The art Bruegel produced between 1559 and 1563 presents a rare opportunity to investigate a concentrated period of productivity by one of the world's greatest artists. In this brief period Bruegel produced some of his most original works-the first pictorial collection of contemporary customs in Carnival and Lent, the first painting with children's activities as its subject in Children's Games, the first large-scale painting of a proverb collection, the unique and enigmatic Dulle Griet (Mad Meg), and the extraordinary Triumph of Death, his disturbing vision of men and women fighting off the onslaught of death. In this comprehensive study, Margaret A. Sullivan accounts for this burst of creativity, its intensity, innovation and brevity, by taking all aspects of the creative process into consideration-from the technical demands of picture-making to the constraints imposed by the dangerous religious and political situation.

Barbara Kaminska’s Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Religious Art for the Urban Community is the first book-length study focusing on religious paintings by one of the most captivating Netherlandish artists, long celebrated for his secular imagery. In a period marked by a profound religious, economic, and cultural transformation, Bruegel offered his sophisticated urban audience complex biblical images that required an engaged, active viewing, not only sparking learned dinner conversations, but facilitating the negotiation of values seen as critical to maintaining a harmonious society. By considering the novelty of Bruegel’s panels used in convivia alongside his small, intimate grisaille compositions, this study ultimately shows that Bruegel renewed the idiom of religious painting, successfully preserving its ritualistic and meditative functions.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Religion offers new insight into the religious dimension of Bruegel’s art. With a number of highly original and thorough case studies, the volume illuminates Bruegel’s inventive and multifaceted engagement with the contemporary religious concepts and practices of his day and age. Religion remains a vital question in the life and career of Bruegel, because it was so long believed to be more or less absent from his work. As a pioneer of the new genres of landscape and peasant scenes, Bruegel was heralded as a ground-breaking “secular” painter. This volume highlights the most recent scholarship on the artist, offering a much more nuanced portrait of Bruegel’s engagement with the dynamic religious landscape of the mid-sixteenth century. Contributors are: Jessica Buskirk, Ralph Dekoninck, Bertram Kaschek, Walter S. Melion, Jürgen Müller, Anna Pawlak, Gerd Schwerhoff, Larry Silver, and Michel Weemans.

A Handbook to the Reception of Classical Mythology presents a collection of essays that explore a wide variety of aspects of Greek and Roman myths and their critical reception from antiquity to the present day. Reveals the importance of mythography to the survival, dissemination, and popularization of classical myth from the ancient world to the present day Features chronologically organized essays that address different sets of myths that were important in each historical era, along with their thematic relevance Features chronologically organized essays that address different sets of myths that were important in each historical era, along with their thematic relevance Offers a series of carefully selected in-depth readings, including both popular and less well-known examples

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.

Claudia Goldstein mines a rich, interdisciplinary mix of sources to shed new light on the cultural history of sixteenth-century Antwerp. Recontextualizing some of Bruegel's work within the cultural nexus of the dining room, she offers a critical and entirely original examination of the function of early modern images for the people who owned and viewed them.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Art Discourse in the Sixteenth-Century Netherlands examines Bruegel's later paintings in the context of two contemporary discourses-art theoretical and convivial. Taking a multi-disciplinary approach, the author analyzes a variety of images, texts and historical records to offer a broader understanding of not only the artist, but also of the vibrant artistic dialogue occurring in the Netherlands during the sixteenth century.