La parábola del sembrador

This is one of the first paintings Bruegel ever signed and dated, made in 1557, and you can feel him figuring out what kind of painter he wanted to be. The subject is the Gospel parable of the sower, the man scattering seed on good ground and bad. But Bruegel tucks him into the lower corner and hands the whole picture over to the landscape, a wide river valley opening toward hazy blue mountains. A few years earlier he had crossed the Alps on his way back from Italy and filled sketchbooks with them, and that memory is doing the work here in the far distance. If you look for the sower you almost have to hunt, which may be the point. The seed is going out into a world far larger than the man throwing it.