Pieter Bruegle 1525-1569......................

this shit rules...................and the Black Sabbath album is one of his paintings "Triumph Of Death"...........
It's natural to think of an earlier artist, Hieronymus Bosch. His work was clearly an inspiration to Bruegel. But the similarity holds a big difference. It's the difference between two kinds of fantasy art. One is devoted to sheer invention. The other brings its inventions to life.

Bosch's phantasmagoria have casts of thousands. He has an endless ability to make things up, to coin weird and queasy combinations. But his creatures remain figments of his imagination. Looking at them, you think of the mind that so ingeniously devised them. Looking at Bruegel's, you think of the creatures themselves.

What Baudelaire said of Goya is also true of Bruegel: "Goya's great merit consists of making the monstrous plausible. His monsters were born viable. Nobody has managed to surpass him for a sense of the possible absurd. All these contortions, these bestial faces, these diabolical grimaces are pierced with humanity."

Bruegel's monsters, more monstrous than Goya's, have life burgeoning in them– yelling, writhing, growling, colliding. The struggle of wild, revolting devils against lean, dainty, tidying angels, is the kind confrontation Bruegel is often drawn to: fat vs thin, gluttons vs prudes. He's not quite of the Devil's party, but he can certainly feel with both sides.

The artist

Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c1525-1569) is one of the world's most postered painters. Hunters in the Snow, The Peasant Wedding, The Fall of Icarus or The Tower of Babel are stuck to walls everywhere. The Netherlandish artist's work has become part of our visual vocabulary – quotable, proverbial, almost anonymous. Bruegel comes across as an inherently democratic painter, part of popular, not elite, culture. He embraces all of life, effortlessly combining comic and tragic. He's a crowd pleaser and his art delights in teeming crowds.