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End notes
Perception and Blindness in the 16th Century

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[1] Masi’s property also included Bruegel’s The Misanthrope. Both paintings were probably brought to Italy by Masi’s father Cosimo, a keen art collector and connoisseur, after a buying trip to the Netherlands. The two Bruegel paintings seized from Masi are now housed as part of the Farnese collection in the National Museum of Capodimonte, Naples. See further Robert L Bonn,  Painting Life: The Art of Pieter Bruegel, the Elder. Chaucer Press Books, 2006 at 84ff; Laura Turchi.  entry on Giovan Battista Masi, Biographical Dictionary of Italians Vol 71 (2008) http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/giovan-battista-masi_(Dizionario-Biografico)/
[2] Alexander Wied, Bruegel, Bay Books Sydney, 1980 at 161.
[3] He was probably in his early 40s.
[4] The Wellcome Library 
https://wellcomelibrary.org/item/b12025112#?c=0&m=0&s=0&cv=0&z=-0.1289%2C-0.035%2C1.3301%2C0.6899
[5] Matthew 15:14.
[6] Such as The Fight between Carnival and Lent (1559), Sermon of St John the Baptist (1566) and the drawing The Blind Men (1562).
[7] Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen, “A Downward Path”, in What Great Paintings Say, vol 2, Taschen, Kōln, 2003 at 195; Philippe and Françoise Roberts Jones, Bruegel, Flammarion, Paris 2012 at 232.
[8] Timothy Foote, The World of Bruegel, Time-Life International (Nederland) 1971, at 120.
[9] Wellcome Library, op cit.
[10] Wolfgang Stechow, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Harry N Abrams, NY, 1990, at 118.
[11] Wied, op cit at 172.
[12] Wied, op cit at 172.
[13] Charles Bouleau, The Painter’s Secret Geometry: A Study of Composition in Art, Mineola; Dover Publications, 2014.
[14] Jamie Lee Edwards, “Still Looking for Pieter Bruegel the Elder”, (unpubl thesis) 2013, at 63 
http://etheses.bham.ac.uk/4164/1/Edwards13MPhil.pdf ; Hagen op cit. This attitude forms a stark contrast to that illustrated in some Greek myths, where blindness was sometimes associated with special gifts, such as the gift of prophecy or musical talent.
[15] Edwards, op cit.
[16] See, for example, our article on the Fall of Icarus.
[17] Edwards, op cit at 64.
[18] If so, it is ironic that the shepherd, who may have been intended to remind us of Christ, the Good Shepherd, has been abraded from the painting.
[19] Hagen, op cit at 193.
[20] In this connection, it is interesting that Martin Luther applied the proverb when he referred to “Pope, bishops and sophists… the blind leading of blind, commanding their subjects to believe as they see fit, without God’s word” (Luther On Secular Authority, 1523; Hagen, op cit at 192.)
[21] Hagen, op cit at 191, For further details, see our articles on the
 Fall of Icarus, and the Way to Calvary.
[22] A point possibly made more directly in Way to Calvary.

© Philip McCouat 2018
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