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Pieter Bruegel the Elder: The draftsman revealedSerebrennikov, Nina. The Art Bulletin 84. 3 (Sep 2002): 501-510.

_______________________________________________________________ Abstract "Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Drawing and Prints" at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in

Rotterdam and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City is reviewed.

_______________________________________________________________ Full Text Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Drawings and Prints

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, May 24-August 5, 2001, and the Metropolitan

Museum of Art, New York, September 25-December 2, 2001

Nadine M. Orenstein, ed., with contributions by Nadine M. Orenstein, Manfred Sellink, Jurgen

Miiller, Michiel C. Plomp, Martin Royalton-Kisch, and Larry Silver. Pieter Bruegel the Elder:

Drawings and Prints, exb. cat. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven: Yale

University Press, 2001. 335 pp., 109 color ills. 168 b/w. $60.00

Pieter Bruegel the Elder is known far and wide for his thirty-five or so extant paintings. The

somnolent field-workers in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Harvest, the dark figures

trudging through knee-deep drifts in the Hunters in the Snow, the ponderous dance of Kernis

in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum have never ceased to captivate the countless visitors

who crowd in front of his panels. His work on paper, on the other hand, unlike that of Albrecht

Durer or Rembrandt, is known primarily to scholars and specialists, and, at least among the

curators, even that group has been largely bifurcated according to medium, depending on

whether one's specialty is prints or drawings. The exhibition Pieter Bruegel the Elder,

subtitled laster Draughtsman at its first venue in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and,

more accurately, Drawings and Prints at the Metropolitan Museum, gave us our first look at

virtually all the works on paper at once. It represented an extraordinary curatorial

accomplishment by Nadine bI. Orenstein, associate curator of prints at the Metropolitan, and

Manfred Sell-- ink, former chief curator of prints and drawings at the Boijmans. To my

knowledge there has never been an exhibition of virtually all the known drawings and prints

of an artist of Bruegel's stature. The two curators managed to engineer the loan of all but a

handful of the drawings-showing every pivotal work either in Rotterdam or New York-as well

as, whenever possible, pristine impressions of nearly all the known prints after Bruegel's

designs.1 Consequently, the show was relatively large for a monographic exhibition, with

fifty-five drawings attributed to Bruegel and sixty-two prints after his designs. Significantly,

over half of the extant drawings had been executed for those prints. The remaining drawings,

finished compositions, not sketches, had provided the original impetus for the exhibition.

The late Hans Mielke, curator at the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett, had long made a special

study of the independent drawings, mostly landscapes penned early in Bruegel's career. In

1975, under the direction of Matthias Winner, the Kupferstichkabinett mounted an

exceptional exhibition of over three hundred drawings spanning the 16th century from

Hieronymus Bosch to the so-called Bruegel revival. Shortly afterward Mielke began a new

project. He published a series of articles and then, in 1996, a new catalogue raisonne that

would substantially alter the artistic profile of Bruegel as a draftsman. He reduced Bruegel's

extant oeuvre by more than half, replacing the 154 of the previous catalogue raisonne by

Ludwig Munz with just 68 sheets. Convincingly, he reattributed a series of approximately

twenty small domestic landscapes to Jacob Savery, a relatively unknown artist active in

Haarlem and Amsterdam in the last decade of the 16th century, this despite the fact that a

number of them were ostensibly signed by Bruegel and dated between 1559 and 1560. His

discovery that the watermark on the Pierpont Morgan Library's Mountain Landscape with a

River, Village and Castle-one of the most ambitious sheets attributed to Bruegel-was not

found before 1585-88, some twenty years after Bruegel's death, seemed irrefutable,

although, since the drawing had been a favorite of many, it was not a popular decision. He

argued that three sheets of mountainous vistas in the Courtauld Institute's Seilern collection

were not Bruegel's studies for a series of mixed etchings and engravings known as the Large

Landscapes, published by Hieronymus Cock about 1556, but instead drawings made after

motifs found in these prints. Finally, in the 1996 catalogue raisonne Mielke added 14

drawings to this same group and tentatively ascribed them to the artist to whom he had given

the Morgan sheet, Jacob Savery's younger brother Roelant.2

Orenstein and Sellink first conceived the recent exhibition as a monographic presentation of

Mielke's Bruegel, offering art historians and the general public alike a golden opportunity to

come to terms with the most recent delineation of the seemingly ever shifting artistic

personality of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Adding the prints, it must have seemed, could only

expand our understanding of this artistic personality. While questions would inevitably remain

unresolved, surely some measure of artistic coherence would result from viewing virtually the

entire graphic oeuvre, previously known to all but a handful of specialists only in grainy

blackand-white reproductions. The inclusion of the newly reattributed compositions, as well

as representative examples of works previously given to Bruegel, such as the village scenes

penned by the Master of Small Landscapes, would then serve as a foil for this newly

delineated Bruegel.

On the whole, both curators achieved the desired effect of displaying a fresh and coherent

draftsman Bruegel-this despite the fact that the two exhibition venues could not have been

more unlike. Each had to deal with a sizable installation-including nearly all the prints more

than doubled the number of objects-in a difficult space. The Boijmans's extensive renovation

forced the show into a series of large and small galleries normally devoted to paintings.

Predictably, the enlarged scale proved an uneasy fit for the graphic works. The early

landscape drawings, arguably the most complex of all Bruegel's works on paper, were hung

in the largest of these galleries, where viewers found themselves stepping from one dimly

illuminated drawing across a darkened foot or two to another pool of light. In New York

virtually the same exhibition was crowded into the three usual print and drawing galleries and

allowed to spill over into the entrance hallway and beyond. While the latter arrangement

provided a certain sense of concentration, both venues suffered, in my opinion, from a surfeit

of objects. I am not certain, for example, what was gained by hanging all seven engravings of

the Deadly Sins and all seven of the Virtues. For both the specialist and the inexperienced

viewer, studying a composition by Bruegel takes considerable time. Few people, I noticed,

had enough acuity or energy left to spend time on the prints and drawings by the artist's

contemporaries each curator had selected and placed in adjacent rooms in order to

contextualize Bruegel's compositions.

The difference between the two venues went beyond the mechanics of installation, however.

In the Boijmans the works were organized thematically. For many citizens of Rotterdam, life

today, as in Bruegel's time, revolves around the comings and goings of ships plying the

mouth of the Rhine at the North Sea. It came as no surprise, then, that Sellink opened the

hang in a small circular room with a series of prints of sailing ships after Bruegel, a drawing

of the Sicilian coastal town of Reggio di Calabria burning coupled with the subsequent print

depicting the naval Battle of Messina, and a pen and ink rendition of the Ripa Grande, a view

across the Tiber of the main harbor in Rome. The attribution of the two drawings has been

questioned repeatedly (but not by Mielke), while the ships, for which no drawings are known,

include mythological figures clearly not by Bruegel's hand. Hardly a testament to Bruegel the

consummate draftsman, this room was intended to establish Pieter Bruegel the Elder as an

artist of seafaring themes with which the citizens of Rotterdam might identify. From there the

visitor walked through a series of ten rooms in which the prints and drawings fell under

various rubrics, some thematic, others curatorial: "The Italian Landscapes," "Problems of

Attribution," "Pieter the Droll?" and "Did Bruegel Read the Bible?" In New York, on the other

hand, Orenstein set out a more or less chronological arrangement, beginning with the

landscape drawings and moving to the drawings intended for prints, with detours here and

there that addressed thorny problems of attribution. While the New York installation appeared

to be designed for the connoisseur eager to evaluate Mielke's Bruegel for him- or herself-and

succeeded admirably-the Rotterdam exhibition could only frustrate that specialized viewer,

though it may have been more accessible to a general audience.

Neither curator, however, focused on the unique aspect of this exhibition-that is, the

relationship of the finished independent drawings to the drawings made for reproduction and

the subsequent prints. Both installations shed light on that critical juncture, however. Nor

does the catalogue address that issue directly. The chronologically arranged entries were

written by Orenstein, Sellink, Michiel C. Plomp, also of the Metropolitan, and Jurgen Miller.

Orenstein shouldered the lion's share of writing: in addition to fifty-one of eighty-two entries,

she authored two introductory essays, a concise summary of the artist's biography and a

discussion of his engagement with printmaking. Sellink contributed an overview of Bruegel's

iconography, Martin Royalton-Kisch of the British Museum wrote on the artist as a draftsman,

and Larry Silver sketched out the early stages of his posthumous reputation.

In the general press several reviewers complained that the catalogue is too specialized. This

seems shortsighted; as a student of this artist, I might easily argue that it is not specialized

enough. Curators have always had to steer (in a timely fashion) between the demands of the

general audience and those of restive academics. As will become evident below, each of the

essays provided fresh insights into this virtually undocumented artist. I do not mean to slight

the authors when I admit that I found the excellent color reproductions of all the drawings

exhibited, many with additional color details, the most valuable aspect of the catalogue. The

drawings are scattered in print rooms from Washington, D.C., to Prague. Showing each

drawing in nearly accurate color and each print in clear, crisp black-and-white, the catalogue

provides a mnemonic for the specialist and the generalist alike and will serve as a reference

tool for years to come. The rewards are exceptional for an artist of Bruegel's pictorial

intelligence.

Rather than a review of Mielke's Bruegel, what follows is intended to draw out some of the

insights Orenstein and Sellink made available in their respective, expansive installations.

Bruegel executed most of the finished, independent drawings that have survived early in his

career, shortly before his journey to Italy and during his stay there between approximately

1552 and 1554. The majority were probably presentation drawings, that is, designed as gifts

or as samples to display the artist's skill. Some he surely made to be purchased. But by

whom? And for how much money? Virtually all we know for certain about this period is that

Giulio Clovio-the prince of miniaturists, as Giorgio Vasari characterized him--was acquainted

with Bruegel, since the two collaborated on a miniature of the Tower of Babel. By his death in

1578 the Farnese miniaturist owned nine compositions by the Fleming, if the attributions on

the inventory of his collection are to be believed. One sheet was a view of Lyons, one the

aforementioned Tower of Babel, and five were described merely ad "paese."

We might take a cue from that cryptic entry. At first glance it appears that nothing much

happens in these early landscape drawings. Saint Jerome kneels down to pray under a

mightly Campagnolesque tree. An even more powerful trunk spirals upward in the Wooded

Landscape with Mills (Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Fig. 1). Cows graze in the shade. In a 1553

drawing in the British Museum several figures on foot, horse, and mule make their way down

to a river valley (Fig. 2). Directly across the river is a fortified monastery perched high on a

rocky bluff. From it the road descends to the left, passing meadows with livestock grazing

and a village half hidden by a hillock. As the river widens in the distance, the settlements

along the water grow increasingly larger. A number of boats, including a barge pulled from a

towpath, indicate that the travelers in the foreground are descending into a populated,

prosperous region. One, however, has put down the basket he had been shouldering and

cups his head in his hands, apparently too weary to move on. His companion leans toward

him, and curiously, a third points at the two. To the right of them another travelerleans

forward, arm outstretched behind his horse. Bruegel would illustrate this same proverb,

"paardekeutels zijn green vijgen" (horse droppings are no figs)--a pointed choice for this

master of illusion--six years later in the Netherlandish Proverbs.

This is a remarkably accomplished drawing executed within two years of Bruegel's entry into

the Antwerp Guild of St. Luke. As Royalton-Kisch reminds the reader in his catalogue essay,

"Pieter Bruegel as a Draftsman: The Changing Image," Bruegel learned much from his

predecessors, the Flemish practitioners of the world landscape such as Cornelis Massys

(and Mathijs Cock), as well as from the Venetians. Indeed, his landscape drawing are

remarkably similar to those of Girolamo Muziano, who was working in Rome during Bruegel's

stay, and even Federico Barocci, who may have been present as well. Neither the Flemings

nor the Italians ever infused their landscape with the copious detail Bruegel used. Rovalton-

Kisch rightfully points to the fact that Mayken Verhulst, wife of Bruegel's putative teacher

Pieter Coecke van Aelst and eventually the artist's motherin-law, has been described as a

miniature painter, and that in collaborating with Clovio, Bruegel was working with the most

renowned miniaturist of the time. The result-many separate, small places to examine on

either side of the water that descends to the flatlands-is analogous to the text constructed by

Erasmus's student who was counseled to light on every blossom in the entire garden of

literature in the preparation of his own collection. This is the northern version of the locus

amoenus, meant to be savored bit by bit. Mielke associated this drawing, in the tradition of

the paysage moralise, with the pilgrimage of life. At the same time, the collection of minute

details, some humorous, some curious, made this vista a "place of delight" that a

sophisticated Italian eye would have enjoyed as well.

Mielke's catalogue raisonne ascribes sixtyone sheets to Bruegel's hand; here, one sheet has

been added and another removed (about which more later). Royalton-Kisch calls attention to

the number of drawings by the artist that must have perished over the centuries; he hazards

an estimate that perhaps as little as 1 percent of Bruegel's original corpus has come down to

us. Fewer than half the designs for prints, a handful (mostly disputed) of figure studies, and

no preliminary sketches have survived. Not a single drawing can be associated with any of

Bruegel's panels. As he points out, the paintings are replete with details an artist would try

out first on paper-the complicated hoists and scaffolding of the Tower of Babel, the bizarre

architecture jutting out from the cliffs in the Haymaking, or, in the same panel, the carefully

varied group of three young women, the youngest of whom deliberately catches the viewer's

eye. Of course, such losses make the question of attribution especially complicated, as it

becomes virtually impossible to determine whether a certain drawing is the sole survivor of

an otherwise unknown stage in Bruegel's career or if it is by another hand. If we accept

Royalton-Kisch's contention that up to 99 percent of the oeuvre might be missing-and he

makes a convincing argument-one would have to admit that even the most uncontroversial

attribution appears to rest on rather insubstantial foundations.

The six sheets executed in a very loose style that Hans Mielke added to the early oeuvre

demonstrate the point. While controversy swirled in print rooms across the United States and

Europe when Mielke first added these drawings to Bruegel's oeuvre, up to this point his

authority and experience have held sway, and no one has publicly rejected them. Royalton-

Kisch is the first to challenge the cohesiveness of the group. Disturbed by the tentative

character of the draftsmanship of the Leiden Path through a Village (Fig. 3) and noting that

that sheet shares an even line and thinly executed foliage with the drawings in the

Nasjonalgallieriet, Oslo, and the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig, and with the

Cow Pasture before a Farmhouse in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Royalton-

Kisch suggests all were executed before the Venetian-inspired 1552 Wooded Landscape

with Mills (Fig. 1). Having called attention to the similarity of these sheets to the few extant

examples of Peeter Baltens's draftsmanship, an artist Bruegel is known to have worked with

in 1551, Royalton-Kisch argues that these drawings should be associated with that moment

and are unlikely to have been executed after Bruegel began to study the woodcuts after

Titian and Domenico Campagnola. On the face of it such redating is unproblematic, since the

Oslo Pastoral Landscape is indeed dated 1552, and it is closely related to both the

Braunschweig and Washington sheets. It also has the virtue of relegating the stylistic

uncertainties of the Leiden drawing to a youthful and thus inexperienced hand. However, not

only attributions but also arguments for stylistic evolution seem somewhat tendentious if

indeed we have lost 99 percent of Bruegel's drawings. How, then, are we to explain the

similarities between these sheets and the last one of Mielke's group, the Wooded Landscape

with a Distant View toward the Sea (Fogg Art Museum), on which RoyaltonKisch himself

found the date of 1554-that is, two years later than the Oslo sheet?

Discussion during the November 5, 2001, Scholars' Day at the Metropolitan indicated that the

most contentious of Mielke's attributions is what he believed to be Bruegel's preparatory

drawing for his only etching, The Rabbit Hunt, traditionally considered to be a copy of that

preparatory design.3 Coupled with it is the newly attributed Journey to Emmaus in

Rotterdam, proposed by Royalton-- Kisch, which does appear to be by the same hand,

although it had previously been given to Jan Brueghel.4 The latter is drawn in such a sketchy

manner that in his catalogue entry Sellink regards it as a compositional study for an unknown

painting or print. Aside from two incomplete sketches on the verso of finished drawings,

these two sheets, if accepted, would be by far the most loosely executed drawings we have

by Bruegel's hand.

Despite Mielke's severely reduced oeuvre, additional drawings are slowly becoming available

for comparison. An infrared reflectogram of the Fogg's Wooded Landscape with a Distant

View toward the Sea assembled by the Straus Center for Conservation at Harvard reveals

the loose style of Bruegel's preparatory chalk drawing (Fig. 4). Infrared reflectograms do not

reproduce well in print, and it takes a trained eye to interpret them, but they are critical to our

understanding of the artist's working habits. The argument for publishing additional

underdrawings of both drawings and panels becomes all the more compelling when we

consider the conclusions by Rebecca Duckwitz and Christina Currie in their respective

essays in the catalogue for the exhibition Firma Brueghel, devoted primarily to Pieter

Brueghel the Younger's multiple copies of his father's designs.5 To both these authors it

seems relatively certain that the son and his assistants used now lost, highly detailed

preparatory drawings of the father's compositions for their copies. If the drawing of The

Rabbit Hunt in the Lugt Collection is indeed a preparatory drawing by Bruegel's hand-and I

am inclined to believe it is-it would constitute the first step in the reconstruction of that studio

practice.6

In Rome, then, Bruegel drew complex, multilayered vistas clearly aimed at a discerning eye.

How the young Fleming attracted such a clientele, as well as how he had access to the

aristocratic Farnese circle are still matters of conjecture. Some possible avenues of research

into this early period were uncovered by the two venues of the exhibition, precisely because

they were so unlike. Sell-- ink's division of the work on paper by subject matter-indeed, as a

16th-century collector might have arranged it-drew the viewers' attention to what we might

call the editorial eye behind these images: a thematic coherence that may have been

imposed at the time by someone other than the draftsman. Reviews of the Rotterdam venue

expressed surprise. "La folle vision de Bruegel" was the headline in L'Oeil. "Old Master

Bruegel no bumpkin," exclaimed the Art Newspaper, "as shown by the largest ever exhibition

of his drawings, he was not just a jolly story-telling depictor of peasants."7 Even scholars

long familiar with each and every composition in the exhibition were taken aback at the

decidedly pessimistic portrait of 16th-century culture this collection of prints and drawings

appeared to present.

Who is this Bruegel who has a family of pigs saunter through the Kennis at Hoboken and

surrounds Justitia with prisoners decapitated, hanged, and burned at the stake, including one

particularly unfortunate soul who is tortured on the rack while liquid is forced down his throat

and hot wax drips onto his legs? In fact, it is a very public Bruegel, the Bruegel his fellow

citizens knew well. Outside of the early landscapes, very few drawings have come down to

us that were not intended for widespread distribution. The fools, the executions, the torture,

the hunters turned hunted were all designs for prints to be published by the entrepreneur

Hieronymus Cock, whose publishing house Aux Quatre Vents had become among the most

prolific in Europe by his death in 1570. Whether the orthodox and successful print publisher

approached Bruegel or the reverse is unknown. But both Sell-- ink's installation in Rotterdam

with its emphasis on subject matter and Orenstein's chronological hang in New York drew

attention to hitherto overlooked facets of the professional relationship between the draftsman

and his publisher or, perhaps more accurately, the publisher's influence on this talented

artist.

Precisely when their collaboration might have begun remains a vexing question. Karel van

Mander reported that Bruegel went to work for Cock before his departure for France and Italy

sometime in 1552, although no hard evidence of that early association has survived.8 If this

is true, Bruegel would have been associated with Cock at least three years earlier than we

now assume. His stay in Rome then would have been less a Wanderjahr and presumably

more akin to a business trip. From this perspective the etching of the Temptation of Christ

acquires added significance. In 1966, Karl Arndt recognized that this etching, inscribed "H.

Cock fecit.," was based on a drawing of a landscape with bears in the Narodni Galerie,

Prague, by Bruegel.9 Cock simply replaced the bears with the figures of Christ and the Devil

disguised as a hermit. As Sellink notes in the catalogue entry, the drawing corresponds

closely to other landscapes Bruegel penned while he was in Rome. The sheet is in poor

condition, but if its date is indeed 1554-and this has been disputed-it would add credence to

van Mander's chronology.10 At the very least it would indicate that some of the designs

executed in Rome may have been drawn with the reproductive process in mind. Conceivably,

too, Cock's connections might explain Bruegel's welcome in the Farnese circle.

The degree to which Cock altered Bruegel's designs for publication is less obvious in the so-

called Large Landscapes, an ambitious series of twelve etchings of approximately 12 1/2 by

16 1/2 inches that Cock published ofter Bruegel's return. Two of Bruegel's drawings for the

series survive, one in the Louvre, dated [15]55, which is in such poor condition that it could

not travel, and another in the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp, also fragile

and hence exhibited only in Rotterdam. The entire set, as well as one additional, somewhat

larger Alpine landscape, was etched and then enriched with engraving by a pair of highly

skilled printmakers,Joannes and Lucas van Doetecum. Landscapes had been the subject of

prints before, of course; one thinks of Albrecht Altdorfer's haunting etchings, Wolf Huber's

experiments in perspectival space in nature, and especially Domenico Campagnola's roiling

vistas and turbulent trees, which so affected Bruegel. But the Large Landscapes is the

earliest known series of prints devoted to natura. Was it Cock the entrepreneur who collected

Bruegel's drawings into a group? Or on his return, did the talented artist who had plied his

wares to the Farnese household convince Cock of the profit to be had in the publication of

such an ambitious series?

As they had done with the secular Landscape with Bears transformed into the Temptation of

Christ, Cock and his printmakers made changes to Bruegel's designs. They converted the

Antwerp Landscape with Three Pilgrims into the etching Euntes in Emaus with the simple

addition of a halo around the central figure. Additional and more telling evidence of Cock's

editorial process comes from a British Museum drawing that Mielke believed was preparatory

to Solicitudo rustica but is here believed to be a copy of that drawing. The fact that

approximately one-quarter of the landscape in the etching is missing from this drawing tends

to corroborate the reattribution, since it seems unlikely that Bruegel would have prepared

only three-quarters of the seamless composition. Except for some staffage across the valley

floor, the remainder of the vista corresponds to the etching with excruciating fidelity, with one

notable exception. As Orenstein notes, to the right of the drawing, in the town nestled on the

bank of the river, a fire rages out of control. No such calamity appears in the finished etching

or in any other of the twelve Large Landscapes. One wonders what other half-hidden

catastrophes the draftsman might have included in nooks and crannies of the distant vistas,

only to have them bowdlerized by his publisher.

More than content was altered in the printing process, as would have been obvious if the

preparatory drawing in the Louvre for the unlabeled Alpine landscape of the series had been

able to travel. Despite the drawing's poor condition it is clear that Bruegel did not conceive of

this vista as mountainous terrain to be traversed along a prescribed path. One has the

impression that here, as in the British Museum Mountain Landscape with River and Travelers

(Fig. 2), there are many separate small places to examine on either side of the water that

gouges its way through the highlands. In the Louvre drawing a second hand used gray ink

over the original brown to emphasize the mountainous formations on the right of the sheet.

The same ink was used to render the two small figures about to cross the bridge spanning

the ravine. Effectively filling in pathways in the etching that Bruegel only suggested in the

drawing, the Doetecum brothers offered the viewer a moralized version of the armchair

journey Georg Braun promised his readers in the introduction to the Civitates orbis terrarum

two decades later. Rather than flitting like the proverbial bee from place to place, the viewer

of the etching must find the right path and trudge purposefully along it, blind to the

blandishments on either side. The printmakers' intervention enhanced the narrative quality of

Bruegel's composition at the expense, one might say, of the episodic. Yet as others and I

have argued, this episodic approach-already apparent in the landscape drawings executed in

Italy-- becomes a hallmark of Bruegel's mature compositions such as the Seasons and the

Numbering at Bethlehem. The fact that Cock and the Doetecum brothers were either

insensitive or impervious to experiencing these vistas in that fashion speaks volumes, I think,

about the audience Cock was envisioning for this series. The places of delight were

sacrificed in favor of the paysage moralise.

Both venues made it clear that in some prints Cock intervened even more radically.

Orenstein's catalogue entry for the Large Landscapes explicitly rejects Catherine Levesque's

suggestion that the prints might be arranged to mirror Bruegel's return voyage from Italy over

the Alps and back to the Low Countries.11 In Rotterdam Sellink arranged the prints not as a

journey, but instead to make some persuasive visual arguments related to questions of

attribution. He gathered together the three compositions with the most Campagnola-like

compositions-the Milites requiescentes, with its powerfully twisting tree bisecting the

composition; the Pagus nemorosus, its right side closely related to the Bruegel drawing now

in Berlin that is based on Campagnola's design; and the Plaustrum Belgicum, which also

exhibits the energy for which the Venetian draftsman was noted-- hanging them next to the

tall, thin, insubstantial trees visible in Fuga deiparae in Aegyptum and in Nundinae

rusticorum. While art historians have long doubted Bruegel's hand in the staffage of these

latter two prints, Sellink's arrangement effectively illustrated Orenstein's contention in the

catalogue that not simply the staffage but the entire composition of the two prints should be

given to another hand, and this despite the fact that both have Bruegel's name as inventor.12

In New York, on the other hand, where these latter two etchings were hung separately and

the prints were indeed arranged as if to replicate a journey from Italy across the Alps to the

Lowlands (despite Orenstein's having earlier rejected this notion), the series suddenly

achieved a stylistic and iconographic coherence that might have been unknown even in

Bruegel's day, given that Bruegel and pseudo-Bruegel were sold together.13

Just as the Large Landscapes were being issued, Bruegel's designs for Cock turned away

from natura in favor of the ever popular Hieronymus Bosch. In Rotterdam the majority of the

drawings and prints cast in Bosch's infernal vocabulary were grouped in two rooms near the

end of the exhibition. Hence it was the New York hang, where Orenstein arranged the early

drawings for prints in approximate chronological order, that threw into relief Bruegel's sudden

transformation into the "second Bosch," as the Liege humanist Domenicus Lampsonius was

to call him.14 In 1556 there appeared an engraving of the Temptation of Saint Anthony

(represented by a pristine impression), which is executed in the same direction as an

unsigned but only occasionally doubted drawing by Bruegel. The print was inscribed merely

"cock excud." That same year Bruegel signed a drawing known as Big Fish Eat Little Fish, a

proverb seen in several compositions by Bosch and reproduced by many of the Bosch

followers. When Cock issued the engraving the following year, it was inscribed "Hieronymus

Bos inventor." Only a short year later, when Cock published Patientia shown assaulted by

Boschian trials (including, at least in the first state, an outsize figure astride a hollow egg who

wears a cardinal's hat that sports the crossed keys), Bruegel was identified as the inventor.

Apparently by that point Bruegel's reputation was such that Cock was convinced (perhaps by

the artist himself) that there was no longer any reason to dissimulate. A Bosch by Bruegel

must have found a ready audience.

The consummate designer of landscapes transformed himself into a second Bosch by

borrowing from the common parlance of the Bosch followers. He also found help closer to

home. By the time Bruegel began his series the Seven Deadly Sins in 1556 Cock was about

to publish or had just published Elephant of War, an anonymous etching based on Alaert

Duhameel's version of the subject, which itself had been inscribed "bosche." Here, too, Cock

added Bosch's name as the inventor (Fig. 5).15 For his drawing of Ira (the only drawing of

the series for which the curators were not able to secure a loan), Bruegel borrowed details

such as the funnel that shields attackers, the nail-studded circular shield with a face in the

center, and the boat supported by barrels. More important, he returned to the imagery in

Elephant of War for the considerably more elaborate design of Superbia (Fig. 6). The entire

right background of his drawing is a reworking of the armor on Cock's elephant.16 I belabor

the relationship deliberately: a scooped-out receptacle in the top center of Bruegel's sheet

grows from an armadillolike back and holds a crowd kneeling before a nude, helmeted man;

it was inspired by the metallic compartment above Cock's elephant's ear. Below and to the

right, Bruegel's turret (above what looks like inverted spectacles) is an elaboration of the

central part of the elephant's armor. The texture is the same in both; Bruegel merely reduced

the ovoid openings and projected the ribs into arcs. The decorated, grated doorway in the

center of the elephant's armor reappears in the upper right corner of Superbia. Bruegel's

obvious dependence on the etching clarifies that it was Hieronymus Cock who first

understood the lucrative possibilities of issuing Boschian prints; perhaps he even had to

persuade the young landscapist to try his hand at this unfamiliar vocabulary. One might even

wonder if there would have been a Dulle Griet without Hieronymus Cock.

A glance at any one of the anonymous infernal panels in the recent Bosch exhibition at the

Boijmans served to affirm the unique aspects of the young Bruegel's emulation of the older

artist. As J. G. van Gelder was the first to remark, the landscape and architecture in

Bruegel's Seven Deadly Sins reflect the subject matter.17 The pawnbroker's hut in Avaritia is

ramshackle and mean, the landscape in Luxuria is verdant and lush, and here in Superbia

the architecture is ostentatious. As such the buildings serve as exempla of the vice

personified in the center of the sheet. For centuries past, preachers had used exempla-

fables, proverbs, anecdotes-to make the principles that infused their sermons both easier

understood and more attractive to their parishioners. In the 16th century no one explained

the function of this rhetorical strategy more clearly than Erasmus of Rotterdam. During his

third visit to England, from 1509 to 1514, he completed a short textbook on how to write

copiously in Latin, De duplici copia verborum ac rerum, a text so popular that it was reprinted

150 times in the 16th century. Erasmus devotes over half the second book to the "eleventh

method of enriching [which] depends on the copious accumulation of proofs and arguments."

Commonplaces are appropriate, but the "most powerful for proof, and therefore for copia is

the force of exempla.... Most of these," he continues, "are customarily used not only for

producing belief but also for embellishing and illustrating, for enriching and amplifying subject

matter."18 Erasmus's description delineates precisely the role of Bruegel's ostentatious

architecture in Superbia. Not all the infernal exempla frighten the viewer; some embellish the

sheet, enhancing its illustrative force. They enrich, they amplify, they make Pride more vivid.

As both Walter Gibson and Larry Silver pointed out in their contributions to the one-day

symposium in Rotterdam, Bosch's eschatological vocabulary had long since lost its fearful

bite.

Accordingly, it was in his 1548 Const van rhetoriken that the poet Matthijs de Castelein

described Satan himself as "drol." Small wonder then that in a list of prints sent by

Christophe Plantin to the Parisian bookseller Martin Le Jeune in 1558, four sets of the Seven

Deadly Sins are described as "4 les 7 pechez droleries."19 Ten years later in the second

edition of the Lives Giorgio Vasari described the Alchemist without naming the artist and then

added, "which plate was designed for him [Cock] by a painter, who caused him to engrave

the Seven Deadly Sins with demons of various forms, which was a fantastic and laughable

thing [che furono cosa fantastica e da ridere]."20 It is clear from his catalogue essay " `The

Very Lively and Whimsical Pieter Brueghel' " that Sellink is well aware of this humorous

characterization of Bruegel's infernal compositions. As he reminds the reader, van Mander

introduced Bruegel as one who "had practised a lot after the works of Jeroon van den Bosch

and he also made many spectres and burlesques in his manner, so that he was called by

many Pier den Drol." Conventional religious subjects were not excepted. Sellink quotes van

Mander again, describing "two pieces [by Bruegel] with the Carrying of the Cross, very

natural to look at, in which there were always some burlesque details" (p. 59).21 At the same

time, Sellink characterizes the myriad of exempla surrounding the Sins as "Bruegel's

frightening, diabolical images [which] offer evidence of the hellish everlasting life awaiting us

after the Last Judgment and at the same time confront us with the monstrous consequences

of our sins during life on earth, namely the loss of dignity and spiritual purity" (p. 60). This is

to characterize Bruegel as the stem moralist par excellence.

Similarly, in Rotterdam the only Boschian composition exhibited in the room labeled "Pieter

the Droll?" was Big Fish Eat Little Fish. The Seven Deadly Sins as well as the Temptation of

Saint Anthony and the marvelously weird Descent into Limbo came under the somewhat

portentous, or at least quite serious, rubrics "Bruegel's Moral Lessons" and "The Ways of Sin

and Virtue." Of course, Bruegel's Deadly Sins evoke the bestial and infernal to instruct their

viewers to follow a virtuous path. But that is only half the story. This is a culture that took its

humor seriously. The armadillolike mouth of hell in Superbia, the half woman, half fish at

lower right in the same composition who evokes Horace, and surely the giant who is too lazy

to defecate in Desidia would hardly terrify the Antwerp burgher who bought these prints. Van

Mander knew this when he claimed that most works by "Pier den Drol" elicited a laugh, or at

least a smile. Because they are at the same time infernal and droll, Bruegel's Boschian

compositions partake in a ludic, risible farce that is profoundly dialogic; humor enlivens the

sheets as it mocks what it parodies. That liveliness was lost in Rotterdam's ostensibly

didactic last two rooms. On the whole, arranging the works according to subject matter

distracted the viewer from precisely those characteristics that Sellink drew attention to in his

essay: the lively, the whimsical, and the droll, those epithets the earliest commentators chose

to describe Bruegel's compositions.

Both curators opted to hang Bruegel's series the Seven Virtues-again, personifications

surrounded with exempla, but now of a more quotidian character-with the Seven Deadly

Sins. The Sins were completed in 1557 and published, probably together as a set, in 1558.

The Virtues were begun the following year and completed in 1560. Remarkably, all fourteen

drawings for these engravings have survived. Seeing them all together made it clear how

carefully Bruegel disciplined his draftsmanship in the drawings that were to be engraved. For

example, in the drawing for Avaritiaone of Bruegel's earliest multifigural compositions-the

draftsman gave no indications of a locale in which these figures were placed. Instead, he

appears to have envisioned the personification surrounded by a myriad of infernal exempla,

much as gnats might swirl around an old pawnbroker's head on a sultry summer afternoon.

He related figures and architecture by contour and texture rather than by having them share

a believable space. The engraver Pieter Van der Heyden was not sensitive to such

relationships. He translated flicks and stipples into ponderous crosshatchings; added a

ground line to connect the left and right background; inserted moneybags and a gold

weigher's scale to fill up what was perceived as an empty foreground. Bruegel apparently

absorbed the lesson, for the remainder of the Seven Deadly Sins are carefully set in a

believable landscape, every detail carefully delineated. As Orenstein points out in the

catalogue, when it came to the drawings to be converted into prints, Bruegel learned to

sacrifice the freedom the pen af-- fords in favor of a more easily replicable and uniform

crosshatching. Such a disciplined-- line differs markedly from the vibrant curves, loops, and

swirls found on the earlier landscape drawings. The virtue of such a comprehensive show is

that the marked difference between the draftsmanship in the early independent drawings and

the disciplined style Bruegel adopted for the printmaker was forcibly demonstrated.

In the conclusion to her catalogue essay "Images to Print: Pieter Bruegel's Engagement with

Printmaking," Orenstein stresses the collaborative nature of the printmaking process, asking,

"What influence might the engravers, inscription writers, and publishers have had on [the

engravings'] content?" (p. 54). To some degree the question is rhetorical, because in their

respective installations Orenstein and Sellink, both by training print rather than drawing

specialists, shed considerable light on the nature of that collaboration. Cock did more than

rein in Bruegel's trenchant wit by instigating certain cautious changes in the engravings, such

as turning a bishop's mitre into an innocuous hat in Bruegel's Luxuria or omitting both the

artist's and publisher's names on the punishments surrounding Justitia. He was probably

responsible for the choice of the commonplaces published at the bottom of the prints,

sometimes taken from classical authors such as Ovid and Juvenal and at other times from

the Bible, and which often do not quite address the image at hand. More important, one

comes away from both the thematic and the chronological installations with the decided

impression that he had a hand in Bruegel's turn to figural allegories and peasant recreations,

which the artist would eventually transpose onto panel. This was an entrepreneur who had

learned of the profit to be had in pointed commentary at the expense of the economically,

socially, or mentally disadvantaged.

Discovering the nuances of the relationship between the artist and his publisher was only one

of the rewards of this exhibition. Seeing the independent drawings with those made for prints

disclosed a complex, even crafty, artistic persona. Already in the earliest known drawings,

where the architecture still lists to one side, Bruegel's pictorial subtlety asserts itself A

covered wagon disappearing around a hillock serves as a compositional fulcrum of the

Leiden Path through a Village (Fig. 3). At right in the Ambrosiana Wooded Landscape with

Mills (Fig. 1), a small, thin tree with fresh spring foliage serves as a pictorial foil to its weighty

counterpart, the massive spiraling trunk. The prints Hieronymus Cock issued do not provide

such nuanced pleasures. The complexity and variety of the surfaces in Bruegel's drawing for

the Alchemist is lost in Philips Galle's engraving. Even Bruegel's own etching of The Rabbit

Hunt does not approach the copiousness characteristic of drawings such as the Mountain

Landscape with River and Travelers (Fig. 2), despite the fact that the etcher's needle can

render minute detail more readily than a quill pen. The young draftsman who set out for

Rome fashioned landscape drawings that invited study as long and pleasurable as that

afforded by the painter of the Seasons a decade later. Whether or not his audience gave him

the reception he deserved is another matter.

In sum, although it broke no new ground the exhibition Orenstein and Sellink mounted

accomplished significantly more than simply presenting Mielke's Bruegel to a wider audience.

Over the past few years Bruegel scholarship has concentrated on the culture that produced

and consumed the artist's compositions, a topic that sorely needed study. By bringing all the

work on paper together in a virtually monographic exhibition, the curators refocused our eyes

on the surface of these sheets, drawing attention to the towering pictorial intelligence of

Pieter Bruegel the Elder. This is what museums do best, and it serves as not only a useful

but also a necessary antipode to recent research. The reintroduction of pictorial skills-skills,

as we have seen, that the artist manipulated as he gauged his audience-into the critical

debate should not be considered a return to the so-called formalism of decades past. Like

subject matter, form is always ideologically charged.22 But it is not always serious.

In fact, humor seems to hover around Bruegel's compositions in whichever period they were

executed. In his catalogue essay "The Importance of Being Bruegel: The Posthumous

Survival of the Art of Pieter Bruegel the Elder," Larry Silver follows Jan G.C.A. Briels's lead

by reconfiguring what is often called an end-of-century Bruegel revival into a continuous

tradition, with the still relatively unstudied painter and draftsman Hans Bol as a major

protagonist in this evolution. Bol's student Gillis van Coninxloo's forest scenes are well

known. Less familiar but not obscure are David Vinckboons's peasant revelries, which Silver

links persuasively to Bruegel the Elder's then known oeuvre. He places the Bruegelian

subjects favored by these three artists and their circle-skating scenes, forest landscapes, and

boerenverdriet, or "peasant distress"-in the context of the emulation of the older artist. For

successful emulation, a concept based on the aemulatio of classical rhetoric, a certain

independence from the exemplar is necessary to distinguish one's own work from its model.

As Silver notes, competition, indeed, rivalry between the younger generation and the masters

they emulate is intrinsic to the process.

Van Mander's description of Hendrik Goltzius's aemulatio provides a useful example here. In

1593-94 Goltzius prepared six engratings of the early life of the Virgin, the Meesterstukjes, in

the style of the Italians, Lucas van Leyden, and Direr, and:

When these things were ready and had hardly been seen by anyone he had very witty

practical jokes played, in particular with the print of the Circumcision, engraved in the style of

Albert Darer, and in which... his mark he had burned out with a redhot coal or iron and

repaired again, after that he smoked and crumpled it as if it were very old and had been on

this earth for many years. This print... was eagerly seen with great admiration and pleasure

by artists and art lovers who had knowledge of these things, and was also bought at a high

price by some who were happy that they had been able to obtain such a piece by the art-full

Nuremberger.23

Because it has challenge built into its very nature, eventually, and not infrequently, the

practice of emulation becomes a sort of surreptitious game for the artist as well as for the

viewer. Can the artist disguise himself and make an even better Bruegel than Bruegel

himself? Can the viewer unmask the deception? The issue lies at the crux of the relationship

between Bruegel and drawings that in the past were thought to be by him and are now given

to the Master of Small Landscapes, to Jacob Savery, to his brother Roelant, and to the newly

christened Master of the Mountain Landscapes, whose drawings Mielke had tentatively also

given to Roelant Saver,.

The identity of the so-called Master of Small Landscapes lies at the heart of the matter.

Between 1559 and 1561 Cock published, in addition to Bruegel's Kemis of Sint Joris and the

Seven Virtues, two anonymous series of small landscapes. These small etchings were unlike

anything else in print at midcentury. In place of familiar panoramic vistas, the viewer saw a

couple resting by the side of a dusty road, or a single, seemingly inebriated rider making his

unsteady way down the village street. Some etchings had no staffage at all. Apparently of

only passing interest to Cock's audience, these intimate, small-scale compositions had

virtually no imitators during the publisher's lifetime. It was as if, as David Freedberg once

wrote, the Master of Small Landscapes never existed. But in 1601 the anonymous series was

reissued in Antwerp, this time with Bruegel's younger contemporary Cornelis Cort named as

inventor. A decade later, in 1612, they were partially copied in etchings by Claes. Jansz.

Visscher, who claimed they were invented by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Even before the turn of the century, at least one artist seems to have studied the Small

Landscapes. Among the drawings that Mielke had reattributed from Bruegel to Jacob Savery

is a series of domestic landscapes, many of which were signed with Bruegel's name and

dated from 1559 to 1562. If Royalton-Kisch is correct in his estimate of how small a

percentage of Bruegel's drawings have survived, it is conceivable that Savery was copying

actual drawings by the older artist. It is even more likely that, inspired by both the series of

Large Landscapes and the two sets of etchings issued at midcentury by Cock, he executed a

set of drawings in the manner of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, that is, he emulated the master. To

my mind it is unfortunate that the curators chose to represent Savery with four small

mountainous landscapes. Other sheets in this group depict pas-oral village scenes

remarkably similar to the Small Landscapes. In a Louvre drawing two women gossip over the

fence gate. A sheet in Berlin pictures the village church nestled in a copse of sun-dappled

trees. Another sheet in the Kupferstichkabinett shows a circular bastion and stone bridge (it

was engraved in 1598 by Jacob de Gheyn and inscribed "Bruegel inv. 1561"). When in his

1986 review of a Fondation Custodia exhibition catalogue Mielke reattributed this entire

group of signed Bruegel drawings to Jacob Savery, he concluded, "The only-unsatisfactory-

explanation I have for the genesis of these drawings is that they are deliberate forgeries."24

Forgeries of what? There are no known drawings of this sort by Bruegel. Are Goltzius's

Meesterstukjes forgeries? No, they are emulations designed to display skill. And, like

Goltzius, Savery inscribed his designs with the master's signature.

A similar challenge was thrown down by the artist who penned the Morgan's Mountain

Landscape with a River, Village and Castle on paper with a watermark, as Mielke discovered,

that has not been found before 1585-88 (Fig. 7). To the twenty drawings he collected in an

appendix to his Bruegel catalogue raisonne and tentatively ascribed to Roelant Savery, the

curators of this exhibition have added one more-the drawing in reverse of the Large

Landscape entitled Solicitudo rustica, which Mielke had given to Bruegel-and reattributed the

lot to the so-called Master of the Mountain Landscapes.25 None of this group has either a

signature or a date. In New York Orenstein hung the Morgan drawing next to one I have long

suspected to be by the same hand despite a signature, the Rotterdam Mule Caravan on a

Hillside. This drawing, in turn, was copied-down to the hatched-over signature-by a later

artist. This second anonymous draftsman inscribed the boulder in the center of the sheet

BRUEGHEL 1603. That this is not the signature of one of his sons is certain, for nowhere in

either Pieter Brueghel the Younger's or Jan Brueghel's known oeuvre do we see such upright

pines as at the right of both the Morgan and Rotterdam sheets. They are visible, however, in

at least one composition that would have been considered as Pieter Bruegel the Elder's, that

is, at the right of the Magdalena poenitens of the Large Landscapes (Fig. 8).

Traces of the Magdalena composition seem to hover just beneath the surface of these two

drawings, especially the one in the Morgan. A reversed boulder, a similar relationship

between the pines and architecture to the left, a triangular mass positioned in the left middle

ground in both drawing and print-all this seems to evoke the artist whom van Mander

described as having swallowed the mountains and rocks on his journey through the Alps, and

then spat them out on his return. Yet perhaps I, like so many predecessors, discover the

Bruegel I want to see, or more likely what this still anonymous and supremely talented

draftsman of the late 16th century wanted me to credit him with. The old masters, wrote W.

H. Auden, were never wrong. They can still confound us. I imagine them laughing at our

unceasing efforts to separate the emulations from Bruegel's own hand. Or, at the very least,

smiling.

Footnote

Notes

Footnote

1. Two drawings exhibited in Rotterdam were deemed too fragile to travel to New York: the

Prague Landscape with Bears (cat. no. 15) and the Antwerp Landscape with Three Pilgrims

(cat. no. 22). The British Museum elected to hold one Bruegel drawing back from each

venue; thus, the Landscape with Fortified City (cat. no. 10) was exhibited only in Rotterdam,

and Elck (cat. no. 58) was seen only in New York. The Pierpont Morgan's Mountain

Landscape with River; Village and Castle (cat. no. 120), here given to the Master of the

Mountain Landscapes, was also seen only in New York. Not exhibited in either venue was

the Mountain Landscape with Ridge and Valley from the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum,

Braunschweig (cat. no. 4).

2. Matthias Winner et al., eds., Pieter Bruegel d.A als Zeichner Herkunft and Nachfolge, exh.

cat., Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin Dahlem, 1975. The approximately

twenty small landscapes

Footnote

were given by Mielke to Jacob Savery in his review of L'epoque de Lucas de Leyde et Pierre

Bruegel: Dessins des anciens Pays-Bas; Collection Frits Lugi, by Karel G. Boon, Master

Drawings 23-24 (1986): 75-90. The Morgan drawing was excised from Bruegel's oeuvre in

"Pieter Bruegel d.A.: Probleme seines zeichnerischen Oeuvres," jahrbuch der Berliner

Museen 33 (1991): 129-34. The Seilern drawings were reattributed tentatively to Roelant

Savery in "Noch Einmal zum Problem von Pieter Bruegels Landschaftszeichnungen: Eigene

Studien oder Ableitungen?" Munchner jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst 42 (1991): 137-47. The

catalog-tie raisonne was published posthumously, Hans Mielke, Pieter Bruegel: Die

Zeichnungen (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996).

3. In addition to the Scholars' Day at the Metropolitan, a one-day symposium was held at the

Boijmans on May 25, 2001. There are no plans to publish the papers of the symposium.

Larry Silver's contribution appears as "Breaking a Smile, from Bosch to Bruegel," in

Desipien.tia 8 (Sept. 2001): 38-46.

4. Martin Royalton-Kisch, "A Sketch for a Court ney to Emmaus' by Pieter Bruegel the Elder,"

Master Drawings 38 (2000): 443-47.

5. Firma Brueghel, at the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht from October 13, 2001, to

February 17, 2002, and the Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels from

March 22 to June 23, 2002, was curated by Peter van den Brink.

6. For discussion of Bruegel's underdrawings, see the publications by Helene M.

Verougstraete and Rogier A. Van Schoute, especially "The Triumph of Death by Pieter

Bruegel the Elder and Pieter Brueghel the Younger: Intellegetur plus semper quam pingitur,"

in Le dessin sons-jacent dons la peinture: Col toque IX, 12-14 septembre 1991; Dessin sous-

jacent et pratiques d atelier, ed. Verougstraete and Van Schoute (Louvain-la-Neuve: College

Erasure, 1993), 213-40. See also the study by Dominique Allart and Christina Currie,

"Splendours of the Winter Landscape: Winter Scenes by Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Copies

by Pieter Brueghel the Younger; Analysis of Works in Belgian Public Collections," to appear

in Scientia Artis in 2002. For the compositional drawings of Bruegel the Elder's panels, see

Rebecca Duckwitz, "The Devil Is in the Detail: Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Netherlandish

Proverbs and Copies after It

Footnote

from the Workshop of Pieter Brueghel the Younger," 58-79, and Christina Currie,

"Demystifying the Process: Pieter Brueghel the Younger's The Census at Bethlehem; A

Technical Study," 80-124, both in Brueghel Enteprises, exh. cat., Bonnefanten Museum,

Maastricht, and Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels, 2001-2. For the

relationship of underdrawings to the remainder of an artist's graphic oeuvre, see Maryan W.

Ainsworth, "Northern Renaissance Drawings and Underdrawings: A Proposed Method of

Study," Master Drawings 27 (1989): 5-38.

7. Martin Bailey, review of Orenstein et al., Art Newspaper 115 (June 2001): 26; and Manuel

Jover, review of Orenstein et al., L'Oeil 527 (June 2001): 60-63.

8. Karel van Mander, The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, ed. H.

Miedema (Doornspijk: Davaco, 1994), vol. 1, 191.

9. Karl Arndt, "Unbekannte Zeichnungen von Pieter Bruegel d.A," Pantheon 24 (1966): 207-

16.

10. My own reading of the date, not 1554 but 1556, could not be confirmed (see Nina

Eugenia Serebrennikov, review of Mielke's catalogue raisonne [as in n. 2], in the Art Bulletin

80 [1998]: 179). Unfortunately, the drawing (exhibited only in Rotterdam) arrived framed, so it

was not possible to lift the mount in order to confirm or disprove my earlier observation.

11. Catherine Levesque, Journey through Landscape in Seventeenth-Century Holland

(University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 18. Orenstein's comments

are on 120-21 of the catalogue.

Footnote

12. In his 1952 catalogue raisonne of Bruegel's drawings, Charles de Tolnay suggested that

these two prints should be given to Cock in their entirety (Tolnay, The Drawings of Pieter

Bruegel the Elder [New York: Twin Editions, 1952], 46). Konrad Oberhuber, Zwischen

Renaissance and Barock: Das Zeitalter von Bruegel and Bellange, exh. cat., Graphische

Sammlung Albertina, Vienna, 1967-68, 49, disagreed with Tolnay, as did Louis Lebeer in the

Catalogue raisonne des estampes de Bruegel l'ancien, exh. cat., Bibliotheque Royale Albert

let, Brussels, 1969, 32. Orenstein, who discovered proof states of each composition without

Bruegel's signature, attributes the invention of these two sheets to one or both of the

Doetecum brothers. Little evidence has come down to us that the Doetecum brothers were

anything but reproductive etchers, however. Moreover, a motif such as the inner harbor in the

background of the Fuga deiparae in Aegyptum has a certain specificity to it that is not

characteristic of Bruegel's more broadly handled details. The similarity between this passage

and the inner harbor on fol. 54r of the so-called Berlin Sketchbook suggests not that the

unknown composer of these two sheets was making use of that particular source, but rather

that he was combining workshop sketches to fill his landscape instead of drawing from his

imagination.

13. The series opened with Prospectus Tyburtius by itself, then paired one above the other

S. Hieronymys in deserto and Magdalena poenitens, the unlabeled Alpine landscape and

Insidious auceps, Milites requiescentes and Solicitudo rustica, Euntes in Emaus and

Plaustrum Belgicum, with the most intimate view, Pages nemorosus, last. In the catalogue (p.

120) Orenstein rightfully points out that given the lack of a title page and numbering as well

as inconsistencies in the labeling, these prints were probably sold separately or in smaller

groups. Evidence that they were also sold as a complete series is provided by a notation in

Christophe Plantin's records for August 27, 1561, when Plantin received from Cock "12

lantscap Brueghel." Plantin Archief xxxvi, reprinted in AJJ. Delen, "Christoffel Plantin als

prentenhandelaar," De Culden Passer 10 (1932): 3-4.

14. "Quis novus hic Hieronymus Orbi Boschius? . . ." The epigraph was published in 1572 by

Hieronymus Cock's widow in a collection of artists' portraits entitled Pictorum aliquot

celebrium Germaniae inferioris effigies.

15. In the Bosch exhibition at the Boijmans (Sep

Footnote

tember 1-November 11, 2001), the etching is given to one Master of Saint George's Kermis,

an appellation given to the etcher of the Kermis of Saint George by Konrad Oberhuber in the

exhibition catalogue of the 1967-68 Albertina Zwischen Renaissance and Barock (64-65).

Since that time the Kermis has been convincingly attributed to the Doetecum brothers. Who

adapted Duhameel's Elephant for the etchers is unknown.

16. The similarity was first noted by Nancy A. Corwin, "The Fire Landscape: Its Sources and

Its Development from Bosch through Jan Brueghel I, with Special Emphasis on the Mid-

Sixteenth Century Bosch `Revival,"' Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1976, 375.

17. Jan Gerrit van fielder and Jan Borms, Bruegels zeven deugden en zeven hoofdzonden

(Amsterdam: De Spieghel, 1939), 13.

18. Erasmus, On Copia of Words and Ideas, trans. Donald B. King and H. David Rix

(Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1963), 66-67.

19. Cited in Delen (as in n. 13), 11. The Patientia is described as "Patience drolerie," and Big

Fish Eat Little Fish as "Poissons drolerie."

20. Giorgio Vasari, L'opere, ed. Gaetano Milanesi (1906; reprint, Florence: Sansoni, 1973),

vol. 5, 439. 21. The translation is Miedema's, in van Mander (as in n. 8).

22. Precisely because of the work done in recent years, it would be difficult to imagine

returning to the formalism of past decades, which I would describe as a set of seemingly

ahistorical beliefs about issues of style.

23. Van Mander (as in n. 8), vol. 1, 397. 24. Mielke, 1986 (as in n. 2), 81.

25. The drawing, which is laid down (hence, the watermark is not visible), had been

associated with the later group by Royalton-Kisch in his review of Mielke, 1996 (as in n. 2) in

Burlington Magazine 140 (1998): 208.

AuthorAffiliation

NINA EUGENIA SEREBRENNIKOV

AuthorAffiliation

Nina Eugenia Serebrennikov, professor of art history at Davidson College, studies

Netherlandish art of the sixteenth century. She is currently preparing a book, Experiencing

Space, Representing Land, on the shifting notions of place and space in that period [Art

Department, Davidson College, Box 7117, Davidson, N.C. 28035-7117].

_______________________________________________________________ Indexing (details)

Subject Visual artists;

Art exhibits

People Brueghel, Pieter (the Elder) (1530-69)

Title Pieter Bruegel the Elder: The draftsman revealed

Author Serebrennikov, Nina Eugenia

Publication title The Art Bulletin

Volume 84

Issue 3

Pages 501-510

Number of pages 10

Publication year 2002

Publication date Sep 2002

Year 2002

Publisher New York

Publisher College Art Association, Inc.

Place of publication New York

Country of publication United States

Journal subject Art

ISSN 00043079

CODEN ABCABK

Source type Scholarly Journals

Language of publication English

Document type Arts/Exhibits Review-Favorable

Subfile Art exhibits, Visual artists

ProQuest document ID 222949378

Document URL http://search.proquest.com/docview/222949378?accountid=15533

Copyright Copyright College Art Association of America Sep 2002

Last updated 2010-06-09

Database ProQuest Central << Link to document in ProQuest

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