Variety in art is the use of several different elements, such as shape, color, size, texture or direction, to hold the viewer's attention and guide the eye through a work. The painting where it is easiest to see is Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Children's Games, from 1560, now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, where more than 230 children play 83 different games.
Variety is one half of a pair. The other half is unity, the feeling that every part belongs to the same picture. A composition needs both, because too much unity goes flat and too much variety turns into noise. Bruegel's square looks like a case of nothing but variety, which is what makes it worth a closer look.
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The Kunsthistorisches Museum calls the picture a painted encyclopaedia of games and says the scenes are so small that decoding them takes slow, selective study. Standing in that square, a visitor would see a mob.
Bruegel solved the problem before he painted a single child, by lifting the whole scene into a bird's eye view, which the museum names as the only way he could show so large a crowd legibly.
So the picture that seems to prove that more is better depends on a decision about where to stand. Without it, the 83 games would run together. The other great crowds in painting solve the same problem in other ways, and the solutions are not always visible at first glance.
A garden of nudes that a king bought solves it one way, and a portrait of an emperor built from fruit, vegetables and flowers solves it another.
What did Bruegel leave out of Children's Games?
A moral. The Kunsthistorisches Museum describes the picture as being without any moralising undertones, and presents the study of the games as a pleasurable pastime…
What You'll Discover
The two colors Bosch keeps repeating.
Where a king hung that crowd.
Why a vegetable face flattered an emperor.
What variety cannot do on its own.