Book Description
Famous for his robust scenes of peasant life and his incomparable mountain landscapes, the beloved 16th-century artist Pieter Bruegel is generally considered the greatest Flemish painter of the Renaissance. This book, the most up-to-date monograph on Bruegel, incorporates the latest art-historical research and new information gleaned from recent restoration of his work. The authors, an art historian and a painting conservator, each bring their special expertise to bear on the many outstanding questions about the artist's life, technique, and the often enigmatic meaning of his paintings.
Bruegel's enduring appeal brought huge crowds to a recent show of his drawings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Lavishly illustrated not only with Bruegel's paintings, drawings, and engravings but also with telling details and archival material rarely or never shown elsewhere, this sumptuous book on this enormously popular artist will find a wide audience.
Customer Reviews:
Magnificent Book.......2003-09-27
Pieter Bruegel Elder is a very well known and hugely influential artist, whose relatively small body of survived through centuries paintings and graphics are incredibly important for the art as whole, and that magnificent book - written with deep respect and admiration to the great flemish master is a definite must have to anyone who is intersted in art history and beyond.What impressed me the most in that excellent reference to the Bruegel's time, art and life is a quality of reproduction of the art work-its really,really great-accurate,vibrant and crisp.
Book Description
Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525/30-1569) was a remarkable draftsman and designer of prints as well as a great painter. His independent drawings and designs for engravings and etchings, which were carried out by the leading printmakers of his day, have fascinated scholars and the general public alike since they were created. They have recently been the subject of research that has given rise to a reevaluation of the parameters of Bruegel's oeuvre. The new scholarship has been brought to bear on the texts in the present volume. An international group of experts presents essays on the artist's life, his contributions as a draftsman and as a printmaker, his iconography and social and political context, and the posthumous survival of his art. The authors also illuminate Bruegel's genius in discussions of individual prints and drawings. Each of these works is illustrated and many comparative illustrations are also included.
Customer Reviews:
Un artiste pour toutes les saisons, surtout l'hiver.......2004-01-15
L'artiste est un grand maitre lorsque ses oeuvres sont impactants, d'un gout eternel. En fait, le Paysage d'hiver de Pieter Bruegel pere se trouve entre les oeuvres d'art les plus copies et imites du monde. La plupart des quarantaines de ses peintures survivantes datent de la derniere decade de sa vie. Il est le peintre incomparable de la comedie humaine, dans l'Ane a l'ecole; des paysages flamands au style italien, dans Paysage emboise avec une vue lointaine; des paysans, dans Kermis du St George; et des proverbes, dans Des grands poissons mangent des petits poissons. Il honore les manuscrits enlumines et les miniatures, dans la Tour de Babel. Ses dessins destines aux gravures sont des chefs-d'oeuvres de details, grains, nuances et textures.
A WORK TO BE SAVORED AND TREASURED.......2002-06-13
Arguably the greatest Netherlands painter and draftsman of the 16th century, Pieter Bruegel was a well traveled artist. Documentation shows that between 1515 and 1553 he made an enviable journey through France and then to Italy. While in Rome he worked with a miniaturist, and was inspired by the Alps that he saw during his return to Antwerp.
A quiet man he was, nonetheless, given to pranks of a slightly frightening nature, very often surprising his students. What comes as a surprise to many today is the recent scholarship which sheds light on not only his life but his work as a draftsman and printmaker, extending to the social and political ramifications of his creations.
This magnificent volume is the catalogue for an important exhibit of more than 140 Bruegel prints and drawings. Included are scholarly essays as well as comparative illustrations. It is a valuable contribution to the annals of art history. For laymen it is a work to be savored and treasured.
- Gail Cooke
Proof of art.......2001-12-28
Proof of art is in strong impact on later generations and timeless appeal: both describe this first major exhibition of PIETER BRUEGEL THE ELDER: PRINTS AND DRAWINGS. His art had been the source of many copies, of which the most often copied was "Winter landscape with skaters," and late 16th- and early 17th-century imitative works, such as dotted atmosphere and forms around grainy ground and trees by Master of the Mountain Landscapes and Jacob Savery, thick forest wildernesses by Gillis van Coninxloo, and winter skating by Hans Bol. We mainly know him through his art and that of sons Jan and Pieter the Younger: most of his 40+ surviving paintings are from his last seven years, such as "Fall of the rebel angels," "Sermon of St John the Baptist," and "Wedding dance"; and terror against heretics, Protestants, and subversives by the Duke of Alba in Brussels wore away his final two years, finding expression in "Blind leading the blind" and "Magpie on the gallows" bitterness and sorrow and in many, ominous "Summer" knives. We think of him immortalizing peasants with "Kermis at Hoboken" and "Kermis of St George," proverbs with "Big fish eat little fish," and winter scenes with "Ice skating before the gate of St George" and "Winter landscape with bird trap": he has been admired for applying an Apelles-type imagination to Hieronymus Bosch-type allegories, with the reptile lying down in "Luxuria" and upside-down frog in "Superbia," and to Eupompas-type nature. He was one of the first Northerners to take on post-Leonardo da Vinci Italian landscape style, coming up with distinctly Flemish scenes, stocky peasants and wide open naturalism, with Sistine Chapel sacrifice of Noah-type hugely solid countryfolk in "Beekeepers," Federico Barocci-type line-flowing tree trunks and white stippled foliage in "Wooded landscape with a distant view," and Cornelis Massys-type commonplace woodland scene and Titan-type balanced composition, broad-reaching lines and cotton-wool foliage in "Wooded landscape with mills." He kept manuscript illumination and miniature painting traditions going in "Tower of Babel" with Giulio Clovio-type teeming, tiny figures. He touched on religion, but by uncommon subject with the Christ-told "Parable of the good shepherd" and "Parable of the wise and foolish virgins" from the New Testament and with "Suicide of Saul" from the Old Testament; and by unusual presentation with the contemporary, stagelike "Death of the virgin." He dipped into comic genre without ending up second-rate with the carefully cross-hatched and solidly outlined "Ass at school." The lasting, widespread popularity of his art was partly due to his designs for prints, whose final look he controlled with Maarten van Heemskerck-type highly specific detail and with printmaker-friendly shading and textures: "Landscape with bears" was the first of 32 drawings directly modeled for prints; and "Rabbit hunt was the only print that he created, with distinctly outlined, light-filled foliage and imposing mountains broadly hatched and finely speckled and with its dark theme of soldiers distressing peasants the same as his "Massacre of the innocents" painting and "Milites requiescentes" print. So Nadine M Orenstein has edited a clearly organized, compellingly written, and wonderfully illustrated book which pools excellent examples of art, along with PIETER BRUEGEL THE ELDER books by Walter S Gibson, Rose-Marie Hagen et al, and Wolfgang Stechow and PIETER BRUEGEL THE ELDER AT THE KUNSTHISTORISCHES MUSEUM IN VIENNA by Pieter Bruegel.
Average customer rating:
- An effort to read, but well worth it
- Enjoyable cover to cover
- Just couldn't stick with it
- Good writer, not a great book
- Hilarious
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Headlong: A Novel
Michael Frayn
Manufacturer: Metropolitan Books
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ASIN: 0805062858 |
Amazon.com
With its sumptuous surfaces and alluring sense of gravitas, classic Dutch painting has fascinated writers for centuries. It's easy to see why. Giant religious representations and gaudy classical scenes already have the weight of literature behind them. But an enigmatic portrait or dimly lit interior seems like a virtual incubator for narrative, and now Michael Frayn joins the Netherlandish fray in Headlong, which features a Bruegel canvas in the starring role.
The other star of the novel is youngish art historian Martin Clay (a Hugh Grant character gone to fat), who identifies the lost Bruegel in a tumbledown country home. The picture elicits an immediate shock of recognition:
Already, somewhere in those first few instants, something has begun to stir inside me. In my head, in the pit of my stomach. It's as if the sun's emerging from the clouds, and the world's changing in front of my eyes, from grey to golden. I can feel the warmth of the sunlight spreading over my skin, passing like a wave of beneficence through my entire body.
The sight of this masterwork glimmering through the "grimy pane of time" fires up Martin's customarily dilettantish intellect, and he decides to secure it for the nation--and make himself a fortune--without revealing its true value to the owner. Much double-dealing, bamboozling, and suppressed hysteria ensue as he and the owner try to outfox each other. Yet the heart of the novel is Martin's search for the meaning of the painting that has become his "triumph and torment and downfall." Bouncing from gallery to museum to library, he delivers an extended (and entertaining) lesson on iconography and landscape.
As Martin's obsession takes hold, the pace of the novel also accelerates into a breathless rush of action, comic anguish, and scholarly speculation. Not surprisingly, some of Martin's machinations go haywire, which leads to a certain amount of irritating slapstick--shady deals in underground parking lots, art treasures being tipped into the back of a filthy Land Rover, and so forth. But even if he makes his plot work overtime, Frayn is superb in the quest for the meaning of art, not to mention the lure of money and intellectual reputation. And for that alone, Headlong deserves to be called picture perfect. --Eithne Farry
Book Description
An unlikely con man wagers wife, wealth, and sanity in pursuit of an elusive Old Master.
Invited to dinner by the boorish local landowner, Martin Clay, an easily distracted philosopher, and his art-historian wife are asked to assess three dusty paintings blocking the draught from the chimney. But hiding beneath the soot is nothing less-Martin believes-than a lost work by Bruegel. So begins a hilarious trail of lies and concealments, desperate schemes and soaring hopes as Martin, betting all that he owns and much that he doesn't, embarks on a quest to prove his hunch, win his wife over, and separate the painting from its owner.
In Headlong, Michael Frayn, "the master of what is seriously funny" (Anthony Burgess), offers a procession of superbly realized characters, from the country squire gone to seed to his giddy, oversexed young wife. All are burdened by human muddle and human cravings; all are searching for a moral compass as they grapple with greed, folly, and desire. And at the heart of the clamor is Breugel's vision, its dark tones warning of the real risks of temptation and obsession.
With this new novel, Michael Frayn has given us entertainment of the highest order. Supremely wise and wickedly funny, Headlong elevates Frayn into the front rank of contemporary novelists.
Customer Reviews:
An effort to read, but well worth it.......2007-01-03
I think the negative reviews may have been given by those who were looking for a book to read on the beach. To enjoy the book, you have to remember (at least to some extent) the sketches of art history, the Spanish attempts to suppress the beginning of the Dutch rebellion against themselves and the Catholic church, the college-professor narrator's get-rich-quick scheme, etc.
I was willing to put in the effort, and felt richly rewarded for it. Within the author's intent, my only criticism would be that the narrator is generally portrayed as intelligent, but his actions sometimes seem imbecile, which stretched my credulity. Perhaps it should not have - I have known some fairly impractical college professors.
Enjoyable cover to cover .......2006-12-01
A fantastic book. Extremely funny and witty. I was not going to write a review until I read all of the unwarranted negative reviews. I would guess the criticism of this book stems from the increasingly short attention span of the average person. If you like to bury yourself in an interesting and funny story, this is the book.
Just couldn't stick with it.......2006-08-07
This had all the earmarks of something I'd love. I was an art-history major in college, am still a major museum-rat, and I especially love Dutch art. But the novel was sooooo boring that I gave up after about a hundred pages. The early dinner-party scene at the Churts' house was hilarious, but then the endless, dry art-historical and philosophical ruminations just put me to sleep. As other reviewers have said, it would have helped immensely if there had been illustrations of the works in question. But reading interminable descriptions of what various paintings look like, and how many different ways you can spell "Brueghel".... please.
Good writer, not a great book.......2006-06-03
I was looking forward to reading this book, yet turned out to be pretty dissapointed. He gets 2 stars for being a good writer, sadly this book just wasnt interesting. The story grew stagnant very quickly, and seemed like a bunch of filler that I wasnt interested in. The main character started getting to the point where it seemed like verything he though about was a repeat of something he had previously said. I think the story had potential, but just wasnt executed well.
Hilarious.......2006-05-17
Fantastic book! Fun, classic plot elements, with some great twists and turns. A very smart read, too. Bravo!
Average customer rating:
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The Mill and the Cross - Peter Bruegel's "Way to Calvary"
Michael Francis Gibson
Manufacturer: Acatos Editions
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ASIN: 2940033722 |
Book Description
"The Mill and the Cross" is a highly original approach to a single painting by Peter Bruegel the Elder - "the Way to Calvary" - to which the book is entirely devoted. But it also represents an innovative approach to the general emergence of Christian culture out of the patterns of Antiquity.
Bruegel's work tells two stories at the same time: on the one hand, it is a straightforward relation of Christ's Passion, in which Jesus appears, lost in a crowd of some 500 characters, carrying his cross from Jerusalem (enclosed in the circle of its walls) to Calvary (marked by the darker circle of the expectant crowd). But it also tells the story of the passion of Flanders in Bruegel's day, since Christ is here escorted to Golgotha by the red-uniformed mercenary police of the king of Spain who was then imposing a fierce repression on Bruegel's native land.
Gibson also takes a close look at the windmill, oddly perched atop a pointed rock. It is, he argues, Bruegel's depiction of the "cosmic mill" which, in the tradition of Antiquity, was thought to grind the fates of men and nations.
The theme of the Precession of the Equinoxes is invoked to explain the deeply rooted tradition of the passing of the ages, the age of the ram giving way, in Jesus' day, to the age of the Fish, to which Christian tradition tied Christ himself.
This allows Gibson to take an innovative look at the way myth commands our representations of the world and how we, today, at another "turning of the world", may look back on the age out of which we are already moving.
More than an art book, it is a book about how we can come to terms with our own culture.
Book Description
63 engravings and a woodcut made from the drawings of the 16th-century Flemish master: landscapes, seascapes, stately ships, drolleries, whimsical allegories, scenes from the Gospels and much more. Stimulating commentaries by H. Arthur Klein on individual prints, bits of biography on etcher or engraver and comparisons with Bruegel’s original designs.
Customer Reviews:
Peasants & Cluttered Symbols Galore.......2004-11-08
This deck, based on the work of 16th century Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel, is full of rowdy, rollicking peasants and strange proverbs. There is often so much going on in the background that one could nearly call it the "Where's Waldo?" of Tarot decks. There are some lovely things about it, however. I thought that the artist did a very good job capturing the spirit of Bruegel's work, which was generally quite complex. And I love the way that the peasants are robust and very "real." The point of this deck is not to paint a pretty, or idealized image of late medieval life. Here we see everything from the brawling to the drunk, to the mad. Yet, there is a lovely earthy quality to it all and the life depicted on these cards is rather rich and filled with loaves of freshly baked bread, jugs of wine, and pints of beer. Unfortunately, it's also filled with quite complicated symbolism. I find myself squinting at the pictures trying in vain to figure out what has just happened in the scene depicted or what some extremely bizarre image means. People wear beehives on their heads or sprout wings from their ankles, eyeballs with legs dash through the corner of the picture and I can't seem to find a meaning for any of it. That, in itself is rather frustrating, but added to that is the frustration that the small booklet that comes with it only offers vague proverbs as an explanation. All in all, these cards are good if you're a collector of art tarot, a fan of Bruegel's work, or a medieval enthusiast. However, their obscure symbols make them very difficult to deal with in a reading. I would definitely caution beginners to stay away.
Book Description
Bruegel's paintings-a peasant wedding in a barn, hunters in the snow, a rollicking street festival-define our idea of everyday life in sixteenth century Northern Europe. In sixteen chapters, each headed by one of the artist's famous works, Rudy Rucker brings Bruegel's art and his colorful world to vibrant life, doing for Bruegel what the bestselling Girl With A Pearl Earring did for Vermeer.
Customer Reviews:
M. C. Eschers inspiration.............2007-01-01
Rudy Rucker has managed to give some insight into the thought processes that created the wonderful works of this 16th century Flemish painter as well as exposing the reader to the hardships endured by the residents of the "low countries" during the merciless Spanish control of the Netherlands.
Brugels early works give a birds-eye perspective of the subject matter as well as depicting religious events as if they were happening in the 16th century. It is my belief that M.C. Escher as well as Salvador Dali both capitalized on Brugels early vision.(See Escher's Tower of Babel as well as Ascending & Descending and several of Dali's works appear to have been inspired by Brugel's "Fall of the Rebel Angels".) Both of these men owe a large debt of gratitude to Brugel for his inspiration.
Although this book is "historical fiction", the author has done such an exemplary job of providing a discerning and perceptive insight into Brugels life and times, it almost reads like an autobiograpy.
If you enjoy history, art, and great storytelling this book is definitely for you! 4 1/2 stars!!!!
Spend some time in Renaissance Belgium.......2003-12-22
Rucker builds a series of chapters around particular paintings by Bruegel, in order to produce a biographical novel that is well-informed concerning the (known) historical details of Bruegel's life and the political and cultural history of the day. The book offers a good way to get engaged with the period and with the paintings. The writing is a bit clunky, and the novel works more because of the inherent interest of the artist and the period than by what the writer contributes. I could easily have put the book down had other things been available, but as it was it served as a welcome companion during a day of many, many delayed flights and long layovers as I flew across the US.
My Favorite Book of this Year.......2003-08-13
My husband and I both love this story of Peter Breugel's life. The book was well researched and obviously written by someone with a life-long passion for Breugel the man, as well as his paintings. It is a beautiful story. My husband and I both agree, we want to go to Europe and see his original paintings after reading this book.
Painless History.......2003-02-22
Not only is this book well-researched and documented but it is an easy read. The times of Europe in the l6th century are colorfully presented and the characterizations are believable. It's easy to get caught up in the intrigues. I'll now view Peter Bruegel's works in a new light. Well-worth a read!
Look deeper!.......2003-01-05
I picked this up blind from the new book bin at the Kailua-Kona public library, and boy, I'm glad I did. I've always enjoyed Bruegel, but this novel really makes you look at each picture with new eyes. Thank goodness I had an art book (Phaidon) of Bruegel at home with big color plates, which really complemented the text of this book. I love the feeling of delving into the past, but with good friends, which is how I think of Bruegel now that I've read this book.
Average customer rating:
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Bruegel
Walter S. Gibson
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OKCR5M |
Book Description
The complexity and variety of sixteenth-century Netherlandish art endow it with a particular dynamism. It was in the sixteenth century that drawing attained an independent status as an art in itself, distinct from painting; landscape increasingly became a separate genre; and artists consciously referred to the great masters of the past, showing the tremendous influence of Italian art in their own works. This volume documents the unique qualities of the art of drawing during the age of Bruegel. Designed to accompany an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art and The Pierpont Morgan Library, the book is also an invaluable scholarly record. In addition to 123 catalogue entries and more than 350 reproductions of rarely-seen drawings, three in-depth essays contain discussions of the art of the period. Its development is traced from a late medieval style at the end of the fifteenth century to the influence of the Italian Renaissance and mannerism in the 1500s, and ultimately to the beginning of the baroque period in the early 1600s. The detailed entries encompass works by sixty-two artists, including Hieronymus Bosch, Jan Gossaert, Lucas van Leyden, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Jan Brueghel the Elder, Karel van Mander, and others. The book will interest specialists and also general readers attracted by the warmth of Netherlandish art.
Customer Reviews:
Great book.......2006-08-30
The images are of a very high quality and well chosen. I bought the book from e-bay and paid much less. Although I enjoy the book I don't think it's worth the Amazon price
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Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Prints and Drawings
Hieronymus Bosch: The Complete Paintings and Drawings
Hieronymus Bosch
Bruegel (World of Art)
The Flemish Primitives: The Masterpieces
