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Having patterned his style early in his life on the works of Hieronymus Bosch, Bruegel was far from earthbound when it came to fantasy. His Tower of Babel, first painted in miniature on his Italian travels, puts together nearly all that is known about construction in his day, with detail piled on detail to make the allegory the more convincing. The Suicide of Saul deals in epic fashion with a Biblical story, while the mountains are sketched with a sureness and imagination that a Chinese master could admire.
Down to the Sea. Among his greatest triumphs were his interpretations of Biblical stories as vivid folk dramas. His Massacre of the Innocents, set in a snowbound Dutch village, is a frozen pantomime of terror and violence that would bring a shiver to any contemporary observer. But it was in his rich seasonal landscapes, filled with the tactile sense of wet bark, chill wind or summer's grace, and his final stormy seascape (opposite) that Bruegel reached his greatest powers. It remains in the viewer's eye the epitome of the fury and perils that the sea held for men who sailed, as Bruegel had, in the small craft of their day.