The blinds Pieter Brueghel The Elder (1525-1569)

Description of Peter Brueghel’s painting The Parable of the Blind (The Blind Lead the Blind)

The painting was painted in 1568. Today it is in the Capodimonte Museum in Naples.

Anyone who happened to read Charles de Koster’s wonderful novel, The Legend of Thyl Ulenspiegel, probably knows that during the Dutch Revolution, the entire nation took part in the violent struggle against the Spaniards for independence.

One of the most important Dutch painters, draftsmen and engravers, who also took part in the birth of realist Flemish and Dutch art, Peter Bruegel the Elder, also took part in these events.

He was an artist-thinker, constantly and intensely thinking about the meaning of life, Bruegel was far ahead of his time. His vivid talent did not fit into the framework of generally accepted concepts and genres of art.

The main theme of Bruegel’s work is the depiction of the Dutch peasants and artisans of the city. He was one of the first painters to portray human labor. He had no desire to create an ideal image of people from the people, on the contrary, he tried to make their images as natural and direct as possible, deliberately rude.

There was always a certain amount of mischievous humor in the paintings of this artist. Characteristic in this respect are also grotesque figures of cripples and beggars, which the artist portrayed more than once. Bruegel’s biographers say that he purposely disguised himself in peasant attire in order to walk around the villages and get to know and study his depicted characters better.

Another characteristic of Bruegel’s artistic paintings is their character of parables. Usually, any of his paintings were not just a simple depiction of a group of people against a landscape, they were also an illustration of some well-known story. This is very evident in his last painting of the artist, The Blind (1568), in which he presented the famous parable of the blind man leading the other blind men.

This painting also has several other titles - The Parabola of the Blind, The Blind, The Blind Leading the Blind, The Blind Leading the Blind. For the subject the artist chose a biblical parable about the blind, which says that if a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a pit.