A man sleeps under a pear tree, his friends eat bread and porridge, and the wheat stands taller than the people who cut it. Bruegel's The Harvesters of 1565 is one of the first paintings to make ordinary work in a landscape its whole subject.

In 1566 Pieter Bruegel the Elder set the Roman census of the Nativity in a snowbound Flemish village at sundown. Mary and Joseph are easy to miss.

While Florence painted Venus, Bruges painted the surface of a peach. A reader's guide to the Northern Renaissance through three painters who solved three different problems.