Bruegel: The Life and Work of the Artist

📕 Pieter Bruegel was born near Breda, in North Brabant, between 1520 and 1530. The exact date of his birth is unknown, but we do know that he died in 1569 in the "middle flower of his age" (according to his friend the geographer Abraham Ortelius), and that he became a member of the Antwerp guild of painters, for which the minimum age of admission was twenty-five, in 1551. He would thus have been born about 1525. We are again in ignorance about his early masters. Accord­ing to Carel Van Mander's "Book of Painters", written about 1600, he was a pupil of Pieter Coecke van Aelst, at his studio in Brussels. Coecke was a cultured artist, mentioned by Vasari. He worked in Italy and Turkey as a painter and designer of cartoons for tapestries and stained glass. He was dean of the Guild of St Luke, an architect, and the translator of Vitruvius and Serlio. He left a very accurate version of Serlio's works, which was completed after his death by his wife, Mayeken Verhulst Beessemers of Malines, who was herself a painter and miniaturist. Van Mander relates that when Bruegel was a young man in his master's house he used to carry about in his arms Coecke's young daughter - the girl who was to become his wife in 1563 (a record of the marriage exists in the church of Notre Dame de la Chapelle, in Brussels).