About Suffering

About Suffering they were never wrong/ The Old Masters how well they understood/ Its human position, how it takes place/ While someone else is eating…. -- W.H. Auden “Musee de Beaux Arts”

Breugel At the forefront of

intellectual thought in the sixteenth century

The reality of human existence

Humility and Tolerance

Symbolically rich paintings

Bruegel’s Period

In the wake of Luther

Peasant Uprisings

Against the Countess of Stuhlingen

Petitioning of the twelve articles: right to elect pastors, end to serfdom, free collection of wood, abolition of certain tithes, restoration of hunting and fishing rights etc.

Easter, 1525 (primary source quotations)

“Peasant” Bruegel and his Immediate Influences

“City child,” certainly not a peasant; therefore, Bruegel regularly interacted with the most important Flemish thinkers.

Abraham Ortelius: geographer and humanist

Dirk Coornhert: theologian, philosopher, humanist, statesman, writer, printmaker

The Time of Copernicus and discovery

From Coornhert, the humanism of the reformation

Spirit of an Age: Copernicus and Erasmus, 16th Century Giants

The Polish astronomer,Copernicus had revealed to all the world that Universe was a fundamentally different

SPANISH INVASION

In the 1560s King Phillip II of Spain ordered the Duke of Alba to raise 20,000 troops to invade the Low CountriesDuring this time Breugel executed his most somber themesMany paintings were destroyed—possibly from this time period

Christ and the Adulteress: humility and tolerance

Influenced by Raphael

Die sonder sonde is die…

The two groups: the accused and the shamed

We feel humble and tolerant and awed

The Wedding Dance

•William Carlos Williams’ poem—”The dancers go round”

•Bruegel, the party crasher

•The quiet observer with writing tools

•Have the revelers missed the point?

•The sixteenth-century “YMCA”

•Nature in the vanishing point

About Suffering

About suffering, they were never wrong

The Fall of Icarus Ovid’s interpretation Tragedy but no one

notices

Landscape with Gallows and Magpie

Gossiping on the gallows: gossips hang in Netherlandish proverbsDancing on the gallowsThe defecating man is BSingThe Spanish Inquisition

Haymaking: perfect harmony

                             

Here for one, Breugel felt

human beings to be in perfect harmony with nature; when they are idle and sometimes while they are doing their work various degrees of ugliness remain, but here … they are happy and radiant.

 

CONCLUSION

Knew what the Italians never noticed “In Italy during the sixteenth century, the unvarnished reality that Breugel (sic) championed was ignored

Unprettified visual reality

Humility and tolerance

Modern Breugels: Faulkner, Steinbeck, Budbill

John Prine: Just a big goofy world with a big goofy man dancing with a big goofy girl

Mystery Slide One

Mystery Slide Two

Mystery Slide Three