Philips Galle

Philips Galle was an engraver employed by the Antwerp print publisher Hieronymus Cock before striking out to run his own publishing house. His technique follows the broad and schematic style of most of Cock’s engravers.

Pieter Bruegel favored New Testament parables, in which he gave visual expression to Christ’s sometimes complex words. Here, he represented several episodes from the parable of the good shepherd found in the Gospel of John: at left are the thieves who enter the stable through its wall to steal the sheep; at the gate to the stable is Christ, embodying the metaphor, “I am the door.” Christ-as-shepherd gives his life for his flock, unlike the shepherd at upper right, who flees from his flock when the wolf appears. Such images involved the viewer in a series of moral questions about how he might be implicated in his salvation through his moral or ethical behavior.