Bruegel

de Maarten Bassens, Joris Van Grieken

"Around 1555, following his travels in Italy, Pieter Bruegel the Elder start to design prints for publication by Hieronymus Cock, an ambitious painter from Antwerp. The results swiftly won the young artist fame throughout Europe. The large number of surviving drawings reveals the extraordinary care he took in preparing these designs, which were cut in copper by talented engravers. Bruegel's 'Large Landscapes' series established him as an influential innovator in landscape art, while prints such as 'Big Fish Eat Little Fish' and 'The Seven Deadly Sins' cycle proved he could hold his own with the great Hieronymus Bosch. Other prints featured satirical allegories, episodes from the Bible and his celebrated peasant scenes. As in his other works, Bruegel portrayed human beings with all theirs strengths--and even more so, their weaknesses--in original and frequently humorous images. Engravings, etchings and the occasional woodcut form an essential part of his oeuvre, which has lost none of its expressive power 450 years after the artist's death. Recent historical, archival and art technological research offers a fresh insight into the overall body of Bruegel prints produced during or shortly after his lifetime. Eighty-nine individual compositions are discussed at length in this magnificently illustrated catalogue raisonné, which includes new and detailed descriptions of the different states and editions. Extensive attention is also paid to the creation, interpretation and reception of the prints that shaped public's wider image of the Elder Bruegel for centuries."