In the centuries to come, notably through the work of Dutch artists of the following century, this focus on everyday life would become the basis of the artistic ethos known as Realism.Ĭ. While he is loath to pay homage to Biblical and mythical heroes, he has far less compunction about representing peasant revelers at a wedding, for example, or a procession of blind beggars. Bruegel was also a pioneer of what would become known as "genre painting", scenes of everyday working life captured with honesty, empathy, and occasional bathetic humor.This represents a departure from the focus on heroic individuals common in Renaissance art, and suggests a sympathy with the common lot of humanity which has been recognized by artists and writers ever since. In his Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, only a desultory pair of legs sinking into the water in the middle distance records the tragic hero's downfall. In accordance with his preference for large group compositions, Bruegel produced a series of mythological or historical paintings in which attention is drawn away from the nominal subject of the work towards the everyday life continuing all around it. Reminiscent of his older countryman Hieronymus Bosch's surreal hellscapes, this approach set Bruegel apart from many Renaissance artists who favored more visually harmonious compositions, offering a snapshot of a lingering medieval view of human society as chaotic and unruly. Bruegel's most distinctive stylistic contribution to art history was a form of narrative composition in which a sprawling landscape is filled with a teeming mass of humanity, figures grouped together across the canvas to form various intersecting focal points.
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