Wikimedia Commons has media related to: 1566

The Stari Most bridge is built.

Year 1566 (MDLXVI) was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar.

Events[link]

January–June[link]

• January 7 – Pope Pius V succeeds Pope Pius IV as the 225th pope.
• March 28 – The foundation stone of Valletta (Malta's Capital City) is laid by Grand Master Jean de la Valette.

July–December[link]

• August 5–September 7 – Battle of Szigetvár: 2,300 Hungarian and Croatian defenders are annihilated by an army of 90,000 soldiers of the Ottoman Empire.
• August – Calvinists destroy religious art in the Low Countries.
• September 6 – Selim II succeeds Suleiman I as Sultan of the Ottoman Empire.

Date unknown[link]

• Religious rioting in the Netherlands signifies the beginning of the Eighty Years' War in the Netherlands.
• The Spanish doubloon is first minted during the reign of Philip II of Spain.
• Pope Pius V expels most of the prostitutes from Rome.
• Between July 19, 1566 and July 7, 1567 – The first bridge crossing the Neretva river at Mostar (in modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina) is completed by the Ottoman Empire. The white marble bridge is now known as Stari Most ("Old Bridge").

Births[link]

• March 8 – Carlo Gesualdo, Italian music composer (d. 1611)
• May 26 – Mehmed III, Ottoman Emperor (d. 1603)
• June 19 – King James VI of Scotland/James I of England and Ireland (d. 1625)
• June 20 – King Sigismund III Vasa of Poland and Sweden (d. 1632)
• August 12 – Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia of Spain (d. 1633)
• September 1 – Edward Alleyn, English actor (d. 1626)
• September 18 – King Sigismund III Vasa/Sigismund I of Sweden (d. 1632)
• October 13 – Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of Cork, Irish politician (d. 1643)
• December 11 – (baptised) – Manuel Cardoso, Portuguese composer (d. 1650)
• December 20 – Edward Wightman, English Baptist martyr (d. 1612)
• date unknown
  • Pietro Cerone, Italian music theorist (d. 1625)
  • Giovanni Baglione, Italian painter and historian of art (d. 1643)
  • Jan Jesenius, Slovak physician (d. 1621)
  • Michal Sedziwój, Polish alchemist (d. 1636)
  • James Sempill, Scottish theologian (d. 1626)

Deaths[link]

• January 7 – Louis de Blois, Flemish mystical writer (b. 1506)
• February 3 – George Cassander, Flemish theologian (b. 1513)
• March 9 – David Rizzio, Italian secretary of Mary, Queen of Scots (b. 1533)
• March 26 – Antonio de Cabezón, Spanish composer and organist (b. 1510)
• March 28 – Sigismund von Herberstein, Austrian diplomat (b. 1486)
• April 25 – Diane de Poitiers, mistress of King Henry II of France (b. 1499)
• April 25 – Louise Labé, French poet (b. 1525)
• May 4 – Luca Ghini, Italian physician and botanist (b. 1490)
• May 10 – Leonhart Fuchs, German physician and a botanist (b. 1501)
• July 2 – Nostradamus, French astrologer (b. 1503)
• July 17 – Bartolomé de Las Casas, Spanish priest (b. 1484)
• July 30 – Guillaume Rondelet, French doctor (b. 1507)
• September 2 – Taddeo Zuccari, Italian painter (b. 1529)
• September 5 – Suleiman the Magnificent, Ottoman Sultan since 1520 (b. 1494)
• September 22 – Johannes Agricola, German Protestant reformer (b. 1494)
• September 27 – Marco Girolamo Vida, Italian poet (b. 1490)
• date unknown
  • Jacob Acontius, Swiss jurist
  • Charles Dumoulin, French jurist (b. 1500)
  • Richard Edwards, English poet (b. 1523)
  • Thomas Hoby, English diplomat and translator (b. 1530)
  • Kimotsuki Kanetsugu, Japanese samurai (b. 1511)
  • Calvagh O'Donnell, Irish chieftain

References[link]

Pieter Bruegel the Elder
The Painter and The Connoisseur, c. 1565 is thought to be Bruegel's self-portrait.
Birth name	Pieter Bruegel
Born	c. 1525 Bree, Duchy of Brabant, Habsburg Netherlands (now Belgium)
Died	9 September 1569(1569-09-09) (age 44) Brussels, Duchy of Brabant, Habsburg Netherlands (now Belgium)
Field	Painting, printmaking
Movement	Dutch and Flemish Renaissance
Works	Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, The Hunters in the Snow, The Peasant Wedding

Pieter Bruegel (Brueghel) the Elder (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈpitəɾ ˈbɾøːɣəl]; c. 1525 – 9 September 1569) was a Flemish Renaissance painter and printmaker known for his landscapes and peasant scenes (so called genre painting). He is sometimes referred to as the "Peasant Bruegel" to distinguish him from other members of the Brueghel dynasty, but he is also the one generally meant when the context does not make clear which Brueghel is being referred to. From 1559 he dropped the 'h' from his name and signed his paintings as Bruegel.

Life[link]

According to some sources he was born in Breugel near the (now Dutch) town of Breda. There are however also records that he was born in Breda, and there is some uncertainty whether the (now Belgian) town of Bree, called Breda in Latin, is meant.^[1] He was an apprentice of Pieter Coecke van Aelst, whose daughter Mayken he later married. He spent some time in France and Italy, and then went to Antwerp, where in 1551 he was accepted as a master in the painter's guild. He traveled to Italy soon after, and then returned to Antwerp before settling in Brussels permanently 10 years later.

He received the nickname 'Peasant Bruegel' or 'Bruegel the Peasant' for his alleged practice of dressing up like a peasant in order to mingle at weddings and other celebrations, thereby gaining inspiration and authentic details for his genre paintings. He died in Brussels on 9 September 1569 and was buried in the Kapellekerk. He was the father of Pieter Brueghel the Younger and Jan Brueghel the Elder. Both became painters, but as they were very young children when their father died, it is believed neither received any training from him. According to Carel van Mander, it is likely that they were instructed by their grandmother Mayken Verhulst van Aelst, who was also an artist.

Style[link]

In Bruegel's later years he painted in a simpler style than the Italianate art that prevailed in his time. The most obvious influence on his art is the older Dutch master Hieronymus Bosch, particularly in Bruegel's early "demonological" paintings such as The Triumph of Death and Dulle Griet (Mad Meg). It was in nature, however, that he found his greatest inspiration as he is identified as being a master of landscapes. It was in these landscapes that Bruegel created a story, seeming to combine several scenes in one painting. Such works can be seen in The Fall of the Rebel Angels and the previously mentioned The Triumph of Death.

Themes[link]

Bruegel specialized in genre paintings populated by peasants, often with a large landscape element, but also painted religious works. Making the life and manners of peasants the main focus of a work was rare in painting in Brueghel's time, and he was a pioneer of the Netherlandish genre painting. His earthy, unsentimental but vivid depiction of the rituals of village life—including agriculture, hunts, meals, festivals, dances, and games—are unique windows on a vanished folk culture and a prime source of iconographic evidence about both physical and social aspects of 16th century life. For example, the painting Netherlandish Proverbs illustrates dozens of then-contemporary aphorisms (many of them still in use in current Dutch or Flemish), and Children's Games shows the variety of amusements enjoyed by young people. His winter landscapes of 1565 (e.g. Hunters in the Snow) are taken as corroborative evidence of the severity of winters during the Little Ice Age.

Using abundant spirit and comic power, he created some of the early images of acute social protest in art history. Examples include paintings such as The Fight Between Carnival and Lent (a satire of the conflicts of the Reformation) and engravings like The Ass in the School and Strongboxes Battling Piggybanks. On his deathbed he reportedly ordered his wife to burn the most subversive of his drawings to protect his family from political persecution.^[2]

Influence[link]

His painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is the subject of the 1938 poem "Musée des Beaux Arts" by W. H. Auden, and also of a 1960 poem by William Carlos Williams that also uses Bruegel's title.

Russian film director Andrei Tarkovksy referenced Bruegel's paintings in his films several times, notably in Solaris (1972) and The Mirror (1975).

His 1564 painting The Procession to Calvary inspired the 2011 Polish-Swedish film co-production The Mill and the Cross, in which Bruegel is played by Rutger Hauer.

It is believed that his painting Hunters in the Snow influenced the classic short story with the same title written by Tobias Wolff and featured in In the Garden of the North American Martyrs.

Works[link]

There are about 45 authenticated surviving paintings, one third of which are in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. A number of others are known to have been lost. There are a large number of drawings. Brueghel only etched one plate himself, The Rabbit Hunt, but designed many engravings and etchings, mostly for the Cock publishing house.

• 

  Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (c. 1558), Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium

• 

  Netherlandish Proverbs (1559), Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, with peasant scenes illustrating over 100 proverbs

• 

  Children's Games (1560), Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

• 

  A detail of Children's Games (1560)

• 

  The Triumph of Death (c. 1562), Museo del Prado, Madrid

• 

  The Fall of the Rebel Angels, (1562), Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium

• 

  Dull Gret {1562}.Museum Mayer van den Bergh, oil on panel

• 

  The Tower of Babel (1563), Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, oil on board

• 

  Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap (1565), Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

• 

  The Hunters in the Snow (1565) Dec-Jan, oil on oak panel, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

• 

  The Gloomy Day {1565}, Feb-Mar, oil on wood, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

• 

  The Hay Harvest (1565), June-July, Oil on wood, National Museum (Prague), Lobkowicz family collection in Lobkowicz Palace in Prague Castle ^[3]

• 

  The Harvesters (1565), Aug-Sept, oil on panel, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

• 

  The Return of the Herd {1565} OCt-Nov, oil on oak panel, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

• 

  The Wedding Dance (c.1566), oil on oak panel, The Detroit Institute of Arts [1]

• 

  The Census at Bethlehem (1566), oil on wood panel, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium

• 

  Massacre of the Innocents, (c. 1565-1567), Brukenthal National Museum, Sibiu

• 

  The Land of Cockaigne (1567), Alte Pinakothek, an illustration of the medieval mythical land of plenty called Cockaigne

• 

  The Peasant Wedding (1568), Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

• 

  The Peasant Dance (1568), Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, oil on oak panel

• 

  The Peasant and the Nest Robber (1568), Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

• 

  The Beggars (The Cripples) (1568), Louvre, Paris, oil on panel

• 

  The Blind Leading the Blind (1568), National Museum of Capodimonte, Naples

• 

  The Misanthrope (1568), National Museum of Capodimonte, Naples

• Naval Battle in the Gulf of Naples, 1560, Galleria Doria-Pamphilj, Rome
• The Fall of the Rebel Angels 1562, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels
• The "Little" Tower of Babel, c. 1563, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam
• The Procession to Calvary, 1564, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
• The Adoration of the Kings, 1564, The National Gallery, London
• Massacre of the Innocents, c. 1567, versions at Royal Collection, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, at Brukenthal National Museum, Sibiu,^[4] and at Upton House, Banbury
• Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap, 1565, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, inv. 8724
• Landscape with Christ and the Apostles at the Sea of Tiberias, 1553, probably with Maarten de Vos, private collection
• Ass at School, 1556, drawing, Print room, Berlin State Museums
• Parable of the Sower, 1557, Timken Museum of Art, San Diego
• Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c.1554–55, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels – Note: Now seen as a copy of a lost authentic Bruegel painting^[5]
• Netherlandish Proverbs, 1559, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin
• The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, 1559, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
• Portrait of an Old Woman, 1560, Alte Pinakothek, Munich
• Children's Games, 1560, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
• Temperance, 1560
• The Suicide of Saul (Battle Against The Philistines On The Gilboa), 1562, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
• Two Small Monkeys, 1562, Staatliche Museen, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin
• The Triumph of Death, c. 1562, Museo del Prado, Madrid
• Dulle Griet (Mad Meg), c. 1562, Museum Mayer van den Bergh, Antwerp
• The Tower of Babel, 1563, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
• Flight To Egypt, 1563, Courtauld Institute Galleries, London
• The Death of the Virgin, 1564, (grisaille), Upton House, Banbury
• The Months. A cycle of probably 6 paintings of the months or seasons, of which five remain:
  • The Hunters in the Snow (Dec.–Jan.), 1565, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
  • The Gloomy Day (Feb.–Mar.), 1565, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
  • The Hay Harvest (June–July), 1565, Lobkowicz Palace at the Prague Castle Complex, Czech Republic
  • The Harvesters (Aug.-Sept.), 1565, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
  • The Return of the Herd (Oct.–Nov.), 1565, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
• Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery (1565), Courtauld Institute of Art, London
• The Calumny of Apelles, 1565, drawing, British Museum, London
• The Painter and the Connoisseur, drawing, c. 1565, Albertina, Vienna
• Preaching of John the Baptist, 1566, Museum of Fine Arts (Budapest)
• The Census at Bethlehem, 1566, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels
• The Wedding Dance, c. 1566, Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit
• Conversion of Paul, 1567, Kunsthistorishes Museum, Vienna
• The Land of Cockaigne, 1567, Alte Pinakothek, Munich
• The Magpie on the Gallows, 1568, Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt
• The Misanthrope, 1568, Museo di Capodimonte, Naples
• The Blind Leading the Blind, 1568, Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples
• The Peasant Wedding, 1568, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
• The Peasant Dance, 1568, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
• The Beggars (The Cripples), 1568, Louvre, Paris
• The Peasant and the Nest Robber, 1568, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
• The Three Soldiers, 1568, The Frick Collection, New York City
• The Storm at Sea, an unfinished work, probably Bruegel's last painting.
• The Wine of Saint Martin’s Day, Museo del Prado, Madrid (discovered in 2010)

Prints

• Large Fish Eat Small Fish, 1556, a print after a Bruegel design

Family tree[link]

Other members of the family include Pieter van Aelst and Mayken Verhulst (father-in-law and mother-in-law to Pieter Bruegel the Elder), Jan van Kessel, senior (grandson of Jan Bruegel the Elder) and Jan van Kessel, junior. Through David Teniers, the family is also related to the whole Teniers family of painters and the Quellinus family of painters and sculptors, since Jan-Erasmus Quellinus married Cornelia, daughter of David Teniers the Younger.

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article Breughel, Pieter.

• Bosch Bruegel Society
• www.Pieter-Bruegel-The-Elder.org 99 works by Pieter Bruegel the Elder
• Complete list of paintings which includes all of the 100 proverbs from the painting, with explanation (in French).
• Timken Museum of Art's "Parable of the Sower" by Pieter Bruegel the Elder
• Creativity Brueghel laid the foundation of the Netherlands School
•  "Bruegel". Encyclopedia Americana. 1920. 

Giuseppe Arcimboldo
Self-portrait, now in National Gallery in Prague
Born	1527 Milan
Died	July 11, 1593(1593-07-11) (age 66) Milan
Nationality	Italian
Field	Painting
Works	The Librarian, 1566 Vertumnus, 1590-1591 Flora, ca. 1591

Giuseppe Arcimboldo (Italian pronunciation: [dʒuˈzɛppe artʃimˈbɔldo]; also spelled Arcimboldi) (1527 – July 11, 1593) was an Italian painter best known for creating imaginative portrait heads made entirely of such objects as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish, and books – that is, he painted representations of these objects on the canvas arranged in such a way that the whole collection of objects formed a recognizable likeness of the portrait subject.

Biography[link]

Vertumnus, a portrait of today.^[1] Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor painted as Vertumnus, Roman God of the seasons, c. 1590-1. Skokloster Castle, Sweden.

His father, Biagio Arcimboldo, was an artist. Like his father, Giuseppe Arcimboldo started his career as a designer for stained glasses and frescoes at local cathedrals when he was 21 years old.^[2]

In 1562 he became court portraitist to Ferdinand I at the Habsburg court in Vienna, and later, to Maximilian II and his son Rudolf II at the court in Prague. He was also the court decorator and costume designer. King Augustus of Saxony, who visited Vienna in 1570 and 1573, saw Arcimboldo's work and commissioned a copy of his "The Four Seasons" which incorporates his own monarchic symbols.

Arcimboldo's conventional work, on traditional religious subjects, has fallen into oblivion, but his portraits of human heads made up of vegetables, plants, fruits, sea creatures and tree roots, were greatly admired by his contemporaries and remain a source of fascination today.

At a distance, his portraits looked like normal human portraits. However, individual objects in each portrait were actually overlapped together to make various anatomical shapes of a human. They were carefully constructed by his imagination. Besides, when he assembled objects in one portrait, he never used random objects. Each object was related by characterization.^[3] In The Librarian, Arcimboldo used objects that signified the book culture at that time, such as the curtain that created individual study rooms in a library. The animal tails, which became the beard of the portrait, were used as dusters. By using the everyday objects, the portraits were decoration and still life paintings at the same time.^[4] His works showed not only nature and human beings, but also how close they were related.^[5]

After the portrait was released to the public, some scholars, who had a close relationship with the book culture at that time, argued that the portrait ridiculed their scholarship. In fact, Arcimboldo criticized the phenomenon of the rich people’s misbehavior and showed others what happened at that time through his art. In The Librarian, although the painting looked ridiculous, it criticized some wealthy people who collected the books in order to satisfy their ownership, instead of to read the books.^[6]

Art critics debate whether his paintings were whimsical or the product of a deranged mind.^[1] A majority of scholars hold to the view, however, that given the Renaissance fascination with riddles, puzzles, and the bizarre (see, for example, the grotesque heads of Leonardo da Vinci), Arcimboldo, far from being mentally imbalanced, catered to the taste of his times.

Arcimboldo died in Milan, to which he retired after leaving the Prague service. It was during this last phase of his career that he produced the composite portrait of Rudolph II (see above), as well as his self-portrait as the Four Seasons. His Italian contemporaries honored him with poetry and manuscripts celebrating his illustrious career.

When the Swedish army invaded Prague in 1648, during the Thirty Years' War, many of Arcimboldo's paintings were taken from Rudolf II's collection.

His works can be found in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Habsburg Schloss Ambras in Innsbruck, the Louvre in Paris, as well as numerous museums in Sweden. In Italy, his work is in Cremona, Brescia, and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. The Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, the Denver Art Museum in Denver, Colorado, the Menil Foundation in Houston, Texas, the Candie Museum in Guernsey and the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid also own paintings by Arcimboldo.

Mannerism[link]

Arcimboldo is known as a mannerist in the 16th century. The Mannerism was a transitional period from 1520 to 1590, which adopted some artistic elements from the High Renaissance and influenced the other elements in the Baroque period . The Mannerist tended to show close relationship between human and nature.^[7] Arcimboldo also tried to show his appreciation of nature through his portraits. In The Spring, the human portrait was composed only of various spring flowers and plants. From the hat to the neck, every part of the portrait, even lips and nose, was composed of the flowers while the body was composed of the plants. On the other hand, in The Winter, the human was composed mostly by the roots of the trees. Some leaves from evergreen trees and the branches of other trees became hairs while a straw mat became the costume of the human portrait.

Legacy[link]

The bizarre works of Arcimboldo, especially his multiple images, were rediscovered in the early 20th century by Surrealist artists like Salvador Dalí. The exhibition entitled “The Arcimboldo Effect” at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice (1987) included numerous 'double meaning' paintings. Arcimboldo's influence can also be seen in the work of Shigeo Fukuda, István Orosz, Octavio Ocampo, and Sandro del Prete, as well as the films of Jan Švankmajer.

His painting, Water, was used as the cover of the album Masque by the progressive rock band Kansas.

A detail from Flora was used on the cover of the 2009 album Bonfires on the Heath by The Clientele.

The 'soup genie' character Boldo in the 2008 animated film The Tale of Despereaux, is composed of vegetables.

Arcimboldo's surrealist imagination is visible also in fiction. The first and last sections of 2666, Roberto Bolaño's last novel, concern a fictional German writer named Archimboldi, who takes his pseudonym from Arcimboldo.^[8]

The 1994 short story The Coming of Vertumnus by Ian Watson counterpoints the innate surrealism of the eponymous work against a drug-induced altered mental state.

Gallery[link]

• 

  The Jurist, 1566, Nationalmuseum, Sweden

• 

  The Librarian, 1566, oil on canvas, Skokloster Castle, Sweden

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  Winter, 1573, oil on canvas, Louvre Museum, Paris

• 

  Spring, 1573, oil on canvas, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid

• 

  Summer, 1573, oil on canvas, Louvre Museum, Paris

• 

  Autumn, 1573, oil on canvas, Louvre Museum, Paris

• 

  An earlier version of Summer, 1563, Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Austria

• 

  The Fire, Oil on Wood, 1566, Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Austria

• 

  Giuseppe Arcimboldo - Fruit Basket

See also[link]

• Hidden faces

References[link]

This article uses bare URLs for citations. Please consider adding full citations so that the article remains verifiable. Several templates and the Reflinks tool are available to assist in formatting. (Reflinks documentation) (February 2012)

Further reading[link]

• Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann. Arcimboldo: Visual Jokes, Natural History, and Still-Life Painting (University of Chicago Press; 2010) 313 pages

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Giuseppe Arcimboldo

• Giuseppe-Arcimboldo.org 32 works by Giuseppe Arcimboldo
• Giuseppe Arcimboldo at Olga's Gallery
• Arcimboldo at TVM
• Arcimboldo in the "A World History of Art"
• Web Gallery of Art
• Arcimboldo at MuseumSyndicate
• Arcimboldo at Panopticon Virtual Art Gallery
• Skokloster Castle, Sweden
• Arcimboldo, from Milan's cathedral to european courts
• Arcimboldo's Feast for the Eyes Smithsonian Magazine