Grotesque and PaintingThe Grotesque World of Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Pieter Bruegel the Elder is the link between the late medieval and seventeenth-century North European Painters. His standpoint is also positioned at the end of the ancient world and the beginning of the new, and he is considered the first modern painter of North. Bruegel neither shares the medieval outlook of someone like Bosch, nor are his views as accredited as those of the seventeenth century, which makes him a more controver-sial figure. This controversy has also found its way to the debates of art historians, and since no letters or writings of any sort has remained of Bruegel, various, and sometimes contradictory, interpretations of his works have been made. Meanwhile, the complexity of the works themselves have added to these controversies. Consequently, some has emphasized the moral and allegorical aspects of his paintings, while others have studied their ethnographical and comic nature. Among the concepts used in Bruegel studies is the grotesque. There have been many studies on the concept of the grotesque in the twentieth century, in which references to Bruegel’s work are also common. The main purpose of this article, however, is not to “tie together” the concept of the grotesque and the works of Bruegel and state the obvious, rather it is to first, outline the figure of Pieter Bruegel, and second, describe the state of Bruegel’s “world” in some of his paintings. It just so happens that, among aesthetic concepts, this description has an equivalent term: the grotesque.