Pieter Bruegel the Elder: The Blind Leading the Blind (1568)


(Museo di Capodimonte, Naples, Italy)

A painting by the Flemish artist Pieter Brueghel the elder (1525-1569). This painting shows a metaphor from the Bible. According to the gospel of Matthew:

10 And he called the people to him and said to them, “Hear and understand:
11 it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth; this defiles a person.”
12 Then the disciples came and said to him, “Do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this saying?”
13 He answered, “Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be rooted up.
14 Let them alone; they are blind guides. And if the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit.”
(Matthew 15:10-24)


Brueghel shows the metaphor literally: a group of 6 blind men are following each other. The leader of the group has fallen on his back into a ditch and, because they are all linked by their staffs, seems about to drag his companions down with him. Thanks to the detail Brueghel put into this work, modern doctors have managed to identify what is wrong with each blind man: The first man's eyes are not visible; the second has had his eyes removed, along with the eyelids: the third suffers from corneal leukoma; the fourth atrophy of the globe; the fifth is either blind with no light perception, or photophobic; and the sixth has pemphigus or bullous pemphigoid. Also Brueghel shows the blind men correctly with their face raised in the air as they would have had to rely on their senses of smell and hearing. The church in the background is the Sint-Anna Church of the village Sint-Anna-Pede. Painting from 1568.