Patience (Patientia)

Description

Patience stands amid a strange landscape of ruins, grotesque creatures and scattered human activity in this engraving. A great bare tree rises on the right, while distant buildings and densely worked foreground forms keep the eye moving through an unsettled world. Pieter van der Heyden made the print after Pieter Bruegel the Elder in 1557, and Hieronymus Cock published it. The title sets the idea of endurance against a scene that offers little visual calm.

The contrast gives the allegory its force. Rather than placing the virtue in an orderly setting, the composition brings it into the midst of disturbance and complication. The engraved line makes even the smallest shapes insistently present, rewarding a gradual examination of the surrounding inventions. Patience becomes a quality tested by circumstances, and the act of looking slowly through the print echoes the steadiness suggested by its subject.

Read our guide to giclée prints or browse the Pieter Bruegel collection.