Close to half a million people saw the huge Bruegel exhibition in Vienna marking the 450th anniversary of the artist’s death. Pieter Bruegel the Elder died on September 9, 1569, but the Kunsthistorisches Museum pushed the show up a year so that lending institutions could celebrate with their Bruegels back on their walls. The exhibition’s slogan, “once in a lifetime,” was true. Never had so many works by this master been shown in one place: some twenty-seven paintings and seventy drawings and prints, more than half of his oeuvre and enough for a lifetime of looking. It is unlikely that any museum will ever be able to assemble such an exhibition again.
