Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Netherlandish; 16th-century
Vienna, Austria: Kunsthistorisches Museum
90%
The Conversion of Paul. 1567. Oil on canvas
There's so much painting going on here — of so many sorts and all so crammed together that it's tough to come away with a sense of this picture as an "image." And yet things hang together. (In this regard, Pierre Bonnard isn't too far off.) There's the solid rendering of the soldiers' garb, and of their horses; the poured look to the paint in the mountains and the rocks; the flat gradient of that crop of sky at left; the scratchy whorls in the clouds just above it. Bruegel's arrangement of the scene parallels how he's handled its paint: well-rendered figures throng in a backwater of the picture (where the titular "conversion," just right of center, is hardly visible) while all around them emptied surfaces stutter, slope, and fall away. And yet, as I said, things hang together. There's a sort of spiraling that, come the image's upper third or so, resolves itself into the verticality of the trees and the bluffs behind them. But to put this composition's logic so patly — to describe it as merely a "spiraling" — is to fail to get at how the painting is somehow always working against itself, rather than towards any end. Bruegel has works that are even more dispersed than this one, and often for the better. But it's in this picture's toying with order, its refusal either to embrace or to subvert it, that its value lies. (TFS, 2025)