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Artist: Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c1525-1569) is that rare creature, a painter who connects us not just with the high culture of the past, but with a lost yet recognisable stratum of folk beliefs, the culture of the poor, illiterate and unprivileged - that is the vast majority of people in early modern Europe. In The Fight of Carnival and Lent, The Netherlandish Proverbs and The Land of Cockayne, Bruegel records popular festivals, jokes, sayings, fantasies; his art draws its energy from this richly textured culture.
Another reason for Bruegel's appeal is his love of nature. The earth spreads out before our eyes in his panoramic landscapes with their population of farmers, hunters or skaters. The Times of the Year, in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, are among the best-loved paintings in existence because they return us to that intimate sense of human beings enfolded into a landscape - most magically, Hunters in the Snow (Winter).
Bruegel's paintings were not made for peasants: the Times of the Year were owned by Emperor Rudolf II. The elite interest in Bruegel's paintings may have been as documents of popular culture, but they still appeal today.
Subject: Carel van Mander, the 17th-century historian of Dutch art, recorded the painting as "Dulle Griet, who is looking at the mouth of hell".
Distinguishing features: With a soldier's breastplate fixed over her dress, hair streaming from under her helmet, face etched and dry, she runs across a landscape at the mouth of hell, with a long, lethal sword in one hand and baskets and bundles of modest loot - food, iron, pots and pans - in the other.
Around this central mythic figure - perhaps a personification of a Flemish proverb, "She could plunder in front of hell and remain unscathed" - the world is consumed by fire and war. People have become monsters: a man with his arse above his head, a barrel with a human face. Dulle Griet charges through them unperturbed at the mouth of hell, which is personified as a scaly , leviathan face mutating out of a hill, its toothy jaws crammed with grotesque, tragic sinners.
Above, the sky blazes red; hell and earth are merging. Behind Dulle Griet to the right, a mob of women are beating the damned, while soldiers seem timid in comparison. The women, knocking the mutants out of their way and defying the army, are looting houses and ransacking the ruined land.
Armies pillaged Europe routinely in the 16th and 17th centuries; it was an acknowledged way for soldiers to be "paid". In this painting, the army is beaten at its own game by tough peasant women. Their leader Dulle Griet is an anti-hero, energetic and courageous, the tragicomic spirit of survival.
Inspirations and influences: Bertolt Brecht vividly praised "the great war painting Dulle Griet... The Fury defending her pathetic household goods with the sword. The world at the end of its tether." Brecht's Mother Courage is a modern Dulle Griet, making a living in a world wrecked by war. Brecht conceived her as a study in bourgeois folly, but couldn't help making her sympathetic.
Where is it? Museum Mayer van den Bergh, Antwerp
