01 Work, The Art of War, Pieter Breughel I's The Fall of the Angels, with footnotes

Follower of Pieter Breughel I

The Fall of the Angels

Oil on panel

48.4 x 63.8 cm

Private collection

Sold for EUR 37,000 in May 2012

The present composition partly derives from the painting by Pieter Breughel I in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Brussels (inv. no. 584).

Emerging from distant depths in a halo of light, monsters are thrown to earth as from a breaking wave. Angels combat them, led by St Michael, thin as a rake in his golden armour, striking with his sword at the dragon with the seven crowned heads on which he has his foothold. 

In Bruegel’s rendering, the violence is expressed not in the bitter nature of the battle – indeed St Michael and his sparse troops do not appear particularly threatened by the demons – but by the intensity of the fall – infernal and endless – of this crawling, hideous multitude that invades the entire surface of the picture, in a remarkable unity of action which increases its impact. By borrowing minutiously observed elements from the plant, animal, mineral and human worlds and combining them to form hybrid, deformed beings, Bruegel invents creatures that are the most repulsive, but also the most curious and fantastic imaginable. More on this painting

Jan Brueghel (also Bruegel or Breughel) the Elder (1568 – 13 January 1625) was a Flemish painter and draughtsman. He was the son of the eminent Flemish Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder. A close friend and frequent collaborator with Peter Paul Rubens, the two artists were the leading Flemish painters in the first three decades of the 17th century.

Brueghel worked in many genres including history paintings, flower still lifes, allegorical and mythological scenes, landscapes and seascapes, hunting pieces, village scenes, battle scenes and scenes of hellfire and the underworld. Brueghel represented the type of the pictor doctus, the erudite painter whose works are informed by the religious motifs and aspirations of the Catholic Counter-Reformation as well as the scientific revolution with its interest in accurate description and classification.

The artist was nicknamed "Velvet" Brueghel, "Flower" Brueghel, and "Paradise" Brueghel. The first is believed to have been given him because of his mastery in the rendering of fabrics.[7] The second nickname is a reference to his fame as a painter of (although not a specialist in) flower pieces and the last one to his invention of the genre of the paradise landscape. His brother Pieter Brueghel the Younger was traditionally nicknamed "de helse Brueghel" or "Hell Brueghel" because it was believed he was the author of a number of paintings with fantastic depictions of fire and grotesque imagery. These paintings have now been reattributed to Jan Brueghel the Elder. More on Jan Brueghel

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