Insidious Images: Veiled Sight and Insight in Pieter Bruegel’s Landscapes

This chapter addresses an overlooked aspect of Bruegel’s art: the presence of anthropomorphic rocks hidden in some of his early Alpine landscapes. This should be related to the interest shown by Renaissance artists in the idea of nature as painter (natura pictricix) or in the ars natura emulation relationship evoked by Abraham Ortelius about his friend. But Bruegel’s unruly landscapes are also part of a tradition that goes back to Herri met de Bles. As with the latter, the visual device of indeterminate or double images, far from being a simple optical game, aims at veiling our sight to better stimulate our insight.