Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Netherlandish; 16th-century
Brussels, Belgium: Royal Museums of Fine Arts
94%
Fall of the Rebel Angels. 1562. Oil on panel
Bruegel, like his inspirator Bosch, can be hard to really see because of how easy he is to look at. It's tough, though, because what makes him so cool and fun — his busyness, his allergy to symmetry and order, his strange mind manifesting for vision as so many convolutes of form and structure — is also essential to what makes him great. But these things aren't aesthetically sufficient on their own and in themselves. Instead, it's what emerges out of their odd combinations: for one, a rare brand of volume, forged for the most part in the crammed space between his figures, that is both infinitely full and dynamic — replete — but also fleeting, almost a figment that, once it vanishes, leaves you just at the threshold of the image, frustratingly outside of the action; and for two, an infinitude of visual possibility, akin to the almost compositional freedom afforded to a listener of improvisational music. More so than with almost any other artwork, you make your own way through this painting. It's as if every linear sword or trumpet is an arrow pointing at some abject curve or crook that might toss you onto a dozen possible optical paths, each of which forks and forks again, whether at the asscrack of a homunculus or the flap of a demon's wings. (TFS, 2026)
Antwerp, Belgium: Museum Mayer van den Bergh
91%
Mad Meg. 1563. Oil on panel
More so than in other Bruegels, the main thing here is the almost ontological relationship — it's nearly a full-on antagonism — between the painterly gradients of the environment (blaring sky, dead brown ground) and the linearity of all of the figures. There's a world beyond these debauched and struggling characters, but it's a world they certainly don't belong to and almost don't even inhabit. That's why they're being scorched from above, and why it's all opening onto damnation below — this is met de Bles's wonder at our distinctness from nature turned around and against itself. At first you want to say that this is all beyond composition, but then you notice that behind Meg things are busier than before her, and that this whole mess of bent bodies and thrust weapons is coursing her towards the mouth of hell. In this sense it's an advancement on Bosch, who is truly without order. Something's lost in Bruegel's greater comprehension, but this is also more stunningly a "picture" than could've happened before it. (TFS, 2026)
Vienna, Austria: Kunsthistorisches Museum
90%
The Conversion of Paul. 1567. Oil on canvas
There's so much painting going on here — of so many sorts and all so crammed together that it's tough to come away with a sense of this picture as an "image." And yet things hang together. (In this regard, Pierre Bonnard isn't too far off.) There's the solid rendering of the soldiers' garb, and of their horses; the poured look to the paint in the mountains and the rocks; the flat gradient of that crop of sky at left; the scratchy whorls in the clouds just above it. Bruegel's arrangement of the scene parallels how he's handled its paint: well-rendered figures throng in a backwater of the picture (where the titular "conversion," just right of center, is hardly visible) while all around them emptied surfaces stutter, slope, and fall away. And yet, as I said, things hang together. There's a sort of spiraling that, come the image's upper third or so, resolves itself into the verticality of the trees and the bluffs behind them. But to put this composition's logic so patly — to describe it as merely a "spiraling" — is to fail to get at how the painting is somehow always working against itself, rather than towards any end. Bruegel has works that are even more dispersed than this one, and often for the better. But it's in this picture's toying with order, its refusal either to embrace or to subvert it, that its value lies. (TFS, 2025)
Antwerp, Belgium: Royal Museum of Fine Arts
86%
The Wedding Dance. c1566. Oil on panel
Absolutely delightful, though not quite so rapturous and confounding as Bruegel's allegorical or religious scenes tend to be. The peasants' forms are a bit standardized, which gives the painting this overwhelming sense of repetitious unity — the logic behind its pictorial structure is almost serial — but which also holds it back from developing the shocking spatial lacunae and uncanny excrescences of form that make Bruegel's great paintings great. Still, there's much that recommends this piece: the tree at left is one of the great repoussoirs in European painting; not only are the men's boners and the women's pelvic thrusts bawdy and hilarious, but the charged spaces in between each pair add up to a circuit of sexual movement that runs through the entire scene, conducting its movement; few paintings can claim closer proximity than this one to the appearance of true random order; the ground is daubed with as much lovely ambivalence as any Bruegel ground, and the peasants are drawn with comparable vigor. (TFS, 2026)