Name: How Bruegel Invented A New Genre Of Painting
Uploaded: 2026-01-16T16:52:44.000Z
Duration: 4 min 59 s
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What you're looking at now is arguably the first significant work of art depicting regular people.

This is a print of Peter Brueghel, the elders ice skating before the gate of St. George.

It's an urban scene of citizens in Antwerp enjoying a winter afternoon.

Skating, walking, playing, observing, laughing.

There's no judgment here, just a depiction of what it was really like one day, 465 years ago.

Well, for much of the history of art, painting was dominated by religious and mythological themes, as well as portraiture of monarchs and the ruling elite.

This is due to the fact that the Church and the aristocracy commissioned the vast majority of the art being made.

But in the 16th century, that started to change, and particularly in the Low Countries.

What constitutes modern day Belgium and the Netherlands?

The Low Countries saw the rapid emergence of a merchant middle class in this period.

With enough money to patronize local artists, it makes sense that they wanted to see art that reflected their own lives.

And with the rise of reproducible prints like this one, art became more affordable, broadening the audience even further.

Chief among these, the Protestant Reformation, which was gaining a foothold throughout the Low Countries, and

inflaming tensions with their Spanish and Catholic overlords.

Advocated for a simplification of worship, shared a dislike for religious images, believing that they could lead to idolatry.

And things came to a head in August 1566 with the Bildenstorm, or the Iconoclastic Fury, in which groups of Calvinists ransacked churches and monasteries throughout the Low Countries, destroying religious images, statues and altars.

This was the precipitating event of the 80 Years War, when the Dutch revolted against their Spanish rulers and eventually won independence.

Bruegel made this drawing just eight years before the war began.

In a period ripe for new genres of art, it was also a period of rising humanism, thanks to the influence of Northern Renaissance thinkers like Erasmus of Rotterdam.

Erasmus famously used satire to critique the social, religious and political failings of his time in an entertaining way.

And satire also found its way into the visual arts, bringing with it depictions of of ordinary people.

In 1514, Quentin Macys made the Money Changer and His Wife, showing an ordinary man and woman counting money.

You can tell by their outfits that they aren't nobles.

The painting is a satirical criticism on the pursuit of material wealth at the expense of spiritual wealth.

The wife is thoughtlessly flipping through a book of devotion while her eyes are fixed on the cash in Van Hemessen's Loose Company from 1540 and Aertsen's the Egg Dance from 1552.

Peasants Dr. And dance in messy brothels.

These paintings are moral warnings against debauchery and lust.

Bruegel made several satires of his own, depicting ordinary people only to ridicule their vices.

In all these paintings, the subject isn't so much the people, but

the vice itself, which is what makes this skating scene so radical.

There is no satire here, no moralizing judgment, just a naturalistic presentation of everyday life.

In the following years, Bruegel painted a number of masterpieces of a similar content winter landscapes, peasants, dancing, eating, getting married.

Some do see a little satire in these paintings, but I don't.

I see curiosity, observation, warmth even.

I see a new genre of painting being born.

At long last, the paperback for my book of essays has just been released.

If you like this video, I think that you'll like my book too, so I'll put the link in the description below.

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