The exhibition of Bruegel the Elder’s drawings and the engraved prints derived from them at the Metropolitan Museum of Art offers a true feast for both connoisseurs and iconographers.[1] The exhibit is of special importance to connoisseurs, as it offers insight into the precarious methods of historical attribution. As advertised widely among the reviewers and academics who pay attention to such things, the exhibition claims to include fifty-four out of a total of the sixty-one sheets that are surely by Pieter Bruegel the Elder himself. We can be grateful that certain sheets that were formerly called Bruegel the Elder by most art historians of my era are included as object lessons in the radical revision of the artist’s graphic oeuvre in recent years.

This “new” Bruegel is based almost entirely on the work of the late Hans Mielke, whose catalogue raisonné of the drawings was pub ...

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