Favourite Paintings - Peter Breughel Netherlandisch Proverbs

Peter Brueghel the Elder - Nederlandisch Proverbs

I am sometimes given to complaining that modern paintings seem to have no meaning or significance. The same can not be said of Brueghel, and this painting - Nederlandisch Proverbs, painted in 1559 - is replete with illusions, some more evident than others. It is said that there are more the 100 proverbs illustrating human foolishness in this scene, the meanings of many of which have been lost. The principal figure of the woman draping her husband with a blue cloak is said to show that she is having an affair. A full list of those that can still be identified can be found on Wikipedia here.

See also Favourite Paintings - Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

See also Art and What it Means to Me

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Favourite Paintings - Landscape with the Fall of Icarus - Peter Breughel the Elder

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

W.H. Auden, Musée des Beaux Arts

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 or opening a window or just walking dully along; 

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting 

For the miraculous birth, there always must be 

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating 

On a pond at the edge of the wood: 

They never forgot 

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course 

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot 

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse 

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. 

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away 

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may 

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, 

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone 

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green 

Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen 

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, 

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. 

See also Favourite Writings - Ovid