A Parábola dos Cegos

Bruegel painted this in 1568, a year after the Duke of Alba marched into the Netherlands with Spanish troops to crush dissent, when heads were coming off in the public squares. He took a single line from the Gospel of Matthew, where Christ warns that if the blind lead the blind both fall into the ditch, and worked it out step by step across the panel. Six men are roped together, and the first has already gone over into the water, so the fall travels down the whole line toward you. Look closely at their faces and the blindness is specific. Doctors who have studied the picture identify real conditions in the different men, one with the eyes removed, another with a clouded cornea, as if Bruegel painted from people he had actually seen. Behind them a village church stands untouched and calm. He died the next year, in 1569.