This dissertation analyzes the emergence of a novel idiom of biblical imagery in the oeuvre of Pieter Bruegel the Elder in response to Antwerp's profound religious, demographic, and economic transformation. I distill the major innovative characteristics of Bruegel's religious paintings, such as his focus on the narrative, compositional complexity, and design for semi-public domestic spaces to show that in privileging those qualities, Bruegel introduced discursivity as the alternative to the devotional and liturgical functions of religious art. Correlating those changes in religious imagery during this period with Antwerp's transformation into an international commercial metropolis, I argue that Bruegel's biblical compositions became active instruments in negotiating the conditions of common welfare and consensual harmony. By analyzing the correspondence of the Antwerp elite, inventories, humanistic treatises, and extant pictorial examples of domestic decoration, I further make the case that the images' role in promoting social and economic cohesion was stimulated by their incorporation into the custom of learned dinner conversations (convivium).

Each chapter examines a different aspect of the engagement of Bruegel's paintings with Antwerp's contemporary transformation. Chapter One advocates for the understanding of the Tower of Babel, displayed in the suburban villa of an affluent entrepreneur Niclaes Jonghelinck, as a pictorial argument on the precedence of collective welfare over individual profit. By approaching the panel as an epitome of the role of visual arts in sparking convivial conversations, this chapter also introduces some of the main premises from which I proceed in my dissertation. The study of the unprecedented popularity of the images of the Conversion of Saint Paul, presented in Chapter Two, continues my interest in period discourses of entrepreneurship, but analyzes them as inseparable from confessional and legal circumstances. This chapter reveals that models of the community envisioned by Antwerp's citizens and their Spanish rulers were at odds, and draws from this observation two conclusions pertaining to the paintings of the Conversion. First, that their display served the purpose of the confessional self-fashioning of collectors, and second, that the contemporary elite began to actively question the uniform Catholic orthodoxy enforced by the Spanish Habsburgs as a necessary precondition for the commercial and cultural success of the community. Chapter Three takes the transformation of religiosity as its main subject, and introduces the Procession to Calvary and the Sermon of Saint John the Baptist as proxies of those changes. Demonstrating that Bruegel thematized in these two compositions religious and artistic shifts towards discursivity, I analyze convivium and open-air Protestant sermons as vehicles for the contemporaneous redefinition of religious ritual, removed from the official supervision of the Catholic Church, and relocated to the alternative space of private houses.

In summary, my dissertation offers a new and coherent reading of a major, albeit previously understudied, body of works of a leading sixteenth-century artist, and explains them as intrinsic to the processes of demographic, confessional, and economic changes of the urban body. By focusing on the multitude of functions and applications of Bruegel's biblical images, I challenge the interpretations of mid-sixteenth-century Netherlandish art as increasingly secularized because of the contemporary Protestant suppression of religious images. Instead, I offer a positive narrative, one in which Bruegel's paintings testify to the success of the contemporary artistic quest for a novel idiom of non-devotional and non-confessional Christian art, and prove visual arts' ability to advance period socio-economic and religious discourses to the advantage of the entire community.