사울의 자살

This is the smallest Bruegel in Vienna, a panel only about 33 centimetres high, and he painted it in 1562 in a near-miniaturist technique. The story comes from the Book of Samuel. On the slopes of Mount Gilboa the Israelites have lost to the Philistines, and King Saul, rather than be taken, has just thrown himself onto his own sword. You have to hunt for him, down in the left corner among the rocks, while the eye is pulled instead across an immense army spilling out of a gorge, a forest of raised lances catching the light. Bruegel is teaching himself here how to fit a human tragedy inside a huge landscape without the landscape swallowing it. A century later the panel turned up in the estate of Rubens.