“Pieter the Droll” was always thought of as a follower of Bosch, which is far less than half the story, or part of a complex narrative of tearing at a facade, peeling off concealment and questioning whether spiritual blackness had run its course of usefulness…
Like Bosch, Bruegel treated things monstrous and deformed as symbols of moral corruption. But where Bosch’s visionary intensity is concerned only with a nightmarish battle between the forces of heaven and hell, Bruegel never quite leaves the real world, or at least the imagery of the real world; either he shares the same religio-aesthetic connection that Exile is a nightmare and our life is only some tattered, obscure and warped sense of reality, but clings more optimistically to the shreds of wreckage floating on the sea.
—The Suicide of Saul by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1562. The first King of Israel, King Saul, had a rather unfortunate ending during a battle against the Philistines at Mount Gilboa. Though there seems to be several different accounts of his death, the outcome is generally that he fell upon his own sword and this scene is shown to the far left of Bruegel’s painting.—click image for source…
With Bruegel, there is always and admixture of humor with the grotesque, and of even compassion with the morbid. Sin for Bruegel was more than a matter of private degradation: his most hellish conceptions are comments on the texture of society as well as moral abstractions. When Bruegel shows us maimed beggars dragging themselves along with rough sticks as crutches, their brutalized spirits showing dark and blank behind their eye sockets, he shows them to us not only as Bosch showed his monsters, as symbols of the spirit defiled by sin, but also as the victims of human cruelty: How Bruegel’s figures of the broken spirit is a metaphor for the domination of exile in the human condition. Artistically, meaning arriving at an articulation of infinity boxed within the parameters of exile.
—Look closely at the line of men. Look how there is a gap between the second and third man and in that gap we have a clear sight of the solidly-built church. Was this intentional? If so what meaning should we put on this aspect of the painting? Could it be that the artist is comparing the solid structure of the church as a solid faith in God in comparison with those people who do not want to see or acknowledge God and this Bruegel depicts by painting the blind men stumbling along the path they have chosen, similar to the stumbling of people who choose a path in life without their God.?—click image for source…
At a time when the maimed, the insane, the feeble-minded and the deformed were laughed at, or at best thought of as animals differing from stray dogs only in being more diverting, Bruegel made them a rebuke to society. This so-called “emancipation” of them, the idea of enduring suffering, replicates a tragedy of transgression, the religious-existential condition that is nonetheless supported by purpose, that of descent leading to ascent. Bruegel might have thought: “how can one eradicate the cause of exile, the edict we are bound to, and then automatically cancel exile itself?” The Holy Grail containing the antidote.
—Pieter Bruegel the Elder: The Magpie on the Gallows (1568)—click image for source…
It can be said the Bruegel’s work is a blend of both the profound and the mundane, rocking between everyday life human dilemmas and walking to the Temple on divine pavement. There is mysterious dimension to existent, that works outside the rational and Bruegel, like Bosch before him was, judging from his art, able to catch a glimpse on rare occasions…
—As they move up the hill they pass through a landscape dotted with gallows on which corpses still hang and wheels to which fragments of cloth and remnants of broken bodies, not eaten by the ravens, still cling.
The sky to the left is blue and calm whereas the sky to the right over Golgotha is dark and storm-like and Bruegel’s landscape has us focusing on an impossible sheer rock outcrop atop of which perches a windmill. Art historians differ on the significance of the windmill on this rocky structure. —click image for source…
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