From Kirkus Reviews
Translator and art historian Snow (English/Rice Univ.; A Study of Vermeer, not reviewed) turns a close reading of the multifarious Bruegel into a colorless exercise in pedantry. The Elder Bruegel's range of subjects and richness of detail make it easy to structure a whole book around the imagery of his paintings, a task to which Snow, alas, brings jargon-mongering and donnish analysis. Any art historian would of course be attracted to Bruegel's scope of accomplishment--peasant genres, Bosch-like fantasies, religious histories, parables, landscapes--and his combination of Dutch realism, Renaissance humanism, and medieval motifs. His painting Children's Games, for instance, with its minute social observation, masterful composition, myriad details, and underlying moral subtleties, make it a favorite subject of study. Snow not only examines the significance of almost each frolicking group in the painting, but also contrasts, not always convincingly, the figures with those in other Bruegel canvases. The games Bruegel's children play are not the moralized images of his Netherlandish Proverbs, however, though the two paintings are similarly crammed; nor is the composition of the carefully structured Children's Games as straightforwardly realistic as Peasant Dance. Snow's efforts unfortunately turn into academic interpretations of other academic interpretations or spiral into abstruse theory-speak, featuring ruminations on the ``unstable libidinal field'' of a painting or the ``oasis of pre-volitional well-being'' in a work. Snow may be sensitive to the problem of our aesthetic responses to an artist so subtly nuanced and historically distant, but his impulse is toward amorphous hermeneutics rather than the essence of the images before him. Reading into Bruegel's paintings, Snow renders the Dutch artist, in recondite prose, into an abstract impressionist. ``They were never wrong, the Old Masters,'' as Auden writes, but the same can't be said for this particular commentary on one of those masters. (150 b&w illustrations, one color plate, not seen) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Stephen Greenblatt
"Edward Snow has an eye-and a mind-for details. He has lovingly ventured inside Bruegel's Children's Games, and his intense, intimate prose enables us to linger in the vast, sprawling scene, savoring each of the marvelous figures and pondering their rich and complex interrelations. This extraordinary sustained act of critical attention will transform our understanding of Bruegel's art and help to illuminate the meanings of that most elusive and precious human activity, play."


Review
“Edward Snow has an eye—and a mind—for details. He has lovingly ventured inside Bruegel’s Children’s Games, and his intense, intimate prose enables us to linger in the vast, sprawling scene, savoring each of the marvelous figures and pondering their rich and complex interrelations. This extraordinary sustained act of critical attention will transform our understanding of Bruegel’s art and help to illuminate the meanings of that most elusive and precious human activity, play.”—Stephen Greenblatt



About the Author
Edward Snow is a professor of English at Rice University. North Point Press has published his translations of Rilke's New Poems (1907), New Poems (1908) [The Other Part], The Book of Images, and Uncollected Poems. He has won both the Academy of American Poets' Harold Morton Landon Translation Award and the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The work of Peter Bruegel the Elder (1525-69) is full of everyday drama and grand human pathos; his canvases of peasants in the fields and squares of Flanders reveal the spirit of their age with a keenness worthy of Rabelais. In this book, Edward Snow, whose A Study of Vermeer is already a classic, undertakes an inquiry into a single Bruegel painting - the kaleidoscopic "Children's Games" -- to unlock the secrets of this great painter's art. "Children's Games" depicts a lively, chaotic gathering of boys and girls at play: they spin tops, roll hoops, climb trees, turn flips, ride fences, shout into barrels, and play leapfrog and tug-of-war. And as they do so they enter into Bruegel's own complex designs, which bring into play a whole array of issues: the innocence of children, the imperatives of culture, the body's urges, the reasons for play, the affect in images - even the nature of one's own perception. Through his own close reading of the details of the painting (which are presented in dozens of illustrations), Snow reveals in Children's Games an "arcane alphabet" for experience at its most densely nuanced.

FROM THE CRITICS

Joseph Leo Koerner

...Snow practices an art history based on the subjective experience of individual images and dependent for its success on the acuity with which that experience is described....Although Snow occasionally draws on the picture's overall perspective to make his point about a detail, his focus is way up close to the picture's surface. -- The New Republic

Stephen Greenblatt

Edward Snow has an eye-and a mind-for details. He has lovingly ventured inside Bruegel's Children's Games, and his intense, intimate prose enables us to linger in the vast, sprawling scene, savoring each of the marvelous figures and pondering their rich and complex interrelations. This extraordinary sustained act of critical attention will transform our understanding of Bruegel's art and help to illuminate the meanings of that most elusive and precious human activity, play.

Dore Ashton

'My claim,' writes Edward Snow, 'is that meaning is there in Bruegel, and that it lucidly inheres.' I would attach the verb lucidly to Snow's essay, so beautifully proportioned, so elegantly tuned. Years of intense scrutiny have awarded Snow with incomparable insights. He has given what Valry called extreme attention to this single work, and, in the process, has revealed 'the painting's intelligence' without ever being snared by iconography, social studies, psychoanalysis, historicism, or any other limiting contemporary reflex.

Kirkus Reviews

Translator and art historian Snow (English/Rice University; A Study of Vermeer) turns a close reading of the multifarious Bruegel into a colorless exercise in pedantry. The Elder Bruegel's range of subjects and richness of detail make it easy to structure a whole book around the imagery of his paintings, a task to which Snow, alas, brings jargon-mongering and donnish analysis. Any art historian would of course be attracted to Bruegel's scope of accomplishment—peasant genres, Bosch-like fantasies, religious histories, parables, landscapes—and his combination of Dutch realism, Renaissance humanism, and medieval motifs. His painting "Children's Games," for instance, with its minute social observation, masterful composition, myriad details, and underlying moral subtleties, make it a favorite subject of study. Snow not only examines the significance of almost each frolicking group in the painting, but also contrasts, not always convincingly, the figures with those in other Bruegel canvases. The games Bruegel's children play are not the moralized images of his "Netherlandish Proverbs," however, though the two paintings are similarly crammed; nor is the composition of the carefully structured "Children's Games" as straightforwardly realistic as "Peasant Dance." Snow's efforts unfortunately turn into academic interpretations of other academic interpretations or spiral into abstruse theory-speak, featuring ruminations on the "unstable libidinal field" of a painting or the "oasis of pre-volitional well-being" in a work. Snow may be sensitive to the problem of our aesthetic responses to an artist so subtly nuanced and historically distant, but his impulse is toward amorphoushermeneutics rather than the essence of the images before him. Reading into Bruegel's paintings, Snow renders the Dutch artist, in recondite prose, into an abstract impressionist. "They were never wrong, the Old Masters," as Auden writes, but the same can't be said for this particular commentary on one of those masters.