I have long been convinced that the most interesting exhibitions answer not the questions of their own time, but those of ours. I Brueghel. Le origini dei generi pittorici in Europa (The Brueghels. The Origins of Pictorial Genres in Europe), a project by Bernard Aikema curated by Carlotta Striolo, brings together more than eighty paintings, drawings and prints at Palazzo Reale. It tells how one Antwerp family, over three generations, invented the categories through which we still look at images: landscape, still life, the genre scene. To me it spoke above all of something else: machines learning to see.
I took notes, room after room. Here are seven.
1. In the style of Bosch
In 1557 Pieter Bruegel the Elder designed Patience: a figure chained to a block of stone, surrounded by a world falling apart. A papal envoy, recognisable by his cardinal's hat and Saint Peter's keys, rides a giant egg. The publisher Hieronymus Cock had understood that the market wanted Bosch, dead for forty years, and Bruegel gave it to him. Later his son Jan would sell to the Roman cardinals his father's fame as a “second Bosch”.
Before talent, there was a market demand: in the style of Bosch. Today we type it into a prompt.
2. Aping
The Sleeping Pedlar Robbed by Monkeys, of 1569, is an engraving in which the only human being is asleep. Everything else is imitation. One monkey looks at itself in a mirror, another tries on the pedlar's spectacles, others play music. The catalogue reads in it the five senses, performed by creatures that reproduce human gestures without knowing what they mean.
My favourite detail is another: the composition itself was not original. Bruegel drew on a medieval tradition and kept its most well-worn motifs, including the monkey relieving itself in the pedlar's hat. The master was, first of all, a formidable recombiner of data.
3. A model trained on a model
The Last Judgement that Jan Brueghel painted on copper in 1601 fits in the palm of a hand. Its genealogy, on the other hand, is a tree: a lost Bosch, then a drawing by Pieter from 1558, then a Judgement by his friend Rottenhammer, met between Rome and Venice and introduced by Jan to Cardinal Federico Borromeo. Each layer adds and corrects. In our language: fine-tuning.
4. The light of eyes
In 1584 the Milanese theorist Lomazzo wrote that at the entrance to Hades the only light is the one reflected by the water “and by the eyes of many foul beasts crouching there in the mud”. Ten years later, in Rome, Jan painted two small underworlds on copper: Aeneas and the Sibyl, and the concert of Orpheus for Pluto and Proserpina. At the bottom right of the first, a blue eye ringed with spines stares back at the viewer.
Lomazzo argued that painting surpasses poetry because it can generate an infinite variety of forms, beyond the boundaries between the natural, the artificial and the imaginary. The toad wearing a helmet and the tortoise with a cockscomb are the proof. Today we call them hallucinations and try to eliminate them. In the sixteenth century, cardinals collected them.
5. The imperfection of data
Jan writes from Antwerp that flowers can only be painted from March to August, chasing the blooms one by one. Then he gathers them in a single vase: irises, narcissi and tulips that never meet in nature. A latent space made by hand.
In a letter of 1608 he promises Borromeo a small picture with “three tulips”. Scholars connect it to a painting that has more of them. The data doesn't add up, and that excess is the most human part of the picture. A century later Rachel Ruysch, daughter of an anatomist who collected rarities, takes the genre to its extreme and hides a snail among the peonies. A model would remove the snail.
6. Knowledge cutoff: 1620
The painting that struck me most is Jan Brueghel the Younger's Allegory of Painting. It is an archive-room: dozens of pictures on the walls, drawings on the floor, the portraits of Michelangelo, Raphael, Dürer, Van Eyck and of the founder, Pieter. At the centre, Painting herself finishes a garland of flowers.
The historian Gary Schwartz noticed that none of the works depicted dates from after 1620. The picture would therefore be a copy of a lost original by the father, painted by the son after 1625, when he hurried back from Italy to take over the workshop. An image with a built-in cut-off date for its data: a knowledge cutoff. The son continues the father using his archive, just as we do when we ask a machine to continue the world with what it has already seen.
7. The one who turns
In Adriaen Brouwer's tavern, painted around 1625, everyone has their back to the viewer. Only one man, in a pink suit and a red cap, turns with his tankard in hand, as if recognising someone who has just come in. On the back wall hangs a caricature of a profile: an image within the image, watching the scene.
I wondered whether one day machines will be able to make images this beautiful. I believe so: the exhibition shows that beauty can be trained, copied, inherited, sold. The problem lies elsewhere. Every image here was made for a gaze willing to stay, and the right question is not whether the machine will be able to paint, but whether we will still know how to stop. The man in pink, meanwhile, keeps turning towards whoever walks in.
Visiting the exhibition
«I Brueghel. Le origini dei generi pittorici in Europa» (The Brueghels. The Origins of Pictorial Genres in Europe)
Palazzo Reale, Piazza del Duomo 12, Milan
29 September 2026 – 31 January 2027
A project by Bernard Aikema, curated by Carlotta Striolo
Promoted by Comune di Milano – Cultura, produced by Palazzo Reale and 24 ORE Cultura – Gruppo Il Sole 24 ORE
Tuesday to Sunday 10:00–19:30, Thursday until 22:30, closed on Mondays
Information and tickets: palazzorealemilano.it
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