Pieter Bruegel: Drawing the World represents the first comprehensive catalogue of Bruegel's graphic works at the Albertina, presented with four critical essays which explore aspects of his drawings and engravings. Edited by Eva Michel with a foreword by Klaus Albrecht-Schroder, the essays—translated into English from their original German—look both forward and back, variously tracing the history of the Albertina's Bruegel collection, closely examining his pictorial motifs in relation and contradistinction to their more traditional presentations, and—most interestingly—complicating Bruegel's artistic indebtedness to Hieronymus Bosch. Though smaller in scope, Pieter Bruegel: Drawing the World complements the monumental exhibition catalogue for Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Drawings and Prints (Metropolitan Museum of Art [2001]).
The essays included in Drawing the World approach Bruegel's graphic work from the expected angles, using the Albertina's collection as the jumping-off point for explorations of his artistic origins, particularly via Bosch and Dürer. Bruegel's famous drawing of Painter and Buyer, star of the Albertina's holdings, becomes a touchstone for several essays in the volume as it crystallizes the tension in Bruegel's work between art and its audience. Eva Michel touches on this tension in her essay, “Pieter Bruegel as Draftsman,” highlighting his skill as both witty observer and “incorruptible moralist” (15). She goes on to discuss his working technique as a draftsman employed by a print publisher, noting that the engraver was paid substantially more than Bruegel himself. Tracing the history of the Albertina's collection back to Emperor Rudolph II—Bruegel's most important collector—and then forward through the twentieth century, Michel's essay offers a bevy of useful information that grounds the catalogue and gives the work that follows its context.
Laura Ritter's fascinating essay, “Forms, Functions, and Methods of Artistic Appropriation in the Graphic Work of Pieter Bruegel the Elder,” centers on Bruegel's storied artistic indebtedness to Bosch. Following Michel's essay, Ritter traces some of the means by which Bruegel could have seen—or not seen—paintings by Bosch, suggesting that Bosch's graphic work was more likely to have been available to Bruegel, possibly through his connection to either Hieronymus Cock, Pieter Coecke, or both. Ritter complicates what has often been treated as a more straightforward choice on Bruegel's part to align himself with Bosch's style, in an era where many of his peers were veering stylistically toward Italy. The crux of her argument lies in the changed political climate between the death of Bosch in 1516 and Bruegel's appearance on the scene in the 1550s. By appropriating Bosch's method of creating hellscapes made more horrible through the combination of absurd creatures and recognizable realia of daily life, Ritter argues that Bruegel's imagery triggers a profound insecurity that would have resonated in the post-Reformation North. As she concludes, “Whereas Bosch had seen the world as a place infected by evil, for Bruegel, it was man himself who became its bearer” (45). This essay is particularly worth reading.
Some of the same themes are sounded in the catalogue's final essay, by Daniela Hammer-Tugendhat, on Bruegel's use of innovative artistic modes as a means of social criticism. The focus here is on Bruegel's Big Fish Eat the Little Fish and Battle about Money, both of which, Hammer-Tugendhat argues, employ proverbs to depict the tension between ethical norms and the actual practices of daily life. There is interesting, though lengthy, iconographic analysis here, not only of those two works but also of Bruegel's Virtues series.
The catalogue itself is divided into five thematic sections, covering categories from peasants to drolleries to the status of the artist and the function of art. This was a wise organizational choice, allowing each section to include works by some of Bruegel's influences and contemporaries—including Dürer and Lucas van Leyden—that follow the same themes. These create a visual context for Bruegel's work, which both couches it in a tradition and shows its departures from that tradition. The catalogue for Pieter Bruegel: Drawing the World is, without question, a valuable addition to scholarship on Bruegel's graphic work.
