The Discovery of Nature: Art of the Netherlands & Low Countries. 3

Pieter Brueghel and the Seasons.

“The contrast between silence and sound, darkness and light, like that between summer and winter, was more strongly marked than it is in our lives. The modern town hardly knows silence or darkness, or the effect of a solitary light or a single distant cry.”¹

Unlike our times, people in the early modern period were more aware of nature as a palpable presence; it was much more than a backdrop against which the events of everyday life occurred. Nevertheless some artists treated nature as a backcloth, as in mannerist landscapes which reduce the world to a stage set with the same props: high viewpoint, high craggy mountains, and distant views of the sea and coast. By the time of the sixteenth-century and the coming of Pieter Brueghel the Elder, approaches towards landscape had matured. Stylistically, Brueghel recalls Gothic illuminators like the Limburg Brothers whose images of snow are reminiscent of Brueghel in paintings like the Massacre of the Innocents. Still, Brueghel developed his landscape paintings out of the mannerist style of the fifteenth- centuries whose ingredients he incorporated into his landscapes. Unlike the mannerists, Brueghel identified a moral function of landscape, which initially occurs in his paintings of allegories and proverbs. Subsequently, this formula uniting morality and nature helps to produce great landscapes where life unfolds against the hours, months and seasons. In all likelihood Breughel’s paintings of the Seasons (above) were done for the Antwerp banker Niclaes Jonghelinck who as Harbison observes might have looked down on the peasants, “sensing their mechanical roles in the cycle of nature.”²

1Johann Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, (Penguin, 1924), 10.

2Harbison, Art of Northern Renaissance, 142.