BRUEGEL PETER THE OLD – Cripples Louvre (Paris)

Description of Peter Brueghel’s painting The Cripples

Peter Bruegel’s painting called The Cripples has rather realistic motifs of the remnants of life, in all times, and even in the modern world too, it is not uncommon to see such a composition live.

Here, unfortunately, the question is different, what was the artist trying to achieve when painting this picture, what he was striving for, what was his goal, let’s try to understand together? What comes immediately before our eyes is a rather depressing, if not screaming, composition consisting of several cripples lacking certain limbs.

We prefer, at the very least, not to be confronted with this rather ugly world of missing and severed limbs. Rather, one of the tasks of the artist, was to confront the viewer directly, and these cripples without the possibility of embarrassingly removing one’s gaze from them. The color composition is also quite interesting, these cripples, once full human beings, seeing the rest of their lives in mostly gray tones, sitting on rather saturated green grass. In their eyes you can clearly see the pain they receive in only "thanks" to us.

Pain and most likely hopelessness. They are surrounded by rather aggressive, red, brick walls, which add even more tragedy to this picture, which is already everywhere, but we are used, without noticing the problem, to think that it does not exist.

It becomes clear that Bruegel, when he painted this painting, did not even think to create allegorical motifs, on the wrong creation of this world, and specifically, the helplessness of people in distress and forced to relive this tragedy over and over again.

Very bright and colorful, the theme is revealed in this picture, which will allow any viewer who decides to join the art to think about it.