The Collection

This part of the collection groups work by XVI Century master, Flemish Pieter Bruegel the Elder (also known as Brueghel).

Bruegel initiated an art movement that impacted pictorial art for centuries, that opened up new frontiers in allegoric and symbolic painting and in the representation of “paysages” - famous scenes with superb, sometime imaginary,  landscapes that depict peasant life in the Low Countries -. Landscapes, with their rich variety of scenery and colours, mixed backgrounds and complex village life, offer one of the greatest challenges to modern ceramic masters.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder (circa 1525–1569)

The greatest of all 16th Century Flemish artists “Pictore sui seculi absolutissimus (*)” travelled, like many of his contemporaries, to Italy between 1551—1554 to add artistic value to his already fast developing fame.

When he returned to the Northern Countries, he worked in what is thought was his birth place Antwerp and then in Brussels where he painted most of his world-famous pictures in and around the 1560’s, the golden years for Netherlandish art.

Big Fish Eats Little Fish One of Bruegel's best known moralizing stories

Pieter Bruegel the Elder was an exceptionally inventive painter and draftsman and, also due to his family business which run a print shop - at the time the most effective method of communication between the wealthy -, quickly became a beacon for artistic developments in the Low Countries and much of Europe. 

He concentrated on scenes with religious meaning and from village rustic life depicting birth and death, punishment and joy, feasting and hunger, morale and righteousness. By masterly transposing moralizing subjects into vernacular language he showed the folly of man through a sarcastic mirror that still today reflects the brevity and illusions of human nature.

He managed to get where no other artist of his time had dared to go, sometime running against the strict ecclesiastical canons imposed upon artists of his time. Through what may appear to be mockery he reached new dimensions in the depiction of reality.

Bruegel was, in its own way, the Shakespeare of the painted world, jostling between scenes and episodes almost unreal and yet so close to everybody's daily life. In those days townspeople looked upon the country peasant as a figure of snobbery and fun; Bruegel managed to put all on an equal footing through his particular use of the ridicule.

His association with Hieronymus Bosch, strengthened a vision of a world filled with angels and demoniacal figures which he aptly used in some of his paintings to reinforce the message of human frailty. Bruegel - students still debate whether his name was Brueghel rather than Bruegel - is present in the world’s best known museums and private collections.
 

(*) “The best artist of his time” Quote by A. Ortelius, a XVI Century art-critic