Pieter Brueghel the Elder, or Peasant Brueghel, as he is sometimes called, is generally recognized today as one of the greatest and most original artists who ever lived; whether we understand and appreciate him fully is another question. His art is so powerful, so original, so many sided that in order to understand it we have to consider many complicated problems. It well repays the closest study.
                Brueghel’s art is at the same time both ancient and modern; ancient, because it is so closely interwoven with the art and the culture of earlier times; modern, because in its form it is so completely new and astonishing and still appeals to us so powerfully that we are inclined to compare it with the productions of our own days.
                The range of his ideas embraces everything seen and thought of in his time: Earth, Heaven and Hell. Like most of his contemporaries, he was deeply religious and his religion plays an important part in his paintings. As opposed to the pious attitude of the XVth century which prevailed well into the sixteenth, we must admit that a more worldly and at the same time a more lively treatment of the subject is introduced.
                In Brueghel’s imagination, Bible subjects become intensely real; he sees the events of the Bible as scenes of exuberant peasant life. He prefers those aspects of the story that give him the opportunity of painting vast multitudes of continual movement. Only holy personages appear in a sort of idealized costume; the others were contemporary dress, with here and there something more old fashioned or fantastic. A contrast to scenes from the Bible is afforded by the sphere of ideas with which in those days the minds of men were scarcely less occupied: Death and the Devil.
                The activities of hellish spirits, composed of the most diverse animal and human forms, the similar host of the Rebel Angels, the skeleton form of Death in all its horror, he depicts with the greatest impressiveness. The realm of Mythology occupies him less often. Allegory is dear to him and he loves to amplify it with illuminated scenes. He delights in the rendering of proverbs, proverbial sayings and parables. This give him the opportunity of painting the World, topsy-turvy in his eyes, and at the same time, according to religious ideas, the work of the Devil, the perverter.
                Here, as in the pure genre pictures that evolve naturally from such subjects, he devotes himself entirely to the realistic aspect of life. Finally he pays homage to the greatness of Nature in landscapes which range from the simple <<view>> to atmospheric renderings of seasons of the year and the hours of the day.
                The history of the master’s life we know only in rough outline. Pieter Brueghel, who must have been born not long before 1530, came from the Border territory somewhere between the modern Belgium and the modern Holland. It is not at all certain that Brueghel was the son of a peasant and spent his youth among peasants. At any rate one likes to believe that he received his spiritual upbringing in the neighboring town of Bois-le-Duc and perhaps even received his first artistic incentive from the works of Hieronymus Bosch, his greatest predecessor, to be seen there in the churches.
                It is not unlikely that his gifts for drawing and painting were discovered here and that is parents, relations or guardians had in mind one of the leading painters of the day to be his master. The choice fell on Pieter Coeck van Aelst, then generally accepted as the representative of official art. Educated in Italy, in close contact with the most learned circles of the day, himself a literary man, noted as painter, architect and especially as draughtsman for festive decorations, tapestries and glass paintings, Pieter Coeck had received the distinction of Deacon of the Antwerp Guild of St. Luke and was Court painter to the Emperor Charles V.
                In 1551 Brueghel entered the Antwerp Guild of Painters as a Master and soon afterwards undertook a lengthy journey through France and Italy, which took him, as is well known, to Rome in the year 1553.