More than any other Northern European painter, Pieter Bruegel (c. 1525–69) appeals to our modern sensibility and taste. Larry Silver concludes his excellent new book by discussing Bruegel’s influence—through his two artist-sons—on later Flemish and Dutch art. But he doesn’t mention the influence on modern works: of Bruegel’s Magpie on the Gallows on Claude Monet’s The Magpie, in which an ominous black bird also stands sentinel on a wooden crossbar in the midst of a wild landscape; and of The Harvesters on D. H. Lawrence’s painting Boccaccio Story, in which the sleeping peasant has the same triangular, sprawling, massive legs that emphasize his crotch. Christ Carrying the Cross inspired the recent Polish film The Mill and the Cross. The Blind Leading the Blind, a series of sightless eyes and stumbling men, inspired one of the most poignant photographs of the Great War: a progression of British soldiers, blinded by poison gas, bandaged and shuffling toward the refuge of a field hospital.

The same poignant painting inspired the poem “Les Aveugles,” whose title echoes Bruegel’s name. Charles Baudelaire writes, “Their eyes, from which the divine spark has departed, as though they were staring into the distance, remain lifted towards the sky.” The painter also inspired William Carlos Williams’ book of poems, Pictures from Brueghel. In “The Dance,” Williams writes that in the self-indulgent and uncontrolled excess of Peasant Kermis, “the dancers go round, they go round and/ around” driven