Original subtitles

While Michelangelo Raphael and the other great artists of the Italian Renaissance painted classical and Christian heroes, in Northern Europe, another lesseroic but equally dramatic vision was being forged.

Peter Broigelsworld is filled with the mundane and the Macabre, all depicted and unflinchingly intricate detail.

Perhaps the most humane of all the major European painters is interested in the everyday was epic in itself.

The date and place of Peter Broigels' birth is uncertain, but he was probably born sometime around 1525 near the town of Brader, close to the border between modern Holland and Belgium.

We don't know much about Broigels' early life, but what we can glean comes from an account written 35 years after his death by a man called Caravan Manda.

Van Manda tells us that when Broigels was still a teenager, he came here to the city of Antwerp to learn the trade of an artist when he was a apprentice of the studio of a man called Peter Cockvane Elst.

Antwerp was one of the best places in Europe to come and make your name as a young artist.

It had a population of over 100,000, which made it bigger than London or Paris, and it was more cosmopolitan.

It had become a banking centre with the first major foreign exchange and traders from all over the world came to its deep water port.

So there was sugar coming out from the new world, it was spices from the east, it was timbering from the Baltic and wool from Britain, and it made the place very, very wealthy.

In fact, the city was called the Florence of the North because of its banking and its wealth, but also because of its burgeoning art market.

The increased demand for art in the city led to a vibrant cultural scene with numerous artists' workshops, in fact, over 300 dotted here in the back streets of Antwerp, which led to a multiplicity of different styles and talents.

Some painters followed the Italian fashion, painting scenes from the Bible or from classical mythology.

Others favored homegrown subjects, every day scenes set in earthy landscapes and painting with meticulous detail.

Although Broggle trained under an Italian eight master, he deliberately rejected the Italian style.

In 1551, Broggle decided to extend his education in the conventional manner by heading south to Italy.

For three years, he traveled to towns and cities and the countryside, learning what it was to be a painter and meeting up with other artists.

His longest day was in Rome, but he doesn't seem to have spent much time studying ancient art and architecture.

Nor does he seem to have copied the great painters like Raphael and Titian, whose works he must have seen.

Instead, it seems as though in Italy, Broggle's great teacher, was nature.

But it was on his journey home, when crossing the Alps, that Broggle's natural curiosity was most strongly aroused.

He made extensive drawings of the mountainous landscape, so dramatic compared with the flatlands of his native low countries.

And this interest in landscape was put to use when the artist returned to Antwerp.

Broggle's first commissioned works were landscape drawings for engravings.

In 1555, he was employed by the publisher, Hieronymous Cock.

Cock's studio made engravings for a wide public.

Embelishing his experiences, Broggle placed flemish villages between Alpine crags.

At a time when travelling was more trouble than pleasure, scenes of faraway places, like Italy and the new territories in America or the East,

were avidly brought up as a vicarious form of travel itself.

Cheap of the Noil paintings, prints had a wider market.

For their mainly illiterate viewers, they were an ideal type of purchase, decorative, informative, entertaining, and sometimes even exotic.

The engravings of Broggle's work helped to establish his reputation and gave him a steady source of income.

He was also asked to design scenes like this allegory of Sloth.

Part of a print series depicting the seven deadly sins, which had a moral, as well as artistic and perhaps comic purpose.

In turn, Broggle transformed the idea of a pictorial parable into oil painting.

In this stunning picture, called the Netherlandish Proverbs.

At first glance, it appears to be a hectic day in any flemish village.

The look more closely, and it becomes apparent that, in fact, this is a tabloat containing visual representations of over 80 different contemporary sayings or Proverbs,

all illustrating the gamut of human folly and foable.

At the centre, his a woman putting a cloak over a man's head, the flemish equivalent of making a husband a cuckold.

Here is a pillar biter, a flemish term for a hypocrite.

A man falls from an ox onto a donkey.

Today that could be translated as to fall from the frying pan into the fire.

More broadly, the colours of red and blue helped to unify the composition, so that it's a picture that works both in the depiction of specific incidents and as a whole.

In the top right hand corner is a man relieving himself under the gallows from the proverb, if you fear nothing, you'll come to a sticky end.

Pregal seems sometimes to revel in the Macabre, but this black humour may have been a direct response to the harshness of the world around him.

The 16th-century low countries, modern day Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg were in the throws of a religious revolution.

The region was divided between the growing numbers of Protestant reformers, and those that remained loyal to the pope and the Catholic Church.

Radical preachers told the countryside, urging the population to reject Catholicism, extremists

resorted to violence, smashing sacred images in churches. Others, like many of Brogals

friends in Antwerp, wanted to reform the Catholic church from within. To make matters

worse, these low countries were ruled by Spain, the major Catholic superpower of its day.

Spain took a hard line on religion, heretics were burnt, cities like Antwerp were

milked for their tax revenues, providing most of the income for the vast Spanish empire.

For many in the low countries, foreign rule was at best a potent mix of oppression and exploitation.

Premature death from war, plague, or pestilence was a frequent occurrence for medieval

man, and had occupied the minds of artists well before Brogall. Brogall himself was heavily

influenced by works like this one, from the popular 15th century painter, Hieronymus Bosch,

he created fantastic scenes of hell filled with demons, monsters, and witches.

And Brogall's preoccupation with Bosch reached his zenith in this picture,

one of the most epic and harrowing portrayals of death ever made. It's called the triumph of death,

and was painted by Brogall around 1562, and it shows, if you have a world, overrun,

by the skeletal armies of death. But it's a picture where the detail holds the key.

It's very complicated in this composition, but you can take it in terms of layers, and in the

foreground, these are the main characters, symbols of a depraved world. On the left is a king,

who's trying to pick the pocket of death, even as he dies, but death in turn is stealing from

his great barrels of gold coins. Then there's a cardinal, he's slumped in death,

looking over a housewife who clutches her baby, but her dead body is being serviced by a

marauding dog. Then there's a pilgrim lying on the ground and having his throat cut by a

skeleton for the souvenirs in his cap. And moving along, we seem lovers, playing music,

symbolic of making music as well as making love, who were then haunted by the spectra of death

with a skeleton playing the vile behind them. Now if we move to the foreground of the painting,

the energy level increases, and there's this strong sense of thrust from left to right.

There's a horse and car, written by a skeleton, full of heads, of skulls, moving slowly

across the painting. But then look at the centre, there on a horse elongated and skeletal itself

rides the ultimate spectra of death, siding up people who are racing towards an open tomb.

Whose mouth is being pulled open by a skeleton on the extreme right-hand side of the painting.

And the detail is incredible here, and yet all the faces, all the figures, are generalised.

They're all showing something of the same horror. The something almost numbing about this particular

vision, where death is being enacted on such a broad scale. And then we get to the background,

a blasted desolate landscape, where there is no life, where figures hang by their necks,

their wrapped around trees. Some of them are stretched on wheels, silhouetted against the sky.

Ships explode, towers are on fire, houses smolder, as if to say there is no escape from death.

The painting itself is bound together or unified by Brogles' use of colour, red and orange

and blue and green, a dotted throughout the painting, complementary colours that pull this

otherwise disparate vision of hell and terror together. There's also the sense that death is

equalised as a mother with a rocking and emperor, a housewife, or a drunk, death will reach us all in the end.

Brogles' bleak visions found already marked. By his mid-30s, he could boast among his clients,

cardinals and wealthy merchants. His career was about to reach its peak.

Brogles' fame and success continued to grow in Antwerp, but so too did the political

attention to his hometown. In 1555, a new Spanish king came to the throne.

Philip II was a man with a mission to smash the Protestants in Europe. The Inquisition

cranked up its torturous activity in an Netherlands, and any hope for religious tolerance,

which may have existed, was dashed. The 1560s were years of drought and famine too. Instead of

compassionate, the Spanish demanded more taxes and discontent became widespread.

In 1563, Brogles moved here to Brussels, partly perhaps to escape the mounting religious tension

in Antwerp. Also, he just got married to Mike and the daughter of his first master van

else, and it seems that their family wanted Brogles to move away from the city where it had a

crash, but perhaps the strongest reason was patronage, because this, Brussels was the seat of

the Spanish court. During his time in Brussels, Brogle worked like a man possessed.

30 out of the 40 paintings which have survived were done in the six years he spent in this house.

Brogles' paintings don't give that much away about his politics. If he was against the Spanish

occupation, he kept it quiet. The consequences of being discovered would have incurred the death penalty.

In 1566, Spain's patience with the rebellious low-country snapped,

and a savage suppression began. Here were given an insight into Brogles' frame of mind.

Painted in the same year as the crisis, the massacre of the innocence is a biblical story set

in a contemporary-flemish village, and Brogle seems to be alluding to the terror of the times.

Herod's mass slaughter of the male children of Bethlehem could have been used by Brogle,

subtly to parallel the religious upheaval in his own time. The commander of the troops

quietly overseeing the murders is thought to be the hated Spanish commander, the Duke of Alva.

Look at the babies and toddlers left to die on the ground. In later years, these images were

thought to be so horrific, they were painted over into sacks of grain.

Despite the misery around him, Brogle continued to work feverishly, and his old patrons

in Antwerp remained loyal to the painter. In 1565, the wealthy Antwerp merchant,

Nicholas Youngerling, commissioned Brogle to do an ambitious decorative scheme for his new

village, just outside the city walls. Brogle effectively produced a freeze-like series of pictures

that ran around the top of the room, and that wrestled with one of the oldest subjects in the history

of art, a kind of pictorial calendar of the unfolding months or seasons. Initially,

artists were in thought that there were 12 pictures in the series, but now they're at the

opinion that were just six, five of which still remain, and three of which are here in the

Kunsthistoricism Museum in Vienna. And what Brogle does is something more profound than simply

an illustration month by month of the year unfolding. Instead, we get a composite work of art

that shows a panorama of mankind's relationship with the natural world around him.

The series begins with this one. It's called Hunters in the Snow, and it's one of the most famous

snow scenes ever painted. This is the depths of winter, December or January time, and what we see

are three hunters plotting through the snow. They're thin, sleek dogs slightly undernourished,

following in their wake, and the results of their labor is a clear, one-manzy fox. All around the

culture, which is dominated by two colors, icy white, and this freezing cold gray green.

We see men and women at work. There's a woman lugging an enormous bunch of firewood across a bridge.

There's a man pulling his horse and cart. There's also two figures racing towards a barn and house

in the distance with ladders, because the chimney's on fire. But amidst all this endurance,

humanity's at play, too. This is an image of work and of play. So across these frozen

fields, we see people playing ice hockey. They're bowling, they're curling. They're also just

skating. And in fact, it looks to me rather like some abstract ballet taking place of picture within

a picture. And then we see a bit of warmth, the colors of brown dotted around, and this fire,

with the pub sign hanging off, threatening to fall into it, as if to remind us that humanity lives

fairly precipitous existence. And then we look again at the picture, and we're seeing it almost

from a bird's eye view. And as if to remind us that, Brogel puts birds all over in this bird

in flight that's saws right across the center of our vision. But we look down at the hunters

who in turn are about to walk down this incredibly steep in-cline. And then look at these trees

that march their way down the hill, and that draws our line of vision right across to this phenomenal

mountain scene. This alpine scene that surely is reminiscent of Brogel's own journey across the

Alps when he was a younger man. And so there's this sense of thrust of a diagonal from left to right

that also reminds us that although this is a wonderfully self-contained image, at the same time,

it's an image that's part of a series and our eyes are drawn out of the picture and onto the next one.

And in the second in the series, you can pick up with the mountains in the top left hand corner.

Your eyes drawn across this stormy scene where boats are being battered and tossed around

on this turbulence scene. And then Brogel thrusts the image of humanity, closer up against our

faces into our eyes. And we get this wonderful vignette, a human being's trying to struggle against

the elements of repairing their houses, of trimming their trees, of gathering firewood,

but also of partying. Now quite why they're partying still in the depths of winter

might be a mystery when you first look at the painting. But the paper hat and the fact that

the man's stuffing waffles into his face seems to lend us to interpret this as being

sure of Tuesday the beginning of Lent. So in fact the picture is either February or March

depending on when Easter falls. And then we look into the distance and see the details and

look in the left hand corner. And there's a figure staggered out of a pub, leaning up against

the wall, relieving himself whilst a fiddler plays. And what we get is humour as well as humanity.

And we get an image that is sympathetic without ever being sentimentalising and also without being

judgmental. The series was painted at remarkable speed, completed in just over a year.

Either because of the time restraints or because the paintings were to be viewed from quite a distance,

Brogler applied his paint very thinly, definitely deceiving the eye with a few superb strokes of his brush.

Brogler's patrons came from the Metropolitan Elite of his day,

wealthy businessman cartographers, even cardinals. But in his later work he developed an

interest in the lives of the less wealthy folk who inhabited small towns and villages,

all of which he depicted with customary detail and a remarkable insight.

Brogler set out to gain first-hand experience of what he referred to as peasant life.

According to his biographer, the painter regularly met with a close friend called Hans Frankert,

himself a wealthy merchant, and together they would dress up as peasant.

And claiming to be related to the bridal groom, they would gatecrash weddings or parties.

When Brogler was in his early forces, there was a marked change in the both the style and approach

to painting which is wonderfully exemplified in this picture. It's called the peasant wedding feast,

and it shows us inside which is rare in Brogler's art, but more crucially we get a close-up

vision of action. In fact it makes us much more actively involved and gives a sense that Brogler himself

was more actively involved rather than the dispassionate observer looking at nature and humanity

in tiny detail from afar. And what we see are individual faces of the people at this country

wedding brought to life with close attention to detail. We see the bride herself with a wonderful

beatisfied or maybe be abused expression on a face. There's a paper crown above her head,

her parents are to her right, and no one can quite see where her bride groom is,

where the man she's married is. Now in fact he may well be serving, and there was another

landist proverb that said it was a poor man that was absent from his own wedding. Also I love

the expression on the bride's father's face, slightly grumpy because he's footing the bill for

all this. But there is a kind of moral dimension to the way this painting has been seen.

First of all religious, people have looked at this and quite rightly said, well there are precedents

for painting wedding feasts. There's the wedding at Cana from the Bible where Christ turns

water into wine. But in pictures of that subject and also in aristocratic banquets, no one ever

eats the food. The food is wonderfully portrayed but no one ever devours it. Now Brogler here

takes a totally different view. People are eating. They're eating voraciously. Look at the child

there who scrape the bowl out with his finger and his licking his finger is scraping the bowl clean.

But there's a second moral dimension which is the whole idea of gluttony. Now in the early 1560s

there were raging famines in the Netherlands that also been an edict from the Imperial Court

to say that country weddings could have no more than 20 people at them. If you count the

numbers of people actually attending the banquet sitting around the table, it's just under 20.

But look in the far right hand part of the painting. A monk talks to a wealthy man. It's almost

a debate about perhaps what is happening here or the nature of excess. But when I look at this

picture, I don't see Brogler producing a picture sermon about the nature of excess that's going

on in this particular scene. I think the way he paints the food and the way he paints the

peasants themselves and the way that they're devouring the food makes it a serious business.

It makes it a celebration if you like. A simple bounty.

The world has changed so radically from the time of Brogler's birth,

only 40 years or so before. Civil war tore apart the low countries and Antwerp was fast-loosing

its prominent position as a world trading centre. A year after Brogler's series of the months were

in youngerlings Grand Villa. The businessman himself went bust. His new house and all his possessions were

sold off, including his collection of 16 paintings by Brogler. Back in Brussels, the artist himself

fed better, gaining a commission to design some tapestries to celebrate the completion of the

Brussels Antwerp Canal in 1565. But the political climate was still very tense and Brogler kept

increasingly low profile. On his deathbed, in order to protect his family, he ordered his wife

to destroy any paintings in the house which might be politically dangerous. Still only in his early

40s, Brogler died in 1569. The painter's popularity continued to grow after his death. His work

was collected by Habsburg Empress and then by later great painters such as Rubens and Rembrandt.

His reputation was also enhanced by his offspring and his sons and grandsons became

accomplished painters in their own right. More broadly, Brogler founded a whole tradition of

low-life painting in the Netherlands, creating an alternative vision to the idealised world

of the Italian Renaissance.