Peter Bruegel (the elder) was called “peasant Bruegel” because he liked to dress of like a peasant and crash peasant weddings. One is not sure exactly how he got this idea, but he claimed it gave him artistic inspiration.
But the fact that Peter was an odd duck is not really what makes him fascinating. Europe was starting to grab hold of an idea that we call “humanism”. And Peter was one of the early artistic adapters, more interested in what peasants really did than what David may have looked like in the nude. We call the resulting work “genre painting”. But it was more than that. It is an aesthetic that we live with now — anti-authoritarian,. You might say that this same humanism was at the core of the American revolution. That sense of continuity pulls me into his paintings in order to see what that looked like back then.
BTW, you can find a boatload of his works in Vienna. This is a bit odd since Vienna is a city that celebrates grandeur. It us a fantastic place, but I don’t think of it as a bastion of humanism.
Buzzography 