1. About Suffering About Suffering they were never wrong/ The Old Masters how well they understood/ Its human position, how it takes place/ While someone else is eating…. -- W.H. Auden “Musee de Beaux Arts”

2. Breugel At the forefront of intellectual thought in the sixteenth century The reality of human existence Humility and Tolerance Symbolically rich paintings

3. Bruegel’s Period In the wake of Luther Peasant Uprisings Against the Countess of Stuhlingen Petitioning of the twelve articles: right to elect pastors, end to serfdom, free collection of wood, abolition of certain tithes, restoration of hunting and fishing rights etc. Easter, 1525 (primary source quotations)

4. “Peasant” Bruegel and his Immediate Influences “City child,” certainly not a peasant; therefore, Bruegel regularly interacted with the most important Flemish thinkers. Abraham Ortelius: geographer and humanist Dirk Coornhert: theologian, philosopher, humanist, statesman, writer, printmaker The Time of Copernicus and discovery From Coornhert, the humanism of the reformation

5. Spirit of an Age: Copernicus and Erasmus, 16 th Century Giants The Polish astronomer,Copernicus had revealed to all the world that Universe was a fundamentally different

6. SPANISH INVASION In the 1560s King Phillip II of Spain ordered the Duke of Alba to raise 20,000 troops to invade the Low Countries During this time Breugel executed his most somber themes Many paintings were destroyed— possibly from this time period

7. Christ and the Adulteress: humility and tolerance Influenced by Raphael Die sonder sonde is die… The two groups: the accused and the shamed We feel humble and tolerant and awed

8. The Wedding Dance William Carlos Williams’ poem— ”The dancers go round” Bruegel, the party crasher The quiet observer with writing tools Have the revelers missed the point? The sixteenth-century “YMCA” Nature in the vanishing point

9. About Suffering About suffering, they were never wrong The Fall of Icarus Ovid’s interpretation Tragedy but no one notices

10. Landscape with Gallows and Magpie Gossiping on the gallows: gossips hang in Netherlandish proverbs Dancing on the gallows The defecating man is BSing The Spanish Inquisition

11. Haymaking: perfect harmony Here for one, Breugel felt human beings to be in perfect harmony with nature; when they are idle and sometimes while they are doing their work various degrees of ugliness remain, but here … they are happy and radiant.

12. CONCLUSION Knew what the Italians never noticed “In Italy during the sixteenth century, the unvarnished reality that Breugel (sic) championed was ignored Unprettified visual reality Humility and tolerance Modern Breugels: Faulkner, Steinbeck, Budbill John Prine: Just a big goofy world with a big goofy man dancing with a big goofy girl

13. Mystery Slide One

14. Mystery Slide Two

15. Mystery Slide Three