Dietrich / RealEstateInBruegel

Real Estate in Bruegel

Real Estate in Bruegel

In case you are an art historian and you don’t see a future in doing art history anymore, there is still one thing that you might do (at least I am told so): you might go into real estate appraisal.
Well, at least that is what we tried to do. But somehow it turned out not that well, and we are back. And now we have only one last thing to do: we take advantage of our experiences in real estate appraisal, and we do now real estate appraisal in art history. In painting. And of course we do that in Bruegel…

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Appraisal, The:

As you can see there were definitely also appraisers at the time of Bruegel. Perhaps even Bruegel himself was an appraiser… At least this is suggested by the 2011 movie The Mill and the Cross. But no, this appraiser obviously misses the best real estate object that can be found in Bruegel at all. See Wind and the Mill, The (below).

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Home Inspection (I):

This did not look like a sound investment at all. To get into the upper floors we had to rent horses…

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Home Inspection (II):

This is perhaps the best example to show how real estate appraisal might help art history. Because the appraisal of this object is really delicate. It’s definitely too easy to say that this is a satire on modern technology. Because it isn’t just that. Fact is that the Biblical account on the tower of Babel says nothing as to the quality of the building. As to the question if the tower was actually architecturally well planned and well designed. Fact is that the tower of Babel is usually seen as the embodiment of human hubris. But the Lord who came down from heavens and found that humans had to be shown their limits, by that doing, rather seemed to judge the architecture well. As promising. Since the Lord had to stop them. And only after the Lord had confused human’s language this project actually got out of hand. And this is probably what Bruegel is showing here: the various teams could not work well together anymore, since the teams had no common language anymore. But perhaps we might still guess an originally brilliant master plan.
Note also that the tower is build on rock, like… well, it might also be seen as a metaphor of the Reformation (but instead we might also think of a giant IT project that got out of hand, with the various elements of a giant master plan not functioning together anymore and having a life of their own).

As to the actual appraisal I would say, beside the guessing of a master plan, one had to inspect all the actual elements of this real real estate composit all by themselves and possibly dismantle them and then appraise one by one. But since this object might be under monument protection this might be impossible anyway, and all we can do is to learn.

(ps: note also what makes the difference between the Rotterdam and the Vienna version: it’s the conceivability of a master plan… the Rotterdam project simply comes to a stop, while the Vienna tower further evolves in an interesting way with many niches developing inside the master structure… Or, you might say, the various niches in the Rotterdam version are just better hidden… I.e. there is a better, perhaps secretive master plan to reuse what is left…)

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Inhabiting a Painting:

The more expensive a painting the more difficult to get an apartment inside the painting. There is definitely gentrification going on inside expensive paintings. Like here. This area might look cheap, but as I can tell, these are not really decrepit houses. Much modern conveniences, actually, of the most luxurious kind.

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Minas Tirith:

Oops, this is not by Bruegel. Or is it? Well, it seems it might be influenced by him. And we see another period (?) real estate appraiser: Gandalf. Might it be that Gandalf is the father of all real estate appraisers? Here he visits the legendary Minas Tirith.

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Wind and the Mill, The:

In some sense definitely my favourite real estate object in Bruegel (and I mean the apartment with the two precisely worked windows below the mill). I am still working on getting a better picture, to look inside. But this remains theoretical anyway. No one would want to live close to an execution site. Not even the miller does probably live up there, but daily has to climb to the top of the rock… And the question remains: what is actually in there… Who lives there?

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