Pieter Bruegel the Elder
We feature today's piece thanks to Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, where until January 13th you can see the world's first ever major monograph exhibition featuring Pieter Bruegel the Elder. This is one of the most important exhibitions of the decade. Enjoy!
From a bird’s-eye view—the only way Bruegel could legibly fit in the impressive number of figures—the viewer looks down onto a wide square with a transition from an urban to a rural setting at the edges. On the right, the view opens on to a long street laid out in central perspective and leading to the city center where a church steeple (or town-hall tower) soars into the sky. The battlement-crowned building at the edge of the square towards the city opens into an arcade running parallel to the course of the stream. At the left edge of the painting, an idyllic village appears on the horizon. Children (more than 230 in all) are occupied with 83 different games. The whole city seems to be theirs. Bruegel gives the beholder an encyclopaedic view of the children’s games of his time. The tininess of the figures and scenes forces a viewer seeking to decipher all the games to study the individual parts of the painting slowly and minutely—an entertaining pastime. Some modern scholars have refused to accept such a humanistic-oriented, simple interpretation, however; the seemingly useless children’s activities have been regarded (probably incorrectly) as a parable for the senselessness and foolishness of human behavior.
If you would like to know more about the exhibition, you should visit its amazing website.
And if you would like to see how the exhibition looks like through our eyes, visit our Instagram and see our Instastory. :)