You can't begin to describe Pieter Bruegel the Elder and his amazing art in one or two posts. The posts The Wintry Scenes of Pieter Bruegel and The Triumph of Death described two of the painter's masterpieces. But there is so much more to Bruegel, with so many interesting stories being played out across towns, villages, and countrysides of the Netherlands during the Renaissance.
One of the few times my high school art teacher gave us any freedom was when we had to use linear perspective to draw a street with houses on either side and a horseman in the center. Everyone else copied the original to the t, but when my teacher allowed me to add characters to the scene, it was time to unleash the Bruegel fury. I had always admired the packed peasant streets of Bruegel's towns such as Children’s Games, and Netherlandish Proverbs (above), so I drew all kinds of people hanging out of windows, playing tricks one each other, playing games or fighting, etc. You know, the kind of things that make an ordinarily plain and simple landscape entertaining and full of life.
Pieter Bruegel painted Netherlandish Proverbs early in his career and shows a highly imaginative composition illustrating the foolishness of life with 100 identifiable proverbs. He does this in such a way as to show each proverb as part of a larger scene, which read literally would be quite the chaotic landscape. Each adage, many of which are still used today, blends right into the next. If you didn't know it was a painting full of metaphors and folk wisdoms, you might just think it was a crazy, topsy-turvy world unfolding before your eyes, not dissimilar to many of Bruegel's other paintings.
The full list of the proverbs at wikipedia.
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