Bruegel [antikvár]

LifePieter 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). The first documented date in Bruegel's life, 1551, is that of the entry recording his admission to the Guild of St Luke in Antwerp, and it is extremely interesting to note that the name above his in the register is that of Giorgio Mantovano, or Ghisi, who in 1550 had copied on to tiles Raphael's famous cartoon St Paul in Athens. This was Bruegel's first contact with the art of Italy. In 1555 he is recorded as working with Hieronymus Cock, publisher of engravings and etchings and an engraver himself, whose busy workshop at the sign of the Four Winds was a cultural centre and meeting place for art lovers, scholars and men of letters. Many of Cock's prints