Bruegel The Complete Paintings by Tiziana Frati.

"The peasants' painter', Bruegel was called at the beginning of the seventeenth century by his first biographer, Carel van Mander. This judgement referred both to the artist's presumed origins and to the fact that peasant life was the theme he turned to most often in his paintings. For about four centuries he continued to be known as a 'peasant painter', and as a skilful imitator of Bosch - despite the words of Abraham Ortelius, geographer and humanist, Bruegel's contemporary and close friend: . . . he has painted . .. things which cannot be painted."

By the end of the nineteenth century.

Romantic critics were resuscitating many artists who had been neglected by the academic tradition. The rediscovery of Bruegel, who had been relegated, as a 'popular pain-ter', to the category of a minor artist, began in earnest. Hymans (1890) referred to him as 'the Hogarth of his time', Riegl (1902) described him as the initiator of non-religious art in the Netherlands. The first catalogue of Bruegel's works appeared (Romdahl, 1904-5), followed by the study by van Bastelaer and Hulin de Loo (1907), a thorough and pathfinding piece of research, rich in detail, although naturally not compiled according to the strict criteria laid down by modern art history.

Numerous new assessments of Bruegel followed: peasant, bourgeois, humanist. phil-osopher, genre painter, landscapist, realist: and so did appraisals of his individual works, from all angles - founded on historical, literary, sociological and esoteric principles.

We know neither the place nor the date of birth of Fieter Bruegel (his surname seems to have originally been Brueghel, but he himself altered it, in about 1559). His early biog-rapher, van Mander, says that the village where he was born gave his family its name and that it was near Breda. There are in fact two villages called Brueghel, but neither is near Breda. More likely to be correct is the information provided by a contemporary of Bruegel, Ludovico Guicciardini (grandson of the better-known Francesco), an Italian who lived and died in Antwerp. In his Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi, 1567, he said Bruegel came from Breda. An approximate birth date

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