Looking at Pieter Bruegle's Blind Leading the Blind Canvas in the landscape, selective preparation of the figures, and the place of man in the cosmos

In a pivotal moment in the development of the arts and the sciences, Pieter Bruegel painted The Blind Leading the Blind (1568), a major work that embodies the transition from the medieval to the humanist mind. In The Blind Leading the Blind, Bruegel ascribed a different treatment to the fi gures and the landscape. I will show how Bruegel applied a white preparation underneath the human fi gures and not beneath the earthy ground surrounding the blind men. In doing so, he physically placed the fi gures on a distinct pictorial plane from that of nature. The way Bruegel organised the materials on the canvas and their encounters are the object of this essay. Indeed, their organisation evokes a rupture in the fabric of life between man and nature that goes hand in hand with the emergence of the modern gaze and ‘visualist’ or ‘naturalist’ representation. The hybrid nature of the picture is especially poignant. I will highlight how Bruegel set the stage: how he detached the fi gures from their environment, chose one main character and combined types of perspectives, light and weather. Hannah De Corte looks at the support of images and how it profoundly affects the way we perceive images…yet we tend to be oblivious to their grounds – whether canvas, paper or digital in nature. De Corte holds a PhD in Art and sciences. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the National Gallery of Art (Washington DC, US), after a year of postdoctoral research at the University of Oxford, supported by the Wiener-Anspach Foundation. She is an artist, represented by the Patinoire Royale Gallery in Belgium. In 2023, she received the Émile Sacré Prize of the Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium, for her work on canvas as a medium.