Full Description
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.
Contributors are: Jessica Buskirk, Ralph Dekoninck, Bertram Kaschek, Walter S. Melion, Jürgen Müller, Anna Pawlak, Gerd Schwerhoff, Larry Silver, and Michel Weemans.
Contents
Acknowledgements
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
