bruegel: cosmic frailties

Much like Michelangelo, Bruegel created a symbolic colossus from the material of the human figure. But the two artists’ colossi resemble one another only in the monumentality of their weight a breadth. Michelangelo idealized man as the supreme intellectual and passionate force. The beauty in the idealized body in Michelangelo’s art expresses man’s spiritual nobility, but in its state of glorious nudity the symbol exists without earthly connections; it could never walk through the streets, could never inhabit a landscape that was not correspondingly invented to suit it.

---The Adoration of the Magi by Pieter Bruegel, in the National Gallery of London (public domain photo) Who else would put such ugly humanity into a picture of this great event? What a congregation of mean, stupid people! The rude soldiers look as though they have collected for an arrest or a Crucifixion and are disappointed. Except for the crossbowman with a bolt in his hat (the way a carpenter keeps his pencil): he has gone soft on seeing the Infant and Mother. The two men on the right are just curious bystanders. God only knows what they will go home and tell their wives. Hearty St. Joseph loves a good meal. What is that servant whispering to him? Presumably it isn’t bad news, such as that the owner of the stable would like him and his family to leave. Why did Bruegel make the Kings ugly too, except for the beautiful black Balthassar, who holds one of the most original gold ships there ever was?---click image for source...
—The Adoration of the Magi by Pieter Bruegel, in the National Gallery of London (public domain photo)
Who else would put such ugly humanity into a picture of this great event?
What a congregation of mean, stupid people! The rude soldiers look as though they have collected for an arrest or a Crucifixion and are disappointed. Except for the crossbowman with a bolt in his hat (the way a carpenter keeps his pencil): he has gone soft on seeing the Infant and Mother.
The two men on the right are just curious bystanders. God only knows what they will go home and tell their wives.
Hearty St. Joseph loves a good meal. What is that servant whispering to him? Presumably it isn’t bad news, such as that the owner of the stable would like him and his family to leave.
Why did Bruegel make the Kings ugly too, except for the beautiful black Balthassar, who holds one of the most original gold ships there ever was?—click image for source…

In Bruegel, all this is reversed with the symbol’s majesty lying in its plainness, a clumsiness that pivits away from idealized form and is only retentive of figurative form within an identity to nature, that within its own context, moves towards a sense of abstraction where man within nature is at best a volatile experience with humans on the top of level of the minerals/vegetation/animal/human chain, but stuck in an orbit that cannot decide if man and earth orbit the sun or vice-versa and what being the center of the universe means when the intensity bleeds towards both sanctity and insanity in dealing with the demons and nightmares of exile. A sense of wonder coupled wit dismay,anxiety and hysteria.

---Bruegel did one of his large story boards to show how little the individual matters in a broad everyday context. What at first looks like a big picnic scene is the hour preceding the execution of Christ. He is dragging his cross up the hill, but he is hard to find, almost invisible in the crowds. There is a little boy trying to help him. –A little to the right of him you would see a waggon with a man sitting in it looking scared; he is one of the criminals that will be crucified along with Jesus. Can you see a white horse almost in the center of the painting? Just above it is the cross.---click image for source...
—Bruegel did one of his large story boards to show how little the individual matters in a broad everyday context.
What at first looks like a big picnic scene is the hour preceding the execution of Christ.
He is dragging his cross up the hill, but he is hard to find, almost invisible in the crowds.
There is a little boy trying to help him. –A little to the right of him you would see a waggon with a man sitting in it looking scared; he is one of the criminals that will be crucified along with Jesus.
Can you see a white horse almost in the center of the painting?
Just above it is the cross.—click image for source…

Be it to Bruegel that man is only one manifestation of universal force with nature being indifferent to his well-being, that is, neutral with regard to benevolence or malevolence, expressing some of the zest of Spinoza of man’s connection to the natural physical plane which would avoid a confrontation with potentially deep-seated frailties, though with Bruegel it is apparent the cosmos w=are not an accident or that human life is without meaning or reason.

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