Mad Meg - Breugel 

The Mad Meg is perhaps the most Boschlike composition by Bruegel, at least at first glance; there are monsters, demons, a wild melee of ruins, ships, weird towers and caves, and conflagrations, wherever you look. But the resemblance fades somewhat as one observes more closely. First of all there is a truly predominant figure, the Dulle Griet or Mad Meg, who strides forward to the left with a powerful gait quite alien to Bosch's imagination. She is worse than Hell itself; in fact, she has just emerged from Hell victorious, laden with loot, and is going after other conquests which we can only imagine. While other, minor hags crowd the bridge which Mad Meg has just left behind, in a wild contest for the coins that a truly Boschlike monster sitting on the roof of a house shovels down to them from his behind, Mad Meg strides on in contemptuous isolation, with the wild stare of the true fanatic, armed for combat, a formidable shrew, who has reduced the monsters of Hell to puny little nincompoops brandishing their armour in pathetically harmless gestures. She is greed personified, a truly capital sinner, but in contrast to the designs in which Bruegel had just previously represented each capital sin in similarly predominant figures (in the series of the "Vices"), she is anything but an allegory.

Beside greed, many other sins populate this Hell. The meaning of some of the monsters, animals, birds, and objects is just as difficult to identify as it is in paintings by Bosch, but gluttony, vanity, and un-chastity are more or less clearly characterized. Most impressive is Bruegel's vision of Satan as an enormous whalelike demon, still reminiscent of the traditional "Mouth of Hell" but now conceived as an impassive tool rather than a violent agent of destruction—so impassive and stupid in fact that its horrible face and horrified eye have themselves become the victim of a special brand of parasites. This concept had already been fully developed in a composition known to us from Bruegel's original drawing in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford and from an engraving of 1556 published by Hieronymus Cock, strangely without Bruegel's name  Here that huge, stupid head is supposed to frighten Saint Anthony out of his wits, but is doomed to impotence as are all his ludicrous companions; it is invaded by parasites as woefully as is its counterpart in the Mad Meg which is equally ignored by the main actor in that composition.

The Boschlike character of the picture is quite evident from the detail; its monsters and its magnificent coloristic use of the conflagration are familiar from the older master's representations of Hell, particularly of that on the right wing of the Haywain triptych in the Prado in Madrid. But everything has taken on a new element of vigour and sturdiness under Bruegel's hands which perhaps cannot vie with the poetic charm and frailty of Bosch's interpretation, but produces a level of reality which fits the different character of Bruegel's entire picture to perfection: the more three-dimensional forms of the buildings and other objects such as the big bowl with the soldiers, the bell and the flag, the soldiers themselves and the monsters, make them appear more absurd, more foolish than any of Bosch's, and more appropriate to the protagonist of the painting, which is, after all, not Satan but Mad Meg. 

Wolfgang Stechow Breugel Abrams