With Pieter Bruegel, what you see is pretty much what you get. Or that, certainly, has been a large measure of the Flemish painter’s appeal. Rather than the abstruse allegories, delicate nudes and courtly portraits that make up our idea of Renaissance art, Bruegel gives us an earthy peasant’s eye view of the 16th Century, peopled by drunken louts, half-cut bagpipe players and broad-in-the-beam trencherwomen. His meticulously observed passing of the unchanging, rural round is never fashionable, but always popular – with the magnificent Hunters in the Snow probably the greatest Christmas card image of all time.