Inside Bruegel: The Play of Images in Children's Games

The work of Peter Bruegel the Elder (1525-69) is full of everyday drama and grand human pathos; his canvases of peasants in the fields and squares of Flanders reveal the spirit of their age with a keenness worthy of Rabelais. In this book, Edward Snow, whose A Study of Vermeer is already a classic, undertakes an inquiry into a single Bruegel painting - the kaleidoscopic Children's Games -- to unlock the secrets of this great painter's art. Children's Games depicts a lively, chaotic gathering of boys and girls at play: they spin tops, roll hoops, climb trees, turn flips, ride fences, shout into barrels, and play leapfrog and tug-of-war. And as they do so they enter into Bruegel's own complex designs, which bring into play a whole array of issues: the innocence of children, the imperatives of culture, the body's urges, the reasons for play, the affect in images - even the nature of one's own perception. Through his own close reading of the details of the painting (which are presented in dozens of illustrations), Snow reveals in Children's Games an arcane alphabet for experience at its most densely nuanced.

About the Author :
Edward Snow is a professor of English at Rice University. North Point Press has published his translations of Rilke's" New Poems" (1907), "New Poems" (1908) ["The Other Part], The Book of Images, "and "Uncollected Poems." He has won both the Academy of American Poets' Harold Morton Landon Translation Award and the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.

Review :
“Edward Snow has an eye—and a mind—for details. He has lovingly ventured inside Bruegel’s Children’s Games, and his intense, intimate prose enables us to linger in the vast, sprawling scene, savoring each of the marvelous figures and pondering their rich and complex interrelations. This extraordinary sustained act of critical attention will transform our understanding of Bruegel’s art and help to illuminate the meanings of that most elusive and precious human activity, play.”—Stephen Greenblatt " Edward Snow has an eye-- and a mind-- for details. He has lovingly ventured inside Bruegel' s Children' s Games, and his intense, intimate prose enables us to linger in the vast, sprawling scene, savoring each of the marvelous figures and pondering their rich and complex interrelations. This extraordinary sustained act of critical attention will transform our understanding of Bruegel' s art and help to illuminate the meanings of that most elusive and precious human activity, play." -- Stephen Greenblatt "Edward Snow has an eye--and a mind--for details. He has lovingly ventured inside Bruegel's Children's Games, and his intense, intimate prose enables us to linger in the vast, sprawling scene, savoring each of the marvelous figures and pondering their rich and complex interrelations. This extraordinary sustained act of critical attention will transform our understanding of Bruegel's art and help to illuminate the meanings of that most elusive and precious human activity, play."--Stephen Greenblatt