The Rebel Angels
by Pieter Brueghel
Category: Art

Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Fall of the Rebel Angels is the first comprehensive book on one of the most cherished masterpieces in the collection of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. Bruegel's dizzingly complex "Fall of the Rebel Angels" (1562) is presented in this lavishly illustrated volume in microscopic detail, and placed in its wider context in the texts, which argue that, with this painting, Bruegel turned a traditional devotional theme into an innovative commentary on his own time. Many of the angels in Bruegel's scene are hybrids of natural and artificial forms, just as the curiosity cabinets of the time would juxtapose "naturalia" and "artificialia" for the connoisseur, connecting the painting to early modern European cultures of knowledge and collecting.