home | courses | ha 192d

COURSES FALL 2008

Histart 192D

UG SEMINAR 15th-16th CENTURY ART: BRUEGEL AND SONS (4 units) Tuesdays, 10-1 308B Doe, CCN: 05925 Elizabeth Honig

This seminar will explore the work of the Flemish painter and printmaker Pieter Bruegel, and also that of his two sons, Jan and Pieter the Younger, who inherited (to varying degrees) his talent and his studio equipment.  Best known as a painter of crude peasant manners and ordinary proverbs, and as an innovator in the representation of rural landscape, Pieter Bruegel actually worked in a great metropolis (Antwerp) and counted nobility and intellectuals among his admirers.  His prints provided subtle commentary upon social, political, and religious issues of his time, while his paintings challenged the aesthetic values held by many of his fellow painters.  This seminar will involve close visual analysis of Bruegel’s printed and painted works, and reading of important commentary on them from Bruegel’s own time and the modern era.  We will also consider how Bruegel’s status as a Flemish cultural icon was shaped soon after his death, and how it affected the careers of his two painter sons. 

 

home | dept info | faculty | courses| undergraduate program | graduate program | events