Bruegel's Later Peasant Paintings Take Heart…
Chapter Three: “Feast your eyes, Feast your mind”: Bruegel’s later Peasant Paintings Take heart…do your best, that we may reach our target: that they (Italians) may no longer say in their speech that Flemish painters can make no figures. -Karel van Mander, Den Grondt der Edel Vry Schilder-const215 [I]n this mortal life, wandering from God, if we wish to return to our native country where we can be blessed we should use this world and not enjoy it, so that the “invisible things” of God “being understood by the things that are made” may be seen, that is, that by means of corporal and temporal things we may comprehend the eternal and spiritual. -St. Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana I. In the following, I examine three paintings by Bruegel made in the last years of his life,1568-1569, all of which are now in Vienna: Peasant Wedding Banquet, Peasant Dance, and Peasant and Nest Robber. Comparable to the way in which members of the Pléiade program or rederijkers, such as Jan van der Noot and Lucas de Heere, advocated the cultivation of the vernacular language by incorporating the style and form of Latin, French or Italian literature, as well as translating texts from classical Antiquity, I show how Bruegel’s monumental paintings of peasants reveal a similar agenda for what I have termed a “visual vernacular.” Rather than this mode of painting being dependent on the resolute imitation of nature, rejecting any idealization of figures, I will show how Bruegel advocates for the incorporation of classicist, Italianate visual concepts and pictorial elements into detailed images of local custom.
[Show full text]