The Sermon on the Mount

The Sermon on the Mount, painted in 1598 on copper and now in the J. Paul Getty Museum, is one of Brueghel's most spatially ambitious early works, depicting the great outdoor sermon described in Matthew 5–7 in which Christ delivers the Beatitudes to a vast crowd gathered on a hillside in Galilee. The subject demanded exactly what Brueghel was developing in 1598: a panoramic landscape capable of containing thousands of figures while maintaining the spatial recession and atmospheric depth needed to suggest the open hillside setting. This early Getty copper is technically related to the Christ's Descent into Limbo of 1597 in the Mauritshuis — both demonstrate his emerging mastery of the small copper format for large-scale spatial compositions. The crowd listening to Christ is rendered with Brueghel's characteristic precision, individual figures differentiated across the full range from foreground to distant horizon.

Oil on copper, the Sermon composition exploits the copper format's tonal clarity to handle the difficult task of rendering a crowd against an open landscape sky. Brueghel uses a high viewpoint to see over the crowd toward Christ on the elevated position at the composition's far end, the perspective recession drawing the eye across thousands of individual figures toward the tiny but luminous preaching figure.