'Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Religion' offers new insight into the religious dimension of Bruegel’s art. With a number of highly original and thorough case studies, the volume illuminates Bruegel’s inventive and multifaceted engagement with the contemporary religious concepts and practices of his day and age. Religion remains a vital question in the life and career of Bruegel, because it was so long believed to be more or less absent from his work. As a pioneer of the new genres of landscape and peasant scenes, Bruegel was heralded as a ground-breaking 'secular' painter. This volume highlights the most recent scholarship on the artist, offering a much more nuanced portrait of Bruegel’s engagement with the dynamic religious landscape of the mid-sixteenth century.
Author(s): Bertram Kaschek, Jürgen Müller, Jessica Buskirk (eds.)
Series: Brill's Studies in Intellectual History, 280. Brill’s Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History, 27
Publisher: Brill
Year: 2018
Language: English
Pages: 298
City: Leiden
Acknowledgements vii
List of Illustrations viii
Notes on the Contributors xiv
1. Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Religion: A Historiographical Introduction / Bertram Kaschek 1
2. Of Birdnesters and Godsearchers: A New Interpretation of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 'The Beekeepers' / Jürgen Müller 35
3. Peter Bruegel and the Problem of Vision / Larry Silver 57
4. Virtue or Tyranny? Pieter Bruegel, 'Justitia', and the Myth of the Inquisition / Gerd Schwerhoff 79
5. The First Temptation of Christ: An Evolving Iconographic Trope in Sixteenth-Century Antwerp / Jessica Buskirk 114
6. The Imaginarium of Death: Pieter Bruegel’s 'The Triumph of Death' / Anna Pawlak 134
7. 'Evidentiae Resurrectionis': On the Mystery Discerned but not Seen in Pieter Bruegel’s 'Resurrection' of ca. 1562–1563 / Walter S. Melion 159
8. Falling Idols, Rising Icons: Bruegel’s 'Flight into Egypt' and the Embeddedness of Sacred Images in Nature / Ralph Dekoninck 226
9. Pieter Bruegel’s 'Hunters in the Snow' and 'Insidiosus Auceps' as Trap Images / Michel Weemans 245
Index Nominum 277
