The blind men, proceeding in single file, across a bit of descending ground that ends in a ditch.The leader tumbles in, and the others continue to follow with complete docility, a catastrophe in graduated stages with increasing levels of suspicion.
The figures other than the leader are all studies in progressive emotions of uneasy suspicions, which morphs into a terrified certainty and culminates in helpless, frantic confusion upon the realization of being caught in a disaster they failed to anticipate after having placed trust in an individual no more gifted to avoid it than themselves.
— The blind were a subject of special fascination to Bruegel. He introduced a group into The Fight between Carnival and Lent and a drawing of 1562 in Berlin also shows a group of three blind people. Other paintings of the blind by Bruegel are mentioned in early inventories. His treatment of them is sympathetic without for a moment being patronizing.
—click image for source…
It is, a parable of human inertia, the weakness of people to follow the path of least resistance and the human disposition to shift responsibility for a course of action to someone else and avoid accountability for thinking on their own. The faces are a wonderful series of inventions but it is in the design of the figures that contain the expressive force.
The last man is drawn in simple masses, and in each successive figure this simplicity becomes transformed into one of greater complexity and agitation until finally the first figure is a tumbled silhouette. Pieter Bruegel’s blind men are not realistic, though they may be in detail, they are really abstract patterns of line and form, expressively designed.
The peaceful landscape contrasts with the tragedy being shown, as simple as the procession of men is complicated. Life is a relatively simple affair, perhaps complicated and loaded with responsibilities, but when human ego becomes pervasive there is a correlation with the tragic and intrinsically complicated. The straight and spare lines of the landscape are Edenistic and the fall from grace in this case is into a hell-hole without saving grace or salvation. As Bruegel has liberated himself from compositional formula so tragedy arises from rigid adherence to same. Also, Like the blind men in the painting, we are only able to sense a part of a whole. The moral being we project that element onto an entire situation, assuming the whole must resemble the “biopsy” we know, in effect, a fallacy on many levels.
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