The Sermon on the Mount
1598
Jan Brueghel the Elder, nicknamed 'Velvet Brueghel' for his incredibly soft and detailed textures, packs hundreds of tiny, distinct characters into this lush forest scene. At the center, a small figure of Jesus preaches to a massive crowd that seems to have spilled out of a 17th-century Flemish village, complete with fashionable nobles in the foreground and peasants mingling in the back. It's a masterclass in 'world landscape' painting, where the tiny humans are dwarfed by towering trees and a sweeping view of the sea and mountains in the distance. Brueghel was famous for painting landscapes so realistically that you could almost smell the forest, and here he turns a biblical event into a bustling, chaotic gathering.
- Technique
- Oil painting