Temperance (Temperantia) from The Virtues

Philips Galle|Pieter Bruegel the Elder|Hieronymus Cock

ca.1559–60 · Engraving; first state of two · Drawings and Prints

Bruegel’s design for Temperance depicts a maelstrom of human activity collapsed into an impossible space. Figures crowd the print in clusters of activity that bleed into one another, from choir singers accompanied by a small orchestra to actors performing for a rapt audience to cosmographers futilely attempting to measure a smoke-billowing, swiftly rotating earth. Groups of surveyors occupy the rightmost edge of the image, gauging fortifications and artillery, while in the foreground students furiously read and transcribe texts, and lenders busily settle their accounts. Anything but temperate, the image juxtaposes the central figure—a personification of temperance and the virtue upon which the study of the liberal arts was supposed to be based—with the chaotic reality of human experience.

Artist

Philips Galle|Pieter Bruegel the Elder|Hieronymus Cock

Date

ca.1559–60

Medium

Engraving; first state of two

Department

Drawings and Prints

Credit line

Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1926