Monday, February 10 / 4-6 P.M. / Free McCune Conference Room, 6020 Humanities and Social Sciences Building The paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder offers us a glimpse into the world of the sixteenth-century Netherlands, a world of peasants and burghers, of civic and religious life. How did viewers in Bruegel's own day look at this art? In order to offer twenty-first-century eyes something of the experience of a sixteenth-century viewer, this book takes an in-depth look at a single painting by the great Flemish artist, his Netherlandish Proverbs of 1559. Bruegel's painting is a collection of over hundred proverbs, each acted out in a single-minded manner by peasants, burghers, monks, inn-keepers and other social types. In order to understand what a viewer of the time might have perceived when viewing this image, this book begins by looking closely at Breugel's composition. From this starting point, the author offers insights into how proverbs were used and understood in the sixteenth century and into period models for organizing collections. Lastly, the author turns to discussions of Breugel by his contemporaries, and the insights these give us into the viewing of this and other paintings. In the end, Breugel's Netherlandish Proverbs seeks to reconstruct the skills of looking and the habits of mind that Breugel's viewers brought to bear upon this intriguing and complex work. Mark Meadow (Department of the History of Art and Architecture, UCSB) is a specialist in Northern European art of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, with particular interests in the histories of rhetoric and collecting. Meadow has received Getty, Kress and Mellon Fellowships. He has published on Dürer, Aertsen and Bruegel and has edited Rhetoric-Rhetoriqueurs-Rederijkers, 1995, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the 1996 volume of the Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek and a critical edition of Symon Andriessoon's 1550 Duytsche adagia ofte spreeckwoorden (forthcoming). <<Back Top of Page