Friedrich Brentel

Presumably part of a series of the Four Ages of The World, this gouache shows the third, the Age of Bronze. Brentel frequently used compositions by other artists in his own works. In this case, he took as his model Antonio Tempesta's engraving of the subject from the series Four Ages of Man, published by Niccolò van Aelst in Rome in 1599.¹

According to the classical sources, such as Hesiod² or Ovid's Metamorphoses, the Age of Bronze was an age of warfare: "Third came the people of the bronze age, with fiercer natures, readier to indulge in savage warfare, but not yet vicious''.³  The inhabitants of Brentel's, or Tempesta's, Age of Bronze appear, however, less bellicose than in some other representations, and the subject has been turned into a charming depiction of rural life and its various activities.

A desire for idyllic life, and thus the appeal of Tempesta's rendering of the Age of Bronze to Brentel seems particularly understandable given that the Germanic countries had already entered the tenth year of the Thirty Years' War by the time this work was painted.  Alsace and its capital, Strasbourg, where Brentel worked from 1601 until his death, was one of the cities hardest hit by the war.

1. Bartsch 178, 1329-1332.
2. Hesiod, Works and Days, 11, 140-55
3. Ovid, Metamorphoses, I, 125