T. J. Clark offers profound insights into Bruegel’s art, where we encounter a reality formed from wholly worldly materials, yet suspended between belief and disbelief.
Renowned art historian T. J. Clark unveils the hidden depths of Bruegel the Elder’s work in this captivating analysis of some of the artist’s most famous masterpieces. Taking the medieval concept of Schlaraffenland, a whimsical dreamland of milk and honey, as his starting point, Clark reveals the satire behind Bruegel’s depictions of paradise and damnation.
In an age marked by enforced orthodoxy, religious wars and threats of burning hellfire, Bruegel the Elder reflected on the powers as well as limitations of religion, deriding the sanctimonious and ridiculing the righteous. At the heart of this book stands Bruegel’s ironic yet highly tender picture of The Land of Cockaigne, where we encounter a vision not of heaven above, but on earth. A parody of paradise, Bruegel’s heaven is consumptive, empty, idle and irresponsible; made of wholly worldly materials, just on the precipice of possibility.
About the author
T. J. Clark is professor emeritus of the history of art at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of the seminal The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers and Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism. He writes art criticism regularly for the London Review of Books. He is also the author of Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come, If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present, and T. J. Clark on Bruegel, all published by Thames & Hudson.
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