Pieter Brueghel the Elder

Every daft thing going on here is meant to be a Dutch saying acted out for real — banging your head against a brick wall, that sort of thing. Counts run to well over a hundred, and no one seems to agree on the exact number, partly because some of the sayings have dropped out of the language since.

This was one of a set marking the turns of the year — six of them, apparently, though only five made it through. They were painted for a rich merchant's house rather than a church, which was still a fairly new idea. It's said the winters around then were genuinely savage across that part of Europe, so the cold isn't invented.

Apparently this was one of six paintings a merchant banker in Antwerp commissioned to track the months of the year — this one's high summer. Only five are known to survive.

Historians have reportedly counted somewhere close to ninety separate games hidden in this one board - tug of war, leapfrog, hoop-rolling, plus a few nobody's been able to name for sure.

I couldn't find much on this one beyond the title — it's a drawing, and the saint part looks almost like an excuse to draw the view behind him.

This one's a print, not a painting — the credit line lists an engraver and a publisher too, so it sounds like a team job, not just one person's work behind it.

The whole square is apparently one big argument — the feast season on one side, the fasting season on the other, the inn and the church facing off across the middle. Nearly two hundred people in there, from what I've read, and supposedly almost every one of them is doing something you could put a name to, if you knew the customs.

Supposedly death coming for everyone regardless of rank was a stock subject back then — a 'dance of death' you'd see on church walls and in cheap prints — and this drags it out of the church and into open country. It went through a long restoration not many years ago, which is apparently why the colours come across as strong as they do now.