FOR EVERYMAN

PIETER BRUEGEL was a lowbrow in art. In an age when the Italian Renaissance was sweeping all before it, Bruegel kept his Dutch feet firmly on lowland ground, stuck close to everyman's taste. His zestful love of practical jokes, wise saws, old proverbs and the daily life in field and village earned him the nickname of "Peasant" Bruegel. But history has proved that Bruegel was dealing with an eternal response of man that lies deeper than the shift and change of artistic fashion. Collected by princes and merchants alike, he has remained one of the most popular artists in history. With 15 of the 40 surviving paintings attributed to him collected in one room, Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum (see color pages) is today his finest monument.

Bruegel was early a Habsburg favorite. Emperor Rudolph II delighted in his works. Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, the greatest of the Habsburg collectors, added still more paintings during his rule as governor of The Netherlands. The Habsburg collection, hidden in salt mines during World War II and then sent traveling for seven years, is now back in place, a favorite tourist stop that draws from 3,000 to 4,000 visitors a day during the peak summer tourist season.

Through the Alps. For all of Bruegel's lusty tastes and robust nature, the evidence is that he was not peasant-born, but a townsman, perhaps from Brogel near the home town of his great predecessor Hieronymus Bosch. Made a free master of St. Luke's painters' guild in Antwerp in 1551, he set out on a painting journey to France and Italy. But, unlike most of his contemporaries, Bruegel did not return home with his head crammed with Venetian painting and classical models. What had impressed him most was the magnificent sweep of Naples' harbor and the awesome Alpine passes.

Endowed as he was with a keen eye for nature and a relish for country ways, Bruegel had the good fortune to come of age at a time when men were for the first time since the Middle Ages beginning to think of art apart from religious painting. The widespread taste for everyday scenes for home decoration was handled in tapestries for the rich; for the less well-to-do, it fell to the "stayned clothe" works on perishable fine linen turned out by the watercolorists. It was to this tradition, with its set format, sharply delineated forms and flat surfaces, that Bruegel himself turned, developing it in his oils to the level of great art.

Owl in the Woods. To his contemporaries, Bruegel's art spoke more directly than to the present day. The point of such parables as that of the fool who walks past the bird's nest (see color) needed no explaining in his time. To satisfy an age when connoisseurs would spend hours before a painting "trying to find the owl in the woods." Bruegel packed his canvases with scenes of birds on the wing, half-hidden bird snares, distant village-green ballplayers, to give his viewers all the delights and surprises of a country stroll. To get his rustic costumes, characters and gestures just right, Bruegel liked to dress in peasant's garb, attended the village festivals, probably danced and drank at the very weddings and country dances he later put down on canvas.

Having patterned his style early in his life on the works of Hieronymus Bosch, Bruegel was far from earthbound when it came to fantasy. His Tower of Babel, first painted in miniature on his Italian travels, puts together nearly all that is known about construction in his day, with detail piled on detail to make the allegory the more convincing. The Suicide of Saul deals in epic fashion with a Biblical story, while the mountains are sketched with a sureness and imagination that a Chinese master could admire.

Down to the Sea. Among his greatest triumphs were his interpretations of Biblical stories as vivid folk dramas. His Massacre of the Innocents, set in a snowbound Dutch village, is a frozen pantomime of terror and violence that would bring a shiver to any contemporary observer. But it was in his rich seasonal landscapes, filled with the tactile sense of wet bark, chill wind or summer's grace, and his final stormy seascape (opposite) that Bruegel reached his greatest powers. It remains in the viewer's eye the epitome of the fury and perils that the sea held for men who sailed, as Bruegel had, in the small craft of their day.

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