Bruegel as Cinema

Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Hunters in the Snow is a study of apocalypse. In 1565, the year the painting was completed, as a number of climatologists and historians have noted, Europe was in the midst of the Little Ice Age.¹ People starved. Agricultural communities regressed to hunting and gathering. Good Christians regressed to survival of the fittest. Except for one dead fox and a tiny, full-ish game bag, Bruegel’s hunters have come home empty-handed. They pass a tavern who