The Seven Deadly Sins in Bruegels' Time

A unique picture of good and evil in the time of Pieter Bruegel the Elder and today, published to accompany the exhibition Truly Wicked: The Seven Deadly Sins Visualised at Bonnefanten, Maastricht, October 18, 2924 - January 12, 2025

How do you portray sin, evil and foolishness in humans? Religious and political tensions and even the weather - we are talking about the depths of the Little Ice Age - contributed to a boom in representations of the Seven Deadly Sins in the Low Countries and immediate surroundings in the long sixteenth century. In this publication, four accessibly written essays highlight different sides of the pictorial tradition of the Seven Deadly Sins, with the renowned print series of the same name designed by Pieter Bruegel the Elder at its center. A fifth, literary essay describes the feverish visions of one of the victims of a true 16th-century series of murders permeated by the deadly sins.

Dr. Dorien Tamis - Curator of Old Master Painting, Sculpture and Applied Arts, Bonnefanten in Maastricht, The Netherlands. Jip van Reijen - Curator Old Masters, Bonnefanten in Maastricht, The Netherlands. Dr Saskia Cohen-Willner - Art historian. Established independent curator, researcher and author, specializing in 16th- and 17th-century paintings, works on paper and art literature. Dr. Wendelien van Welie wrote her PhD-dissertation on the earliest illuminated manuscripts of Brunetto Latini's Livre dou Trésor. She published on a variety of topics such as the representation of Jews in Quaerendo, the representation of power. She is specialized in early medieval art, especially early Christian art, Byzantine art and Karolingian/Ottonian art. Dr. Van Welie works at the department of Art History of the Middle Ages where she lectures in both the bachelor and master on medieval Western and Byzantine art, iconography and historiography.