Painting Life: The Art of Pieter Bruegel, the Elder
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism
Painting Life: The Art of Pieter Bruegel, the Elder Details
About the Author Robert L. Bonn was professor at City University of New York. He is author of the noted textbook Criminology. His articles have been published in many periodicals, including The World and I, Criminal Justice Ethics, and Logos. Read more
Reviews
I'll start with the good things about the book: the color plates of Bruegel's major works, the bibliography, and the information on where each of the paintings is. The book is also quite readable, and I finished it, although upon doing so I immediately sold it to a used bookstore, as I would have felt embarrassed to have it in my house. The book's main problem is that it has nothing to say and describes each of the paintings with utterly vacuous gibberish. One painting reveals the "moral complexity that is at the heart of our civilization" and "points us toward the future much as it captures the essence of our past." Another "shows an extraordinary grasp of the soul of a culture, indeed the essence of our social life." The book appears not to have been professionally edited, and I would have guessed that it was self-published, except that I saw it for sale in Borders. It puts numerous words in unnecessary quotation marks, which is a sure sign of amateurishness. It starts quotations with ellipses, which is never appropriate, and, at one point, if I recall, it has, in the middle of a quotation, ". . . [and] . . . ," which makes no sense. You will learn nothing about Bruegel from this book, other than what his major paintings look like and where they are.
