The Battle of Carnival and Lent by Pieter Brueghel the Elder

In honor of the Mardi Gras season that I am currently missing in New Orleans, I thought I would pick this really cool painting from my A Year in Art book to share. I know with this picture the detailing is not quite as exquisite as one would hope, but you can at least get a sense for the grandness of the canvas. The Battle of Carnival and Lent by Pieter Brueghel the Elder is in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. Dated 1559, this canvas does sort of capture the amount of randomness of the carnival season in New Orleans. Things are going on all over the place, and who knows if there is really order going on. Surely, chaos is reigning in the picture, and it usually takes over at some point.

I was able to get this detail of the painting to share:

One a rather interesting note, when searching for images on the web, I found out that Zbigniew Preisner composed a short instrumental piece based off of this painting for one of my favorite films, Bleu. I can't wait to rewatch the film now and listen to the piece and see how it fits into the score/film.