around 1525 -1569 · Brabant, Antwerp, Italy and Brussels

Inhabited panoramas, seasons, proverbs and moral lucidity make Pieter Bruegel the Elder one of the most inventive observers of the Nordic Renaissance.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder was born around 1525 in the Breda region and died in Brussels in 1569. Received master at the guild of Saint Luke of Antwerp in 1551 -1552, he traveled to Italy then collaborated with the publisher Hieronymus Cock, for which he draws landscapes, parables, vices, virtues and inventions close to Bosch. His painted work, scanty but exceptionally dense, renews the landscape and the representation of common life. Hunters in the snow belongs to a series of Seasons commissioned by the merchant Niclaes Jongelinck. Tired hunters, games on ice and distant mountains make up less of a work schedule than a complete winter experience. The tower de Babel transforms architecture into a gigantic organism, brilliant with ingenuity but undermined by its own excess. The Triumph of Death extends the catastrophe to all classes and all human activities. Flemish Proverbs bring together more than a hundred sayings in a village where popular wisdom becomes a comedy of madness. Bruegel observes parties, works, children, meals and landscapes without idealizing or despising his characters. His images combine panoramic distance and tiny details, humor and gravity, humanist culture and vernacular language. Broadcast by print and then taken up by his sons and their workshops, they gave Europe a visual memory sustainable in the Flemish world. The "Pieter Bruegel the Elder" selection notably compares Hunters in the Snow and The Tower of Babel. Its reading favors color.

Bruegel looks down without judging from afar: the panorama embraces the world, the detail reveals its madness and the landscape gives human gestures a universal measure.