Pieter Bruegel and the Idea of Human Nature

Renaissance Lives | 'Pieter Bruegel and the Idea of Human Nature'

WarburgInstitute
  Apr 19, 2023
Pieter Bruegel and the Idea of Human Nature - Elizabeth Alice Honig in conversation with Rembrandt Duits (Warburg Institute) and Fran;ois Quiviger (Warburg Institute).

16th-century Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder redefined how people perceived human nature. Bruegel turned his critical eye to mankind’s labours and pleasures, its foibles and rituals of daily life. Portraying landscapes, peasant life and biblical scenes in startling detail, Bruegel questioned how well we really know ourselves and also how we know, or visually read, others.

This superbly illustrated volume, now in paperback, examines how Bruegel’s art and ideas enabled people to ponder what it meant to be human. It will appeal to all those interested in art and philosophy, the Renaissance and the painting of the Dutch Golden Age.

Renaissance Lives is a series of biographies published by Reaktion Books as well as a series of conversations discussing the ways in which individuals transmitted or changed the lives of traditions, ideas and images.

This talk took place on 17 February 2023.


***
Elizabeth A. Honig
Home
Photo of Elizabeth Honig
Professor, Northern European Renaissance Art , Art History and Archaeology

(301) 405-1490
eahonig@umd.edu 4216 Parren J. Mitchell Art/Sociology Building
Get Directions
Education
Ph.D., , Yale University

Research Expertise

Digital Humanities
Early Modern Studies
Gender

Curriculum Vitae
Website
Elizabeth Alice Honig works on the art, literature, and visual cultures of Early Modern Europe. Her interests span the pictorial arts, the built environment, and civic ritual; the art market and practices of collecting; the mobility of objects and imagery; domestic material culture and ideas of dwelling; copying and originality; notions of visuality in literary texts; gender and representation; and historical techniques of painting. She also works within the Digital Humanities and has integrated mapping, network analysis, and digital text analysis into her teaching.

Honig’s first book, Painting and the Market (Yale 1998), concerned the ways in which painting responded to changing notions of value, exchange, and display in the commercial city of Antwerp from about 1550-1625. Her next book, Jan Brueghel and the Senses of Scale (Penn State 2016), focused on a single artist and how he proposed an aesthetic in the years around 1600 that countered those of his colleagues Rubens and Caravaggio in operating at a very small representational scale that demanded a closer visual engagement and mobilized the sense of touch as well as sight. Most recently, in Peter Bruegel and the Idea of Human Nature (Reaktion 2019) she examines Bruegel, Erasmus, and ideas of what it meant to be human in 16th-century Northern Europe. Her current projects concern Nicholas Hilliard and small things in Elizabethan England; and the spaces and experiences of confinement, particularly incarceration, in early modern Europe. Honig maintains a suite of websites about the Brueghel family, the central one being janbrueghel.net. For these and other projects she has received funding most recently from the NSF, IMAF, the Mellon Foundation, CITRIS, the Townsend Center, and the Berkeley Digital Humanities program.

Honig’s graduate students have worked on a diverse range of topics in the arts of The Netherlands, England, Spain, Germany, and the New World; they study painting, architecture,
pageantry, costume, and urban planning; violence, propaganda, devotion, repetition, identity, and failure. Before coming to Maryland, Honig taught at Tufts University and at the University of California, Berkeley and held visiting positions at universities in Leiden and Utrecht.

Publications
Economic Histories of Netherlandish Art
State-of-the-field article surveying the economic histories of Netherlandish art.
Author/Lead: Elizabeth A. Honig
Contributor(s): Tony Cui
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Jessica Stevenson Stewart
Dates: Tuesday, July 4, 2023 - 12:00
This state-of-the-field article surveys the economic histories of Netherlandish art. Tracing major contributions by scholars following in the footsteps of Michael Montias, we present the developments of art historical econometrics and consider the evolving ways in which economic analyses address topics such as supply, demand, price, labor, and form. We show the various applications of economic methods and pay particular attention to the interrelations between quantitative research and other modes of inquiry: archival, technical, biographical, stylistic, digital, regional, global, and so forth.

Read Moreabout Economic Histories of Netherlandish Art

Thinking through Data in the Humanities and in Engineering
This article considers how the same data can be differently meaningful to students in the humanities and in data science.
Author/Lead: Elizabeth A. Honig
Contributor(s): Christian Cloke, Quint Gregory
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Deb Niemeier
Pieter Bruegel and the Idea of Human Nature in the Renaissance
A book that considers, through the viewpoints of Pieter Bruegel and Erasmus of Rotterdam, how people in the Renaissance thought about human nature.
Author/Lead: Elizabeth A. Honig
Jan Brueghel and the Senses of Scale
A monumental examination of an extraordinary artist, this book reconsiders Brueghel’s paintings and restores them to their rightful place in history.
Author/Lead: Elizabeth A. Honig
Painting and the Market in Early Modern Antwerp
How the art of painting responded to the conditions of a new market-based economy.
Author/Lead: Elizabeth A. Honig