ONLINE ART HISTORY COURSE  “Comedy is Serious Business: The Art and Humor of Pieter Bruegel the Elder“

Course Description:

The 16th-century Dutch painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder has been studied and admired for four centuries. His works have become a familiar part of our lives, inspiring not only volumes of art criticism, but also poems, films, and novels. Even so, the artist himself remains a shadowy figure. He worked in Antwerp, a political hotbed of capitalist greed, luxury, and religious discord, and one of the great centers of wealth and commerce in the 16th century.  Bruegel’s smoldering hellscapes, tongue-in-cheek proverbs, rollicking over-fed rustics, and panoramic landscapes were inspired by the teeming diversity of this important cultural center.  For a man who died young, “in the flower of his life,” he left behind a vast legacy of work, which has been interpreted in many ways and mostly misunderstood. Early art critics, reacting to his biting satire and scathing social commentary, labeled him “Pieter the Droll” and “Peasant Pieter.”  But we will study him as a cultivated artist, who traveled broadly and read widely.  His works satisfied a wealthy urban society’s pleasure in moralizing proverbs and scientific advances, and his patrons and associates numbered among the foremost intellectuals of his day.

Virtual Classroom: Full access to an online educational platform with videos of recordings, syllabus, and reading list.

Location: LIVE INTERACTIVE ON-LINE ART HISTORY LECTURES

Optional Readings: Information will be provided 2 weeks before the start of the course.

Complete syllabus will be provided 2 weeks before the start of the course.

• ALL LECTURES WILL BE RECORDED AND AVAILABLE FOR VIEWING AT YOUR CONVENIENCE IN OUR VIDEO LIBRARY FOR TWO WEEKS AFTER THE COURSE HAS ENDED.

LECTURE 1 – A Second Bosch

– Wednesday, March 3

The young Bruegel broke into the Antwerp art scene on the coat tails of the great Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, who died in 1516.  In paintings like Dulle Griet (Mad Meg), Children’s Games, and Carnival and Lent, the painter took on the earlier master’s penchant for flaming hellscapes and large panels filled with multiple tiny figures, each engaged in the work of living and dying.

LECTURE 2 – Figures of Speech

– Wednesday, March 10

Proverbs are a mainstay of Bruegel’s art, especially his large Netherlandish Proverbs, the Fall of Icarus, and The Blind Leading the Blind.  The Ancient Romans appreciated them as expressions of universal truths, and in the 16th century, they were essential tools of humanist discourse.  Bruegel presents proverbs as a timely way of chiding the world for its frailty and folly.  Antwerp publishers reinforced this practice, publishing several collections of proverbs in the 16th century.

LECTURE 3 – The Mirror of the Earth

– Wednesday, March 17

Bruegel viewed the world as a vast panorama of human beings subdued by nature.  His scenes of the natural world take a God’s-eye view, elevated above the fields and mountains as if transmitted by drone.  More interesting from a modern point of view is Bruegel’s treatment of the world as a sentient entity, subject to changes in mood.  This was an emerging a concern of 16th-century scientists, a phenomenon we now refer to as “weather.”

Laurinda Dixon is a specialist in northern European Renaissance art. Currently retired, she served as the William F. Tolley Distinguished Professor of Teaching in the Humanities at Syracuse University for many years. Her scholarship considers the intersection of art and science – particularly alchemy, medicine, astrology, and music – from the fifteenth though the nineteenth centuries. She has lectured widely in both the USA and Europe, and is the author of many articles, reviews, and eleven books, including Perilous Chastity: Women and Illness in Pre-Enlightenment Art and Medicine (1995), Bosch (2003), and The Dark Side of Genius: The Melancholic Persona in Art, ca. 1500-1700 (2013). Laurinda holds a Ph.D. in art history from Boston University, as well as a degree in piano performance from the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. She currently resides in Cincinnati, Ohio.