Pieter Bruegel the Elder (ca 1525-1569), The Fall of the Rebel Angels, 1562, oil on oak
De Val van de opstandige Engelen

Brussels Museum of Fine Arts

The painting pictures the angels who have rebelled against God and are driven out of Heaven by an armoured Archangel Michael assisted by two angels in white robes. Falling from grace, the insurgent angels have lost their angelic nature and are metamorphosed into a miscellany of hybrid, hideous, repulsive and essentially ridiculous beasties. They plunge in a whirling swarm and spread out to fill the whole lower half of the painting in a dense inextricable throng of yelling, grimacing, growling and colliding bestial faces. Bosch was clearly an inspiration to Bruegel.

Bruegel’s creatures are composites of scattered bits from the animal, vegetable and human worlds and of a few artefacts as well. We are confronted with particles of sea creatures, butterflies, poultry, frogs, eggs, slippery fish, shrimps, fruit, lizards, skeletons in various combinations and most striking with those particles, combined with human heads, bodies, arms or legs. On the right, a puffy gnome carrying a sundial and a plumed helmet brandishes a sword. In the lower centre, a human head with butterfly wings is coupled with a shapeless body. On the left, another human head trumpeting against Archangel Michael, is grafted onto a tailed body made of tiny red bubbles, partly enclosed in a cuirass and a pair of shells. Below, a toad-like creature with bird legs has its belly torn up, exposing its inside eggs. The demons of Bruegel with their diabolic grimaces are still full of live, and even those missing human elements, all are entangled in humanity.

For several details of the painting, see next pictures