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Artistic Splendor: Significant Works from the Thrivent Art Collection,

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Rising

Sculpture by late renowned artist Richard Hunt featured outside Thrivent's downtown Minneapolis office.
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Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Netherlandish, c. 1525/30-1569
Engraved by Pieter van der Heyden
St. James and the Magician Hermogenes, from The Story of the Magician Hermogenes, 1565
Engraving

Marvelously fantastical creatures fill this scene with chaos and spectacle. Pieter Bruegel transforms a pious legend found in early Christian hagiographies (biographies of saints) into a riot of inventions. Bruegel unleashes a teeming swath of demonic absurdity. Hybrid beasts, airborne crones, and plague‑ridden monsters swarm across the sheet, overwhelming the nominal narrative with comic menace. This sensational image reads less as moral instruction than mischievous satire. With playful disregard for narrative fidelity found in the biographical text, Bruegel’s scene cloaks a veiled critique of the repression by the Catholic Church of protestants, in visual tumult and his trademark chaotic energy.