Le Christ et les apôtres sur la mer de Galilée

This is the earliest painting Bruegel signed and dated, from 1553, soon after he came back from a long journey across the Alps to Italy. The subject is from the Gospels, Christ appearing to his apostles beside the water, but Bruegel hands most of the panel to landscape, a wide luminous bay clearly fed by the mountains and coasts he had just crossed. The small holy figures on the shore may not be his at all. Several scholars think another Antwerp painter then working in Italy, Maarten de Vos, added them, which would make this early work a picture where Bruegel painted the world and left someone else the story.