Tag Archives: Pieter Bruegel the Elder

malthus and famine: curse of the wedding ring

Do people starve simply because there are too many of us? Is famine the necessary companion of civilization? Was parson Malthus right in his grim insistence that population must necessarily outdistance food supply? Or, even worse, are the hungry dying … Continue reading

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parables of the blind

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. … Continue reading

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at home in a greater order

A painter can say things well beyond the narrative of an incident drawn from a literary source. Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Fall of Icarus fits the ticket as a philosophical narrative…. According to Greek legend, Icarus fell to his … Continue reading

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dreamscape

Dreamscapes. They may appear unexpectedly, like passages of dream breaking through the more mundane course of a work. The romantic movement in its revolt against the desiccating official painting, was an emotionalized response that varied from the lyric to the … Continue reading

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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 … Continue reading

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bruegel: discarding the idealized for commonplace

It can be said that Bosch and Bruegel are not much alike in effect. Bosch’s greatest work is calculated to give rise to shivers of spiritual terror linked to sexual excitement as the primal reflex among men. Bruegel’s horror of … Continue reading

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conditions of exile

“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 … Continue reading

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views from babel

Is the gift of languages a dubious blessing? Can we escape being defined by our dialect? … To be born to a single language. To speak, work and live within one serviceable tongue. After all, with foreign languages, the differences … Continue reading

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comfort of words

The comfort of words. Think the covert substitutions and mental projections to which they are subject.Climbing out of our universe, one rung at a time… “A name is a prison, God is free,” or so said the Greek poet Nikos … Continue reading

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satyricon: angering the sex-god priapus

Did Fellini mine the original to create his own brutto spettacolo of a pagan world- as it was in Nero’s time, and as it may be in our own? … In his film adaptation of Petronius’s Satyricon Frederico Fellini created a … Continue reading

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