THE FANTASTIC JOURNEY OF PIETER BRUEGEL

Based on imagined events during Bruegel's real-life two-year journey through mid 16th-century France and Italy, newcomer Shafer's luminous watercolor and pencil illustrations spill across the large-scale format with the vivacious humanity characteristic of the great Northern Renaissance painter. As in Bruegel's work, the pictorial settings surrounding the young artist are rich with dramas large and small. The narrative, conveyed through chatty diary entries, tells of thieving boys in the Alps and Ottoman soldiers battling in Reggio. Shafer thus drives home the idea that Bruegel lived and traveled among real people with all their frailties and foibles, characters and ideas that would continue to inform his work. Together, text and illustrations create a portrait of a place and time—complete with the plague and the pope's private zoo—as well as an introduction to an artist whose work and themes are highly accessible to children. Unfortunately, the 16 paintings and drawings by Bruegel, reproduced as a kind of postscript, are too small to do justice to the artist's genius; one double-page spread of The Wedding Banquet, for instance, would have conveyed Bruegel's magic more effectively than the miniatures assembled here. A lengthy author's note with considerable historical background rounds out this visually appealing evocation of the man behind the art. Ages 8-12. (June)