2024-05-15
New technologies in the service of an old painting. What do new technologies and old paintings have in common? A lot, it turns out. Painted in 1559, the famous Dutch artist Peter Bruegel the Elder's painting "Fight between Lent and Carnival" conceals many terrible secrets.
With the help of X-rays, it has been established that the painter placed many naked bodies on the canvas. One of the figures has his face turned towards the viewer. The most frightening thing, however, is the naked bodies of the children. The new discoveries in the painting by the Dutch painter are related to the project "Inside Bruegel", which is ongoing at the Museum of Art History in Vienna and is closely linked to an exhibition of the artist's works. A similar project also concerned the works of Rembrandt. He too, like other master painters, created many different compositions on a single canvas. It will be interesting to see what and when famous artists will surprise us next. It will probably happen when the next X-ray project is launched.
In many of his canvases, the painter showed death (e.g. in the painting 'Triumph of Death'), as well as the macabre and the grotesque. It is possible that he treated 'The Struggle between Lent and Carnival' as a sketchbook. Perhaps it was meant to be a completely different scene from the one the artist painted? During the Renaissance, it was very common for famous painters to paint fragments of clothing, facial features and even other figures that were eventually included on canvases. There is nothing strange about this. Painting utensils such as brushes, canvases or paints were expensive and consumed a lot of time (the artists made them with their own hands). Hence, they tried to save the materials at their disposal.