Description
Book SynopsisPieter 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. Contributors are: Jessica Buskirk, Ralph Dekoninck, Bertram Kaschek, Walter S. Melion, Jürgen Müller, Anna Pawlak, Gerd Schwerhoff, Larry Silver, and Michel Weemans.
Trade Review“This book reveals how Pieter Bruegel, under the ban of controversies, developed a visual code to hint at traps laid by false prophets and the devil. Readers might feel themselves trapped in the intricate webs of visual exegesis in these essays, but the understanding obtained will deepen their comprehension of the vexed vision of an artist of universal importance.” Leopoldine Prosperetti, University of Houston. In: Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 73 , No 4 (Winter 2020), pp. 1362–1363.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements List of Illustrations Notes on the Contributors 1 Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Religion: A Historiographical Introduction Bertram Kaschek 2 Of Birdnesters and Godsearchers: A New Interpretation of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Beekeepers Jürgen Müller 3 Peter Bruegel and the Problem of Vision Larry Silver 4 Virtue or Tyranny? Pieter Bruegel, Justitia, and the Myth of the Inquisition Gerd Schwerhoff 5 The First Temptation of Christ: An Evolving Iconographic Trope in Sixteenth-Century Antwerp Jessica Buskirk 6 The Imaginarium of Death: Pieter Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death Anna Pawlak 7 Evidentiae Resurrectionis: On the Mystery Discerned but not Seen in Pieter Bruegel’s Resurrection of ca. 1562–1563 Walter S. Melion 8 Falling Idols, Rising Icons: Bruegel’s Flight into Egypt and the Embeddedness of Sacred Images in Nature Ralph Dekoninck 9 Pieter Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow and Insidiosus Auceps as Trap Images Michel Weemans
