Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525–1569)

Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Birth name	Pieter Bruegel
Born	c. 1525, Breda, Habsburg Netherlands
Died	September 9, 1569 (age 44), Brussels, Habsburg Netherlands
Field	Painting, printmaking
Movement	Dutch and Flemish Renaissance
Works	The Peasant Wedding

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Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525 – 9 September 1569) was a Netherlandish Renaissance painter and printmaker known for his landscapes and peasant scenes (Genre Painting). He is sometimes referred to as "Peasant Bruegel" to distinguish him from other members of the Brueghel dynasty, but is also the one generally meant when the context does not make clear which "Bruegel" is being referred to. From 1559 he dropped the 'h' from his name and started signing his paintings as Bruegel.

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Life

There are records that he was born in Breda, Netherlands, but it is uncertain whether the Dutch town of Breda or the Belgian town of Bree, called Breda in Latin, is meant. He was an apprentice of Pieter Coecke van Aelst, whose daughter Mayken he later married. He spent some time in France and Italy, and then went to Antwerp, where in 1551 he was accepted as a master in the painter's guild. He traveled to Italy soon after, and then returned to Antwerp before settling in Brussels permanently 10 years later. He received the nickname 'Peasant Bruegel' or 'Bruegel the Peasant' for his alleged practice of dressing up like a peasant in order to mingle at weddings and other celebrations, thereby gaining inspiration and authentic details for his genre paintings. He died in Brussels on 9 September 1569 and was buried in the Kapellekerk. He was the father of Pieter Brueghel the Younger and Jan Brueghel the Elder. Both became painters, but as they were very young children when their father died, it is believed neither received any training from him. According to Carel van Mander, it is likely that they were instructed by their grandmother Mayken Verhulst van Aelst, who was also an artist.

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Style

In Bruegel's later years he painted in a simpler style than the Italianate art that prevailed in his time. The most obvious influence on his art is the older Dutch master Hieronymus Bosch, particularly in Bruegel's early "demonological" paintings such as The Triumph of Death and Dulle Griet (Mad Meg). It was in nature, however, that he found his greatest inspiration as he is identified as being a master of landscapes. It was in these landscapes that Bruegel created a story, seeming to combine several scenes in one painting. Such works can be seen in The Fall of the Rebel Angels and the previously mentioned The Triumph of Death.

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Themes

Bruegel specialized in genre paintings populated by peasants, often with a large landscape element, but also painted religious works. Making the life and manners of peasants the main focus of a work was rare in painting in Brueghel's time, and he was a pioneer of the Netherlandish genre painting. His earthy, unsentimental but vivid depiction of the rituals of village life—including agriculture, hunts, meals, festivals, dances, and games—are unique windows on a vanished folk culture and a prime source of iconographic evidence about both physical and social aspects of 16th century life. For example, the painting Netherlandish Proverbs illustrates dozens of then-contemporary aphorisms (many of them still in use in current Dutch or Flemish), and Children's Games shows the variety of amusements enjoyed by young people. His winter landscapes of 1565 (e.g. Hunters in the Snow) are taken as corroborative evidence of the severity of winters during the Little Ice Age.

Using abundant spirit and comic power, he created some of the early images of acute social protest in art history. Examples include paintings such as The Fight Between Carnival and Lent (a satire of the conflicts of the Reformation)[citation needed] and engravings like The Ass in the School and Strongboxes Battling Piggybanks. On his deathbed he reportedly ordered his wife to burn the most subversive of his drawings to protect his family from political persecution.

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References in other works

Bruegel's work plays prominently in Don DeLillo's 1997 novel Underworld (DeLillo novel). In the prologue, titled "The Triumph of Death" and set at the 1951 baseball game between the Giants and the Dodgers in which Bobby Thomson hit the so-called "Shot Heard 'Round the World", a reproduction of the eponymous painting (c. 1562) floats down into J. Edgar Hoover's hands amidst a celebratory hailstorm of loose bits of paper and other pieces of trash after the home run. Later in the novel, the concepts of death and play (activity) are compared with one another as the character Albert Bronzini discusses another Bruegel painting, Children's Games (1560): "I don't know what art history says about this painting. But I say it's not that different from the other famous Bruegel, armies of death marching across the landscape. The children are fat, backward, a little sinister to me. It's some kind of menace, some folly. Kinderspielen. They look like dwarves doing something awful" (U 682).

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Works

There are about 45 authenticated surviving paintings, one-third of which are in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. A number of others are known to have been lost. There are a large number of drawings. Brueghel only etched one plate himself, The Rabbit Hunt, but designed many engravings and etchings, mostly for the Cock publishing house.

Naval Battle in the Gulf of Naples, 1560, Galleria Doria-Pamphilj, Rome
The Fall of the Rebel Angels, 1562, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels
The "Little" Tower of Babel, c. 1563, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam
The Procession to Calvary, 1564, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
The Adoration of the Kings, 1564, The National Gallery, London
Massacre of the Innocents, c. 1567, versions Royal Collection, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, and London art market (2007)
Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap, 1565, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, inv. 8724
Landscape with Christ and the Apostles at the Sea of Tiberias, 1553, probably with Maarten de Vos, private collection
Ass at School, 1556, drawing, Print room, Berlin State Museums
Parable of the Sower, 1557, Timken Museum of Art, San Diego
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c.1554-55, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels - Note: Now seen as a copy of a lost authentic Bruegel painting[2]
Netherlandish Proverbs, 1559, - Gemäldegalerie, Berlin
The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, 1559, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Portrait of an Old Woman, 1560, Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Children's Games, 1560, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Temperance, 1560
Saul (Battle Against The Philistines On The Gilboa), 1562, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Two Small Monkeys, 1562, Staatliche Museen, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin
The Triumph of Death, c. 1562, Museo del Prado, Madrid
Dulle Griet (Mad Meg), c. 1562, Museum Mayer van den Bergh, Antwerp
The Tower of Babel, 1563, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Flight To Egypt, 1563, Courtauld Institute Galleries, London
The Death of the Virgin, 1564, Upton House, Banbury, Oxfordshire, UK
The Months. A cycle of probably 6 paintings of the months or seasons, of which five remain:
The Hunters in the Snow (Dec.-Jan.), 1565, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
The Gloomy Day (Feb.-Ma.), 1565, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
The Hay Harvest (June-July), 1565, Lobkowicz Palace at the Prague Castle Complex, Czech Republic
The Harvesters (Aug.-Sept.), 1565, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The Return of the Herd (Oct.-Nov.), 1565, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery (1565), Courtauld Institute of Art, London
The Calumny of Apelles, 1565, drawing, British Museum, London
The Painter and the Connoisseur, drawing, c. 1565, Albertina, Vienna
Preaching Of John The Baptist, 1566, Museum of Fine Arts (Budapest)
Census at Bethlehem, 1566, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels
The Wedding Dance, c. 1566, Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit
Conversion Of Paul, 1567, Kunsthistorishes Museum, Vienna
The Land of Cockaigne, 1567, Alte Pinakothek, Munich
The Magpie on the Gallows, 1568, Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt
The Misanthrope, 1568, Museo di Capodimonte, Naples
The Blind Leading the Blind, 1568, Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples
The Peasant Wedding, 1568, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
The Peasant Dance, 1568, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
The Beggars, 1568, Louvre, Paris
The Peasant and the Nest Robber, 1568, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
The Three Soldiers, 1568, The Frick Collection, New York City
The Storm at Sea, an unfinished work, probably Bruegel's last painting.

Prints

Large Fish Eat Small Fish, 1556, a print after a Bruegel design

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieter_Bruegel_the_Elder

Allegory of Happiness (1564)

Allegory of Happiness (1564)

Angelo Bronzino, "Allegorie des Glücks" (1564)
Oil on copper
40 x 30 cm
Uffizien (Florenz)

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Agnolo di Cosimo (November 17, 1503 – November 23, 1572), usually known as Il Bronzino, or Agnolo Bronzino was an Italian Mannerist painter from Florence.

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http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Angelo_Bronzino_-_Allegorie_Des_Gl%C3%BCcks.jpg

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Angelo Bronzino | Paintings in the Uffizi Gallery | 1564 paintings | Fortuna | Paintings of cornucopia | Caduceus | Allegorical paintings | Humans with angels | Oil on copper | Mannerism (1520 - 1600)

Tower of Babel (1563)

Tower of Babel (1563)

Artist	Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Title	English: Tower of Babel العربية: برج بابل Deutsch: Turmbau zu Babel Français : La Tour de Babel Español: Torre de Babel Italiano: Torre di Babele Русский: Вавилонская башня Polski: Budowa wieży Babel 中文: 巴別塔
Date	1563
Technique	Deutsch: Öl auf Holz Italiano: Olio su Tavola
Dimensions	Deutsch: 114 × 155 cm
Current location	Deutsch: Kunsthistorisches Museum Deutsch: Wien Français : Vienne, Autriche Italiano: Vienna, Austria

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Brueghel-tower-of-babel.jpg

Academic art (1563- )

Academic art

Academic art is a style of painting and sculpture produced under the influence of European academies or universities.

Specifically, academic art is the art and artists influenced by the standards of the French Académie des beaux-arts, which practiced under the movements of Neoclassicism and Romanticism, and the art that followed these two movements in the attempt to synthesize both of their styles, and which is best reflected by the paintings of William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Suzor-Coté, Thomas Couture, and Hans Makart. In this context it is often called "academism", "academicism", "L'art pompier", and "eclecticism", and sometimes linked with "historicism" and "syncretism".

The art influenced by academies and universities in general is also called "academic art". In this context as new styles are embraced by academics, the new styles come to be considered academic, thus what was at one time a rebellion against academic art becomes academic art.

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The academies in history

The first academy of art was founded in Florence in Italy by Cosimo I de' Medici, on 13 January 1563, under the influence of the architect Giorgio Vasari who called it the Accademia e Compagnia delle Arti del Disegno (Academy and Company for the Arts of Drawing) as it was divided in two different operative branches. While the Company was a kind of corporation which every working artist in Tuscany could join, the Academy comprised only the most eminent artistic personalities of Cosimo’s court, and had the task of supervising the whole artistic production of the medicean state. In this medicean institution students learned the "arti del disegno" (a term coined by Vasari) and heard lectures on anatomy and geometry. Another academy, the Accademia di San Luca (named after the patron saint of painters, St. Luke), was founded about a decade later in Rome. The Accademia di San Luca served an educational function and was more concerned with art theory than the Florentine one. In 1582 Annibale Carracci opened his very influential Academy of Desiderosi in Bologna without official support; in some ways this was more like a traditional artist's workshop, but that he felt the need to label it as an "academy" demonstrates the attraction of the idea at the time.

Accademia di San Luca later served as the model for the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture founded in France in 1648, and which later became the Académie des beaux-arts. The Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture was founded in an effort to distinguish artists "who were gentlemen practicing a liberal art" from craftsmen, who were engaged in manual labor. This emphasis on the intellectual component of artmaking had a considerable impact on the subjects and styles of academic art.

After the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture was reorganized in 1661 by Louis XIV whose aim was to control all the artistic activity in France, a controversy occurred among the members that dominated artistic attitudes for the rest of the century. This "battle of styles" was a conflict over whether Peter Paul Rubens or Nicolas Poussin was a suitable model to follow. Followers of Poussin, called "poussinistes", argued that line (disegno) should dominate art, because of its appeal to the intellect, while followers of Rubens, called "rubenistes", argued that color (colore) should dominate art, because of its appeal to emotion.

The debate was revived in the early 19th century, under the movements of Neoclassicism typified by the artwork of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, and Romanticism typified by the artwork of Eugène Delacroix. Debates also occurred over whether it was better to learn art by looking at nature, or to learn by looking at the artistic masters of the past.

Academies using the French model formed throughout Europe, and imitated the teachings and styles of the French Académie. In England, this was the Royal Academy. The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts founded in 1754, may be taken as a successful example in a smaller country, which achieved its aim of producing a national school and reducing the reliance on imported artists. The painters of the Danish Golden Age of roughly 1800-1850 were nearly all trained there, and many returned to teach and the history of the art of Denmark is much less marked by tension between academic art and other styles than is the case in other countries.

One effect of the move to academies was to make training more difficult for women artists, who were excluded from most academies until the last half of the nineteenth century (1861 for the Royal Academy). This was partly because of concerns over the propriety of life classes with nude models' special arrangements were often made for female students until the 20th century.

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Development of the academic style

Since the onset of the poussiniste-rubiniste debate many artists worked between the two styles. In the 19th century, in the revived form of the debate, the attention and the aims of the art world became to synthesize the line of Neoclassicism with the color of Romanticism. One artist after another was claimed by critics to have achieved the synthesis, among them Théodore Chassériau, Ary Scheffer, Francesco Hayez, Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps, and Thomas Couture. William-Adolphe Bouguereau, a later academic artist, commented that the trick to being a good painter is seeing "color and line as the same thing." Thomas Couture promoted the same idea in a book he authored on art method — arguing that whenever one said a painting had better color or better line it was nonsense, because whenever color appeared brilliant it depended on line to convey it, and vice versa; and that color was really a way to talk about the "value" of form.

Another development during this period included adopting historical styles in order to show the era in history that the painting depicted, called historicism. This is best seen in the work of Baron Jan August Hendrik Leys, a later influence on James Tissot. It's also seen in the development of the Neo-Grec style. Historicism is also meant to refer to the belief and practice associated with academic art that one should incorporate and conciliate the innovations of different traditions of art from the past.

The art world also grew to give increasing focus on allegory in art. Both theories of the importance of line and color asserted that through these elements an artist exerted control over the medium to create psychological effects, in which themes, emotions, and ideas can be represented. As artists attempted to synthesize these theories in practice, the attention on the artwork as an allegorical or figurative vehicle was emphasized. It was held that the representations in paintings and sculpture should evoke Platonic forms, or ideals, where behind ordinary depictions one would glimpse something abstract, some eternal truth. Hence, Keats' famous musing "Beauty is truth, truth beauty". The paintings were desired to be an "idée", a full and complete idea. Bouguereau is known to have said that he wouldn't paint "a war", but would paint "War". Many paintings by academic artists are simple nature-allegories with titles like Dawn, Dusk, Seeing, and Tasting, where these ideas are personified by a single nude figure, composed in such a way as to bring out the essence of the idea.

The trend in art was also towards greater idealism, which is contrary to realism, in that the figures depicted were made simpler and more abstract—idealized—in order to be able to represent the ideals they stood in for. This would involve both generalizing forms seen in nature, and subordinating them to the unity and theme of the artwork.

Because history and mythology were considered as plays or dialectics of ideas, a fertile ground for important allegory, using themes from these subjects was considered the most serious form of painting. A hierarchy of genres, originally created in the 17th century, was valued, where history painting—classical, religious, mythological, literary, and allegorical subjects—was placed at the top, next genre painting, then portraiture, still-life, and landscape. History painting was also known as the "grande genre". Paintings of Hans Makart are often larger than life historical dramas, and he combined this with a historicism in decoration to dominate the style of 19th century Vienna culture. Paul Delaroche is a typifying example of French history painting.

All of these trends were influenced by the theories of the philosopher Hegel, who held that history was a dialectic of competing ideas, which eventually resolved in synthesis.

Towards the end of the 19th century, academic art had saturated European society. Exhibitions were held often, and the most popular exhibition was the Paris Salon and beginning in 1903, the Salon d'Automne. These salons were sensational events that attracted crowds of visitors, both native and foreign. As much a social affair as an artistic one, 50,000 people might visit on a single Sunday, and as many as 500,000 could see the exhibition during its two-month run. Thousands of pictures were displayed, hung from just below eye level all the way up to the ceiling in a manner now known as "Salon style." A successful showing at the salon was a seal of approval for an artist, making his work saleable to the growing ranks of private collectors. Bouguereau, Alexandre Cabanel and Jean-Léon Gérôme were leading figures of this art world.

During the reign of academic art, the paintings of the Rococo era, previously held in low favor, were revived to popularity, and themes often used in Rococo art such as Eros and Psyche were popular again. The academic art world also idolized Raphael, for the ideality of his work, in fact preferring him over Michelangelo.

Academic art not only held influence in Europe and the United States, but also extended its influence to other Western countries. This was especially true for Latin American nations, which, because their revolutions were modeled on the French Revolution, sought to emulate French culture. An example of a Latin American academic artist is Ángel Zárraga of Mexico.

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A Virgin (1892-1893), Depicts the artist's daughter and sons by Abbott Handerson Thayer

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_art

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Academic art | Art movements | Academic art (1563- )