Art by Pieter Brueghel, the Elder (1526–1569)

Brueghel painted Flemish peasant life, harvests, weddings, winter villages, with an eye that treated ordinary rural people as subjects worthy of serious, large-scale painting at a time when that was genuinely unusual, earning him the nickname "Peasant Bruegel" even though he was almost certainly an educated, well-connected city dweller observing that world from the outside rather than living inside it. His painting "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" shows the mythological fall almost as an afterthought, a tiny pair of legs disappearing into the sea while a farmer keeps plowing, oblivious, a composition that later inspired W. H. Auden's poem "Musée des Beaux Arts." His other major works, including "The Tower of Babel" and "Hunters in the Snow," combine sweeping landscape with dense, closely observed human detail.