Small among the crowd, with a thin halo, he stands and gestures as he speaks.
Bible in art · Matthew
The Sermon on the Mount
Jan Brueghel the Elder · 1598
Getty Center, Los Angeles
Jan Brueghel the Elder, son of the famous Pieter Bruegel, painted this little picture on a copper plate in Antwerp in 1598. Copper gave a smooth, hard surface, and he used it to paint hundreds of figures no bigger than a fingernail.
Most of the picture is a forest of tall trees; the sermon itself happens in the crowd below. You have to look for Jesus: a small figure with a faint halo, left of centre, surrounded by listeners in the clothes of Brueghel’s own Flanders.
From the text
- Jesus saw the crowds and went up on the mountain (Matthew 5:1)
- His disciples came to him, and he began to teach them (Matthew 5:1–2)
- Large crowds following him from many places (Matthew 4:25)
The artist’s own
- A Flemish forest instead of a bare hillside
- Listeners in ruffs, felt hats and white caps of around 1600
- Jesus standing among the people, not seated as the text says
- A group of fashionable ladies and gentlemen strolling at the edge
Details
Jesus
The crowd
Hundreds of listeners — old and young, rich and poor — packed close together.
Court costume
Ladies in yellow and pink silk and gentlemen in black stand apart from the crowd.
A distant town
Hills and domed buildings fade into blue — the way Flemish painters showed distance.
In the sky
A bird of prey hovers above the trees.
Jan Brueghel the Elder, Flemish, 1568–1625. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (84.PC.71) · Oil on copper · Images provided here are believed to be in the public domain and are available under CC0 through Getty’s Open Content Program. (Getty record: "No Copyright", http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)