Pieter Bruegel the Elder was born around 1525 in the southern Netherlands in a tiny village named Bruegel outside the city of Breda, in southern Holland. Judging from the precision and exactitude with which Bruegel painted his pastoral scenes, his life must have been deeply rooted in such rural circumstances. There is only one snag: no such village as Bruegel, or any spot resembling that name, ever existed. And according to his biographer Alexander Wied: “There is, in fact, every reason to think that Pieter Bruegel was a townsman and a highly educated one, on friendly terms with the humanists of his time.” This suggests that Bruegel may in fact have been born in Breda.
Bruegel probably mixed with the educated humanists of Breda, but his biographer Nadine Orenstein insists that “he had not mastered Latin,” which would have been highly unusual amongst such circles. Indeed, she goes as far as to suggest that the Latin inscriptions which appear on some of his paintings were in fact written by another hand.
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