  Richardson draws the analogy from contemporary literature of the Pléiade poets in France, led by Ronsard, who actively campaigned for use of French rather than literary Latin. This, he argues, was equivalent to Bruegel's choice of local traditions, including Bosch, as well as local settings and peasant actors. 

Richardson also invokes Erasmus' sophisticated use of ancient models, especially the symposium tradition, for moral and religious purposes in order to claim a similar investment by both connoisseurs and art theorists of Bruegel's day concerning appropriate pictorial presentation.  And in a concluding anecdote, when Bruegel allegedly sent-up an elaborately painted architectural perspective by his younger contemporary, Hans Vredeman de Vries, with the addition of a soiled peasant, Richardson asks anew how Bruegel could leave his own mark on, and offer his cultural challenge to, the dominant models of high art-making in his own time.  Laughter breaks in, to compete with seriousness, thus earning its own response and building its own complementary reputation.

The chosen test cases feature well-known, later Bruegel peasant pictures: Peasant Wedding Banquet, Peasant Dance, and Peasant and Nest-Robber (all in Vienna), as well as a lone print design, Festival of Fools, which invokes the local vernacular of urban rhetorician satires (rederijkerspelen) before fantasy architecture derived from Renaissance models.  In general, Richardson does not claim that Bruegel expressly uses Italian influence.  Instead, he argues that Bruegel transmutes figure models and religious compositions by the most famous Italian painters, Raphael and Leonardo, for works such as the Peasant Wedding Banquet, thereby achieving both sturdiness and clarity of figure movement for his peasants. 

Of course, as Richardson acknowledges, other Flemish contemporaries, such as Frans Floris, more freely adopted both the forms and themes of Italian art.  He also recalls that the very concepts of landscape and genre were not yet established in art production in Bruegel's Antwerp, so that the depiction of a biblical scene within a snow-covered Brabant village, seemingly mixing sacred with secular, demands careful scrutiny and alters the terms of pictorial – and religious – seriousness.  This mixture of pleasure and piety crystallizes in Bruegel around the annual saint's day, kermis, celebrations depicted in the Peasant Dance.  Both visual and moral analyses come into play in seeking any balance, before such a painting, of 'reverence and revelry.'

Such close analysis of particular works is the chief delight of Richardson's book.  Whether the explicit use of individual Italian models or French poetry debates (a thoughtful new analogy) had any direct influence on Bruegel will have to be test-driven by scholars. (Some of the Italian figures have been invoked before, including Michelangelo, by Carl Stridbeck and Jürgen Müller.)  Certainly the foreign models that Bruegel adapts reveal the subtlety of his assimilation of such dignified figures into peasant roles.   Richardson's essay, while not comprehensive in its view of the artist's achievement, goes far towards explaining the real power and thoughtfulness, as well as the deliberate self-consciousness, which lie behind his seeming amusements.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Art Discourse in the Sixteenth-Century Netherlands by Todd M. Richardson is published by Ashgate,  2011. 243 pp., 8 colour and 86 mono illus. ISBN 978-0-7546-6816-9