Paradoxia epidemica in the art of Pieter Bruegel the Elder : an investigation into sixteenth-century parody (original) (raw)
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Pictorial Satire & Ironic Inversion: Pieter Bruegel's Battle of Piggy Banks & Strong Boxes
Pi AT Br Sr F-rh Thi soc anl Rrr by I Pieter Bruegel, after, Battle between tlte Pig Banbs and Strong Boxes, r;7os, cngravin g (photo: Brussels, Koninkliik Bibliotheck). Pictoria/ Sdrire, Ironic Inaersion, and ldeo/ogia/ Conflict r57 An earlier examples would be the woodcut showing the battle between the Israelites and Philistines from Le Mer des hystoires (fig. r), first published at Paris in 1488. We find some of these pictorial qualities in the scenes of military action that decorate the Wondrous Wars of the Emperor Mdximilian that was published at Antwerp around ryr9, and rhe Chronicle of Holland, Zeeland and Friesland, the so-called 'Diuisie'chronicle, that appeared wo years earlier at Leyden (fig. ).t The same holds for rhe Cbronicle of Flanders, issued at Antwerp in r53r, a luxury publication from which a full page with text and illustration is shown to emphasize the close associations between this sort of martial imagery and the context of elite regional histories ( .' These conventions were proper not only to book illustration but also to tapestries, which displayed on a vast scale similar congested fields of combatants from the Tiojan war, the campaigns of Caesar and Alexander, encounters from of the Old Testament, and more recent European conflicts.'
Pi AT Br Sr F-rh Thi soc anl Rrr by I Pieter Bruegel, after, Battle between tlte Pig Banbs and Strong Boxes, r;7os, cngravin g (photo: Brussels, Koninkliik Bibliotheck). Pictoria/ Sdrire, Ironic Inaersion, and ldeo/ogia/ Conflict r57 An earlier examples would be the woodcut showing the battle between the Israelites and Philistines from Le Mer des hystoires (fig. r), first published at Paris in 1488. We find some of these pictorial qualities in the scenes of military action that decorate the Wondrous Wars of the Emperor Mdximilian that was published at Antwerp around ryr9, and rhe Chronicle of Holland, Zeeland and Friesland, the so-called 'Diuisie'chronicle, that appeared wo years earlier at Leyden (fig. ).t The same holds for rhe Cbronicle of Flanders, issued at Antwerp in r53r, a luxury publication from which a full page with text and illustration is shown to emphasize the close associations between this sort of martial imagery and the context of elite regional histories ( .' These conventions were proper not only to book illustration but also to tapestries, which displayed on a vast scale similar congested fields of combatants from the Tiojan war, the campaigns of Caesar and Alexander, encounters from of the Old Testament, and more recent European conflicts.'
The battle of changing times : picaresque parodies from Bruegel to Grosz
1999
This study focuses on Bruegel's parodic legacy in the picaresque tradition. It is based, on the one hand, on visual rhetoric, visual parody, and the poetics of epideictic rhetoric; and, on the other, on the interaction between epideictic rhetoric's salient features and the Bruegelian themes of camivalisation, the satirising of human folly, and the ontic order of the World Upside Down topos as organising principles. The relationships between the above themes are chronologically traced in various disguises in pictures by representative picaresque artists from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries: i.e., in Bruegel, Steen, Hogarth, Daumier, and Grosz. Each of these picaresque artists battled with their own times, parodying the paradigmatic targets of the high mode, in both social and genre hierarchy, and in doing so revealed the complexities of the above themes at work within an ever changing context-bound rhetoricity.
Pieter Bruegel's Historical Imagination
2016
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/or proto-ethnographer. In Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination, 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. Bruegel’s unique pictorial style and his manipulation of traditional iconographies picture the complex relations among classical antiquity, local history, and art history unique to this moment. An important reassessment of Renaissance attitudes toward history and of 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 Netherlandish art history.
Reforming Bruegel: Between the Margins of Morality and the Confines of Comedy
2012
In this thesis, I explore a pair of genre prints designed by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Thin Kitchen and The Fat Kitchen. Each print depicts a domestic scene that takes place in the kitchen. A theme of impoverishment runs through The Thin Kitchen, while in The Fat Kitchen the setting depicts gluttony and overabundance. These prints are usually discussed in a moralizing context by scholars, and are considered critiques of avarice. However, this thesis will argue that these prints should be understood as allegories of the symbolic battle between Carnival and Lent. I will develop this idea further and argue that Bruegel created these images within the comic mode of humanist wit. Once we understand these prints as operating in the comic mode of humanist wit, we will be better able to understand how they were perceived and interpreted by their original audience.
For an artist whose known surviving paintings number less than fifty, the complexity and diversity of the works of Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525/30-1569) is breathtaking. These works range from biblical narratives and “moralizing” allegories of epic proportions to panoramic landscapes and rustic celebrations animated with peasants. They have fascinated many art historians who have bestowed on Bruegel many labels: for instance, Bruegel le drôle, Peasant Bruegel, Bruegel le philosophe, or Bruegel the pictorial novelist. This paper examines yet another side of Bruegel: that of the realist. Could Bruegel be considered a Realist of similar persuasion as painters who represent 19th-century French Realism, an art movement that blossomed 300 years later? How much of Bruegel’s artwork anticipated the tendencies of this art movement?