Creator story
Surprising fact
In Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, the drowning hero is almost invisible — just two legs vanishing into the sea while a ploughman works on, unbothered.
Source: Wikipedia / WikimediaRenaissance
Pieter Brueghel the Elder
Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525–1569) was the great Netherlandish master of peasant life and panoramic landscape. His teeming scenes of villages, proverbs and seasons brim with ordinary humanity.
Bruegel raised everyday peasant life to grand art and founded a dynasty of painters.
- Master of panoramic landscapes and crowded peasant scenes.
- Hid his subjects in plain sight, as in the Fall of Icarus.
- Founded a dynasty of Brueghel painters lasting generations.
Key works
Two works that open the world of Pieter Brueghel the Elder
These works make it easiest to see how the artist changed form, content, and the very way art could exist in culture.
1565
The Harvesters
The Harvesters reads as one of the anchor works of renaissance, where Pieter Brueghel the Elder's visual voice becomes unmistakable.
1565
The Hunters in the Snow
The Hunters in the Snow shows how Pieter Brueghel the Elder turns the language of renaissance into a coherent painted image.