Pieter Bruegel the Elder (EN)

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Fall of the Rebel Angels is the first comprehensive book on one of the most cherished masterpieces of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels. It argues that with the Fall of the Rebel Angels (1562), Pieter Bruegel (d. 1569) turned a traditional devotional theme into an innovative commentary on his own time, and situates the painting within the early modern cultures of knowledge and collecting. More particularly, it suggests that many of the hybrid falling angels are carefully composed of naturalia and artificialia, as collected in art and curiosity cabinets of the time. Bruegel’s noted emulation of Hieronymus Bosch was only part of his wider interest in collecting, inspecting and imitating the artistic and natural world around him. His interests prompt an examination of the world when he painted the Fall of the Rebel Angels: locally, in the urban and courtly centers of Antwerp and Brussels on the eve of the Dutch Revolt, and globally, as the discovery of the New World irreversibly transformed the European perception of art and nature. Painted as a cautionary tale of hubris and pride, Bruegel presents the Fall of the Rebel Angels as a meditation on the dangers and potential of man’s pursuit of art, knowledge and politics, a universal theme that has lost nothing of its power today.