Masterpiece: ‘Parable of the Sower’

Bruegel’s highly detailed landscape tells a story of faith and salvation

“Parable of the Sower”

By: Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Year: 1557

Medium: Oil on panel

Size: 24-by-40½ inches

Location: Timken Museum of Art, 1500 El Prado, Balboa Park

You can get lost in a painting as sweepingly panoramic and vividly detailed as “Parable of the Sower.” Sixteenth-century European viewers who saw it when it was new would have recognized its subject as a handsomely rendered Biblical story, an evocative and familiar aid to reinforce their faith.

Today it is also a rare artistic masterpiece, one of only half a dozen paintings in the United States by the Flemish master Pieter Bruegel the Elder (about 1525-1569).

Painted during the Renaissance, with all its artistic and scientific discoveries, this narrative depicts a peasant sowing seeds, or Christianity’s message, in the foreground. Christ preaches to a small group in the distance, on the banks of a river that leads the eye into the background. A rugged mountain range reaches toward heaven, offering a magnificent path to eternal salvation.

“Bruegel totally humanizes the spiritual nature of this religious subject matter” and links it to the natural world, explained John Wilson, the Timken Museum’s executive director. “Little things catch your eye, like the tower of a church, the thatched hut, birds and horses.

“Many of his contemporaries put Bruegel in the genius category,” he added.

Without diminishing the painting’s sacred message, the artist was among the first to paint the landscape for the sheer joy of it.

Ann Jarmusch writes about art, architecture and historic preservation.