Bruegel, Hunters in the Snow (Winter)발음듣기
Bruegel, Hunters in the Snow (Winter)
It's this wonderful panel painting from the Renaissance, from Flanders, made for a merchant in Antwerp that had asked Bruegel to make six panel paintings, which were study of the labors of the months.발음듣기
This is perhaps the very first time in the history of painting where that idea has been brought to this larger scale.발음듣기
We see some hunters returning from their hunt with their dogs, but they haven't got very much to show for their day out hunting.발음듣기
Male: If you look closely, you can see a rabbit just hanging off the back of one of the hunters, but it is a pretty meager catch.발음듣기
But as our eye moves down the hill, and it moves down pretty fast, there's almost no middle ground, all of a sudden we're down in this icy pond.발음듣기
Female: We're not just looking at a lovely landscape, but a landscape that is given meaning by the activities of the people that inhabit it, by their daily routines.발음듣기
Male: In fact, that idea is an ancient one, and comes from Virgil, Bruegel's patron may well have been thinking about Virgil when he commissioned this series, this notion of painting a landscape that is given meaning by the labors of the people within it.발음듣기
Although the image seems as if it is a moment in time, in fact the painting is carefully composed.발음듣기
Our eye follows the hunters down the hill, which is given a wonderful visual rhythm by those trees, and then my eye wants to ride down to that frozen pond where we see a woman pulling somebody else on a little sleigh.발음듣기
We see people pulling each other on the ice, children playing and chasing each other, a man about to hit a ball with a stick on the ice, playing kind of ice hockey for the 16th century.발음듣기
Female: This is really typical of Netherlandish painting, this idea of giving us a lot of visual information, a lot of things to look at, a small little narrative so that we can patiently discover more and more.발음듣기
This is the Renaissance. In Italy, there's an attempt at this moment to perfect, to isolate, the most ideal moment.발음듣기
It's so different from Northern painting which is concerned with these almost literary narratives.발음듣기
Male: It is still interested in finding meaning that comes from the multiplicity of human activities no matter how prosaic.발음듣기
We have the birds who soar through the space, even into the very distant hills that are a reminder that Bruegel had actually made his way from northern Europe across the Alps to Italy.발음듣기
But unlike some of the other northerners who made that trip, he doesn't come back with the latest traditions of the Italian Renaissance painters.발음듣기
When Bruegel made his trip down to Italy, what he seems to have most been impressed with were the Alps.발음듣기
This is a good reminder that what we're looking at is not an actual view, for example, that Bruegel saw out his window, but a composed, partially imagined, composite landscape, activated by these human figures.발음듣기