Braegel biography is briefly

The place of his birth is most often called the city of Delred in the modern Netherland province of the North Brabant or the village of Brewel near this city. He began his creative biography as a schedule. By the middle of the x, he ended up in Antwerp, where he studied at the workshop with Peter Cook Van Alst, the court artist of Emperor Charles V. in the workshop of Van Alsta Breigel worked until his teacher’s death in the year.

In the year, Bruegel was admitted to the Antwerp guild of painters and entered the workshop of Jerome Koku, who printed and sold engravings. In the workshop of Coca, the artist saw Estamp from Bosch’s paintings, who made him such an impression that he drew his own variations on the topics of the great artist. In years, at the suggestion of Coca, Brueghel made a trip to France, Italy, Switzerland to make a series of drawings of Italian landscapes intended for reproduction in engravings.

He was shocked by the ancient monuments of Rome and the masterpieces of the Renaissance, marine elements and picturesque harbors of the Mediterranean. Presumably in Rome, he worked with the miniature Julio Clio. In the year, Bruegel worked in the Antwerp for the Four Winds printed workshop, belonging to the Dutch publisher Jerome Koku. According to Brueghel’s drawings, engravings “Large fish eat small” and “Donkey at school” were made here.

Wanting to please the tastes of rich customers, Coca did not even disdain to fake signatures in engravings. So, the engraving “Big Pisces eat small” was sold with the signature of the famous Dutch artist Jerome Bosch. In the year, Bruegel wrote a cycle of engravings, illustrating seven mortal sins. Lust, laziness in the year moved with his family to Brussels.

In the year, a series of “Pictures of the months or the time of the year” was written, from which only five works were preserved. In the late medieval illustrated prayer prayer books for the nobility, religious texts were often preceded by a calendar, where for each month it took the page. The change of seasons was most often depicted through the prism of classes corresponding to every month.

But in Braigel, in the change of times, nature plays the main role, and people, as well as forests, mountains, water, animals, become only part of the boundless landscape. Autumn, "" Hunters in the snow. Winter ”and“ haymaking ” - the same format and, possibly, are made for one customer. The other two are “harvest. Summer ”and“ Gloomy Day. Karel Van Mander calls the customer of the entire series “months” of the rich Antwerp merchant Nicholas Yongelinka, who then, urgently needed a large amount of money, gave all these paintings as a bail and never bought them.

Peter Bruegel was about forty, when the army of the Spanish Duke Alba with an order to destroy heretics in the Netherlands entered Brussels. Over the next years, Alba sentenced several thousand of the Dutch to death. The last years of life have passed in an atmosphere of terror planted by Alba. About one of the last works of Brueghel, “Magpie on the gallows”, Van Mander writes that: “He bequeathed to his wife a picture with a forty on a gallows.

Magpie means gossip, whom he would like to see hanged. " The gallows were associated with the Spanish rule, when the authorities began to be sentenced to shameful death through the hang of the Predant, and the terror of Alba himself kept almost exclusively on rumors and denunciations. The painting “Beatering of babies” contains an image of an ominous person in black, observing the execution of the order of King Herod; This person is very similar to Alba; So, the artist compares King Philip II with Herod.

The artist died on September 5 in Brussels. Notre de la Shalpel was buried in the Brussels Church. Of all the surviving paintings by Bruegel, about a third are in the Museum of the History of Art in Vienna. There are no works of Bruegel in Russia. Faceless representatives of the rural lower classes become the main characters of his work: in his drawings, he often generally hides faces.

None of the artists had previously dared to create works on such topics. But many later works testify to the artist’s growing interest in individual figures. The artist begins to write large figures of people, in relation to which the environment plays an already subordinate role. Such paintings include the “parable of the blind”, “ruin of nests” another name - “peasant and ruin of nests”, “cripples” and “misanthrope”.

In the worship of the Magi, the artist in an allegorical form showed that the birth of a child is not a joy if war and death reign in the world by the compositional center of the picture completely filled with people, the sad figure of the Virgin Mary with a baby on his knees serves. She is wrapped in a blue cloak, and her face is almost not visible. Her figure, written in cold colors, contrasts with the environment solved in warm colors, and therefore involuntarily attracts the attention of the viewer.

Behind her, the figure of Joseph, carefully listening to the whispering of a random passerby, rises behind her with a light silhouette. In front of Maria - three magi. Two, kneeling, extend their gifts to the baby. The expressions of their senile faces are similar to grimaces.On the left side of Madonna Valtasar. His dark black face contrasts sharply with white clothes.

At the entrance, inside and around the tribe, where Maria raised the baby-Christ, crowded people mocking the event, the expressions of their faces are extremely cruel. Among them there are many soldiers with peaks, whose spinning is directed to the sky. Thus, the artist, as it were, transfers the birth of Christ into modern, embraced by the war of the Netherlands.

The artistic images of Brueghel are overloaded with semantic content: hints of topicality, biblical allegory, playing the imagination of the artist himself - all this is included in the close framework of one work. The creations of Brueghel require tense attention from the viewer, disturb their ambiguity, wake up the imagination. All this gives his worship of the Magi stored in the London National Gallery the deepest meaning.

She, like the rest, was commissioned by the long -term cartridge of the artist Nilels Yongelinka for his home by Antwerp. In this series, the medieval tradition is reflected to decorate the calendars with images of human classes dating back to a certain month of the year. At the same time, this is already a purely Renaissance work, it is noticeable in the influence of the Italian painting of the Renaissance, whose wealth Bruegel could see during his journey.

However, everything perceived was very revised by him, and his own, Brueghelevskoye, perception of the world, is already acting.

Take at least the fact that none of his contemporaries created such landscapes and panoramic paintings of peasant labor. A freely spread landscape - the golden sea of ​​wheat, the village and yellow fields in the distance - goes into the foggy haze, to the distant lake. This space is inhabited by people who are hiding, knitting sheaves, carrying a huge width of wheat, eat and sleep under a tree and there, in the village, also engage in economic affairs.

Bruegel often visited the countryside and knew peasant life well. She was a constant source of inspiration for him. He knew how to mercilessly expose the bad aspects of human nature, Brueghel depicted peasants with sympathy and admiring their labor and rest. Here, as in the other works of the cycle, the equilibrium of nature and man is emphasized, which is achieved only by a worthy life.

To the conclusion about what agreement between man and nature - read the world - holds the world, Bruegel unobtrusively lets down his picture. As far as is known, Bruegel did not write custom portraits and naked figures. Of the portraits attributed to Bruegel, only one undoubtedly belongs to him. This is the picture "The head of the peasant" of the year. Surely the artist had no shortage of requests to write portraits of his contemporaries, but apparently, Brueghel did not accept such orders.

In order not to confuse Peter Bruegel with his son - also a painter, the elder was later dubbed by Bruegel Muzhitsky. Peter Bruegel Muzhitsky. Peter Bruegel. Peter Bruegel Senior. PEETER Brueghel. Bruegel series "Life of wonderful people." Anvers, Francastel P. as ABOVE, So BELOW: A Novel of Peter Bruegel. Peter Bruegel Senior: paintings by the artist.