Bruegel Children’s Games – Renaissance Art Puzzle

The work Bruegel Children’s Games in puzzle version is our choice for discovering and entering the art of the great Dutch artist Pieter Jan Brueghel the Elder.

The painting Children’s Games is a medium-sized oil on panel painting (118 cm x 161 cm) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, dated 1560 and preserved in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
The dating is made possible by the date and the signature that the author places at the bottom right “ BRVEGEL 1560 ″.

This work, mentioned by van Mander in 1604, was purchased in 1594 by Archduke Ernest of Habsburg, entering the private collection of the Habsburg family.

The scene of the work depicts a large square that welcomes groups of children , intent on playing with expressions halfway between monotony and flatness.
In fact, Children’s Games, the work of Bruegel the Elder, is a very useful document on how adults and children spent their free time in the mid-sixteenth century.

More than eighty typical sixteenth-century games are represented in the painting .
Thanks to this sort of photography we are, therefore, able to understand how the people who lived in 1560 spent their time.
From the painting, it is easy to recognize, among others, games such as “ blind man’s buff ”, “ piñata ”, “ morra ”, “ pass the barrel ”.

Children’s Games by Brueghel the Elder

For example, we find “Toton,” the ancestor of roulette. Known since ancient Roman times, toton takes its name from the Latin totum (“all”) because it was used for gambling. The game consists of a die mounted on a stick that is rotated after placing a bet.

We can consider classic throwing games, such as throwing hats through a child’s outstretched legs, competing to see who can throw them the farthest. Or throwing coins against a wall, where the winner is the one who manages to place the coin closest to the wall.

We can also find the Knucklebones game of very ancient origins, played with five small objects, originally the “knuckles” of a sheep, which are thrown and caught.

The bustling view of a village square hosts groups of children performing childhood games.

The subject, already practiced in medieval miniatures, is here brought together in a single scene for the first time. The view is achieved through the geometric application of fifteenth-century perspective, populated by groups of figures and individual characters, evenly spaced, with a zoned organization facilitated by the presence of colored patches on the ground, sometimes dusty, sometimes muddy, sometimes grassy, ​​in full light or in shadow.