A Face in the Crowd

Pieter Bruegel the Elder died in 1569, but 2020 has been a breakthrough year for the painter.

A couple times an hour, a tiny swatch of a Pieter Bruegel the Elder painting flashes across my Twitter feed, courtesy of an automated account called @Bruegelbot. Bruegel’s paintings—and here we’ll just refer to him as “Bruegel,” setting aside the other painters with the same surname—are notoriously busy, packed with tiny figures going about their business in nearly every square inch of the painting. @bruegelbot is valuable because it removes…