Wedding Dance. The Wedding Dance is a 1566 oil-on-panel painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
Owned by the museum of the Detroit Institute of Arts in Detroit, Michigan, the work was discovered by its director in England in 1930, and brought to Detroit. It is believed to be one of a set of three Bruegel works from around the same time, The Wedding Dance, The Peasant Wedding and The Peasant Dance.
The painting depicts 125 wedding guests. As was customary in the Renaissance period, the brides wore black and men wore codpieces.
Voyeurism is depicted throughout the entire art work; dancing was disapproved of by the authorities and the church, and the painting can be seen as both a critique and comic depiction of a stereotypical oversexed, overindulgent, peasant class of the times. Pieter Bruegel the Elder completed The Wedding Dance in 1566.
It is believed to have been lost for many years, until discovered at a sale in London in 1930 by William R. Valentiner, the director of the Museum Detroit Institute of Arts at the time. Valentiner paid $35,075 for The Wedding Dance through a city appropriation. It is still owned by the museum. The Peasant Wedding and The Peasant Dance are also by Bruegel which share the same wedding theme and elements and were painted in the same period in Bruegel's later years. They are considered to be a trilogy of works by Bruegel. In all three of the paintings, there are p