This focused volume presents a deep exploration and new interpretations of the winter paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder (ca. 1525-1569). By applying new methodological approaches and interdisciplinary research to these masterpieces of Flemish Renaissance art, including Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap (1565) and The Census at Bethlehem (1566), both at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, the book offers an enhanced understanding of the painter's relationship to his time and the extent to which his winter landscapes were meant to reflect real-life situations. After tracing how these paintings have been understood over time, the essays propose new insights into such issues as whether Bruegel depicts the plight of the local populace during winter and whether The Census at Bethlehem challenges or reaffirms central power structures. Abundantly illustrated, Bruegel's Winter Scenes is both a thorough examination and a celebration of these widely admired images. Distributed for Mercatorfonds.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525/30-1569) was a remarkable draftsman and designer of prints as well as a great painter. His independent drawings and designs for engravings and etchings, which were carried out by the leading printmakers of his day, have fascinated scholars and the general public alike since they were created. They have recently been the subject of research that has given rise to a reevaluation of the parameters of Bruegel's oeuvre. The new scholarship has been brought to bear in the texts of the present volume, which accompanies a major exhibition of 140 of Bruegel's prints and drawings to be shown at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, from May to August 2001 and at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from September to December 2001. An international group of experts discusses the new Bruegel who has emerged from recent studies, in essays on the artist's life, his contributions as a draftsman and as a printmaker, the survival of his art, and his relationship to the humanism of his day. They also illuminate his genius in entries on all the works in the exhibition. Every work is illustrated and rich comparative illustrations are included. Provenances an

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.

In this visually stunning and much anticipated book, acclaimed art historian Joseph Leo Koerner casts the art of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel in a completely new light, revealing how the painting of everyday life was born from what seems its opposite: depictions of a foe hellbent on destroying us. Probing deeply the visual cunning of these Renaissance masters, Koerner uncovers art history's unexplored underside: the visual image as enemy. An absorbing study of the dark paradoxes of human creativity, Bosch and Bruegel is also a timely account of how hatred can be converted into tolerance through art. Koerner guides readers through all the major paintings, drawings, and prints of these two towering artists, including Bosch's elusive Garden of Earthly Delights, which forms the mesmerizing center of the historical tour de force. Elegantly written and abundantly illustrated the book is based on Koerner's A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, a series given annually at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. -- Inside jacket flap.

The life and times of Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1526/30-1569) were marked by stark cultural conflict. He witnessed religious wars, the Duke of Alba's brutal rule as governor of the Netherlands, and the palpable effects of the Inquisition. To this day, the Flemish artist remains shrouded in mystery. We know neither where nor exactly when he was born. But while early scholarship emphasized the vernacular character of his painting and graphic work, modern research has attached greater importance to its humanistic content. Starting out as a print designer for publisher Hieronymus Cock, Bruegel produced numerous print series that were distributed throughout Europe. These depicted vices and virtues alongside jolly peasant festivals and sweeping landscape panoramas. He would eventually increasingly turn to painting, working for the cultural elite of Antwerp and Brussels. This monograph is a testament to Bruegel's evolution as an artist, one who bravely confronted the issues of his day all the while proposing new inventions and solutions. Rather than idealizing reality, he addressed the horrors of religious warfare and took a critical stand against the institution of the Church. To this end, he developed his own pictorial language of dissidence, lacing innocuous everyday scenes with subliminal statements in order to escape repercussions. To produce this XXL-sized collection, TASCHEN undertook a comprehensive photographic campaign, capturing all the breadth and splendid detail of Bruegel's oeuvre like never before. The result gathers all 40 paintings, 65 drawings, and 89 engravings in pristine reproductions--each piece a unique witness to both the religious mores and the close-knit folk culture of Bruegel's time.Marking the 450th anniversary of his death and his first ever monographic exhibition at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, this volume is the most immersive journey into Bruegel's unique visual universe.

European narratives of the Atlantic New World tell stories of people and things: strange flora, wondrous animals, and sun-drenched populations for Europeans to mythologize or exploit. Yet between 1500 and 1700 one region upended all of these conventions in travel writing, science, and, most unexpectedly, art: the Arctic. Icy, unpopulated, visually and temporally “abstract,” the far North – a different kind of terra incognita for the Renaissance imagination – offered more than new stuff to be mapped, plundered, or even seen. Neither a continent, an ocean, nor a meteorological circumstance, the Arctic forced visitors from England, the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy, to grapple with what we would now call a “nonsite,” spurring dozens of previously unknown works, objects, and texts – and this all in an intellectual and political milieu crackling with Reformation debates over art’s very legitimacy. Into the White uses five case studies to probe how the early modern Arctic (as site, myth, and ecology) affected contemporary debates of perception and matter, of representation, discovery, and the time of the earth – long before the nineteenth century romanticized the polar landscape. In the far North, this book contends, the Renaissance exotic became something far stranger than the marvelous or the curious, something darkly material and unmasterable, something beyond the idea of image itself.

As you read this book, you will see how Bruegel's scenes capture the universal conditions of conflict, work, play, folly and chaos, as well as innumerable pieces of biblical and folk wisdom."--BOOK JACKET.