Hunters in the snow   -   Pieter Brugel the Elder
"Bruegel was able to perfectly capture the light, the feel, the atmosphere of a late winter afternoon in the countryside. Exactly what countryside it’s meant to be is a mystery - there certainly aren’t any mountains like that in Holland. But Pieter Bruegel did take a long trip to Italy, so he was certainly familiar with mountains. And anyway, exact locations don’t matter. The painting Winter is the archetype of winter, the Idea of winter. It can be any winter you want it to be, anywhere you think it should be. The fact that the painting is unconstrained by an exact location is part of what gives the work its enduring quality.
I think that Hunters in the Snow is more constrained by a sense of time than of place. Despite the fact that the year 1565 is not really the Middle Ages anymore, Hunters in the Snow perfectly captures my concept of what the Middle Ages was like: cold, brutal, fairly miserable, and real. Perhaps it’s that aspect of Bruegel’s paintings that intrigues me most of all: his subjects are so detailed and so realistically portrayed that they seem to be able to march right off of the canvas and into our world."    Jessica Spengler


I second that review. I have always been a fan of Carravagio and Brugel the Elder for their dynanic realism, and ability to capture life in everyday norms with a hint of darkness, but not too much, because the viewer has to be able to think of those people in regular terms, they're tired, they just marched up a big hill, and they are looking at the frivolity below them probably with some envy.  Artists are usually somewhat morose individuals anyway, so we could picture them just as easily on a sunny afternoon, but it wouldn't be as much fun.  - b.s. (Bavarian Snowflake)

Licence: Public Domain