c. 1575-1600

The Unfaithful Shepherd

Christ's parable of the unfaithful shepherd, who grows fat from eating the sheep in his care and flees when the wolf attacks them, was rarely illustrated in art. Pieter Bruegel the Elder's original composition of 1567-69, with its dramatic sweep of landscape, is lost but thought to be reflected in this copy in a later style. The scene may be a disguised allegory of the failure of Margaret of Parma, then regent of the Netherlands, to protect dissenters and Protestants from persecution by the Duke of Alva, or of the flight of his Protestant opponent, the Prince of Orange, to Germany.