Over the past decade a young generation of art historians has substantially redirected the study of the art of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Instead of examining the artist's intentions—which can only be the subject of speculation for this most undocumented of major artists—these scholars have turned their attention to a subject that is much more amenable to research: the reception of Bruegel's panels among the upper echelons of art patrons in mid-sixteenth-century Antwerp. Barbara A. Kaminska's Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Religious Art for the Urban Community fits squarely into this compelling approach. Perhaps as a result of the previous generation's emphasis on peasant Bruegel, the majority of recent scholarship has focused on Bruegel's secular subjects. Instead, as her title indicates, this author concentrates on six of his religious panels. It is a fruitful perspective given those turbulent years.

Kaminska conjectures that Bruegel's audience discerned that religious orthodoxy was no longer perceived to be the prerequisite of a peaceful polis. Consequently, a dogmatic public spirituality was replaced with a more discursive, contemplative one. She divides Bruegel's religious panels into two categories: the large-scale narratives intended for semi-public domestic spaces (the Vienna Tower of Babel, the Conversion of Saint Paul, the Procession to Calvary, the Sermon of Saint John the Baptist) and the smaller, more intimate grisailles (Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery and the Death of the Virgin). Whether Bruegel was consciously reviving the pictorial tradition of biblical imagery, as the author asserts, or instead acceding to the demands of imperious patrons, or both, is, finally, unknowable. However, Kaminska's book will prove to be a valuable resource for the evidence gathered in support of her thesis. Our understanding of the perceptual habits that Bruegel's contemporary viewers brought to these panels is considerably enriched by it.

Like her predecessors, the author situates the large-scale panels within the context of the convivia, or banquets like the fictive one Erasmus describes in his Godly Feast, which was inspired, in part, by the dinners he had attended in the palatial home of the Flemish humanist Jerome van Busleyden. Busleyden died in 1517, the same year that the wealthy Antwerp entrepreneur Niclaes Jongelinck was born. In his suburban villa that housed Bruegel's series of the Months as well as his Tower of Babel, Jongelinck assuredly hosted banquets for his mercantile colleagues. Consensus reigns among Bruegel scholars that in all probability Bruegel's panels hung in the dining room for guests to contemplate, comment upon, and debate, much like Erasmus had described. But mid-century Antwerp was a far more unsettled community than it had been in Erasmus's lifetime. We know nothing of Bruegel's formal education and have very little insight into his affluent beholders’ proclivity to discern contentious subject matter in seemingly innocuous imagery. The analogy between the reception of Bruegel's images and the writings of one of the most erudite humanists of the century assumes a level of discourse that we have scant documentation to support.

On the other hand, Kaminska is the first Bruegel scholar to pursue the analogy between his paintings and the popular tafelspelen, or short plays written by rhetoricians and performed by two or three characters before, during, or after a festive meal or gathering in a guild hall. Here the issue is less a question of education or common knowledge; rather, it pertains to analogous patterns of perception and reception. In many of these concise dramas the playwright broke through what was to become known centuries later as the fourth wall, that unseen barrier between the players and the spectators. In the rhetorician Cornelis Everaert's play Sint Lasant, for example, the actors query the members of the audience, soliciting their counsel on spiritual issues. A disinterested spectatorship did not appear to be an option. Much like leafing through a collection of emblems, the beholder is prevailed upon to respond, to resort to his or her wits in order to find connections between disparate elements. As Kaminska notes, such an invitation to an individual reply “might have even formed a prelude to a convivial discussion of the paintings on display” (138). It is a convincing context for these willfully enigmatic panels.