Bruegel made peasants and landscapes as grand as altarpieces
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, born about 1525–1530 and dead 9 September 1569, turned genre scenes and wide landscapes into large-scale Flemish Renaissance statements. After Italy he designed prints for Hieronymus Cock in Antwerp, then painted in Brussels until asking his wife to burn drawings too sharp for dangerous times.
Almost nothing is recorded of Bruegel's origins. His birth between about 1525 and 1530 is inferred from his joining the Antwerp painters' guild in 1551, and early writers disagree on whether he came from Breda or from a village near it that no one can identify. Karel van Mander assumed a peasant upbringing to match the peasant scenes, but recent scholars see an educated townsman at ease among humanists. He trained with Pieter Coecke van Aelst and in 1550 and 1551 helped Peeter Baltens with a now-lost altarpiece in Mechelen, painting its wings in grey monochrome, probably through the family of Coecke's wife, Mayken Verhulst.
Soon after becoming a master he travelled to Italy, unusually reaching Reggio Calabria at the toe of the peninsula by 1552, where he drew the city burning after a Turkish raid. In Rome he worked with the miniaturist Giulio Clovio, whose will listed paintings by Bruegel, including a joint work. Unlike most northern visitors, he drew landscapes and ignored the ancient ruins. Back in Antwerp by 1555, he designed more than forty prints for Hieronymus Cock, northern Europe's leading publisher, and in 1559 dropped the h from his name, perhaps to give it a Latin look.
In 1563 he married Coecke's daughter, also named Mayken, and moved to Brussels; van Mander claims his mother-in-law pushed the move to separate him from a servant mistress. Painting now became his main work, collected by rich Flemings and Cardinal Granvelle. Of the first generation for whom religious subjects were no longer the default, he painted no portraits and brought landscapes and peasant life to large scale, as in The Hunters in the Snow of 1565. Before dying in 1569 he told his wife to burn drawings with inscriptions too sharp to be safe.
Source: Pieter Bruegel the Elder
