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.

In Anonymous Art at Auction, Anne-Sophie V. Radermecker takes the opposing view of the superstar economy by examining contemporary sales of Early Flemish paintings with unknown authorship and the effects of various substitutes for real names on price formation.

This accompanying publication will explore the development and diversity of this legendary dynasty of Flemish painters over four generations and 150 years. From the proverb pictures and peasant festivals of Pieter Bruegel the Elder and his eldest son Pieter Brueghel the Younger to the exquisite flower pieces of Jan 'Velvet' Brueghel and the captivating cabinet paintings of Jan van Kessel, the book will unravel the mysteries of the dynasty, and will explore how Bruegel's sons were able to emulate their father's model despite having no access to his paintings. The book will turn the spotlight on to the major Bruegel holdings in UK collections for the first time, telling the story of the dynasty through masterpieces from British public collections and a number of previously unseen works from private collections.

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.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder - Fall of the Rebel Angels is the first comprehensive book on one of the most cherished masterpieces of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels.

This stunning compilation of the work Pieter Bruegel, the 16th century's most famous Netherlandish artist, is being published in anticipation of the 450-year anniversary of the artist's death.