Every time the world order and the social system
are called in question this involves an overhaul of the
résumés of ancient wisdom embodied in the proverbs
of the past.

CLAUDE ROY.

BRUEGEL's early drawings and early paintings alike, all dating
to the period between 1553 and 1558, reflected exclusively
the artist's responses to the natural scene: trees and plants,
rivers, plains and mountains, the ocean of the sky, the far-flung
splendor of terrestrial and maritime horizons. By and large they
constituted a full-fledged ars poetica, the fruit of daylong medi-
tations, and seemed to point the way towards a boldly experi-
mental art culminating in pure Impressionism.

It was due to Hieronymus Cock that Bruegel's course was
temporarily deflected from this path, and he abandoned poetry
for prose, solitude for collective life, nature for the theater of
the world of men.

As early as 1557 he had begun, at the suggestion of the great
Antwerp publisher, a sequence of seven engravings illustrating
the Deadly Sins. Obviously their purpose was to inculcate a
moral lesson. They marked a turning point in his career, away
from a technique all in veiled suggestions to clean-cut linearism,
adapted to engraving. Thus he was called on to superimpose on
his new, still tentative feeling for nature a more "philosophic"
attitude, and also to investigate and exploit the possibilities of
illustrative painting.

Was Bruegel now to yield to literary, medieval, outworn
tendencies, to the didactic pretentiousness of the rhetoricians,
to the encyclopedic pedantry of the humanists? Was he to lapse
into an anecdotal art and surrender to the pressure of tradition?

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