The Longer You Look at This Painting, The Colder It Gets

Three hunters coming home through deep snow, with their dogs behind them. It looks like a Christmas card, until you see what they're carrying: one fox. Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted Hunters in the Snow in 1565, in one of the harshest winters of the Little Ice Age. We go through it one detail at a time: exhausted dogs, a broken inn sign, skaters on the frozen ponds, a frozen watermill, Alpine mountains that don't exist in Flanders, and one black bird crossing a silent sky. 00:00 One fox 00:42 Hunters in the Snow 01:20 A failed hunt 01:57 The inn and the broken sign 02:49 The valley 03:26 The frozen mill 03:45 Mountains that aren't there 04:38 The Little Ice Age 05:15 The silent sky 05:51 Tarkovsky and Melancholia 06:23 What did Bruegel really paint? Painting: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Hunters in the Snow (1565), Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Public domain. Image via Wikimedia Commons (Google Art Project). Music: "Cave 5", "Cave 1", "Cave 4" by HoliznaCC0 (CC0). Opening: Edvard Grieg, "In the Hall of the Mountain King" — Musopen Symphony Orchestra (public domain, via Wikimedia Commons). #bruegel #huntersinthesnow #arthistory #hiddendetails #littleiceage