Abstract
"Pieter Bruegel was the most perfect of his century," said Flemish cartographer and geographer Abraham Ortelius eulogizing his friend, who "was taken from us while still in his full manhood." Both men observed and delineated new and original angles of reality, Ortelius in his great atlas (Theater of the World), Bruegel in his paintings, which described, in astonishingly modern terms, the lives of ordinary people. "When asked which of his predecessors he followed, the painter Eupompos is said to have declared that he followed nature herself, not an artist. This agrees with our Bruegel .... Indeed, I would not call him the best of painters, but rather the very nature of painters. So I think that he is worthy of being followed by all," noted Ortelius, not alone in his praise.