Bruegel explains its name as a tribute to Pieter Bruegel, the 16th-century painter whose work epitomizes unvarnished and innovative depictions of life in Europe. It can also be read as a reference to a “Brussels European and Global Economic Laboratory”, even though Bruegel does not consider its name to be an acronym. The think tank was initially co-founded by the economists Jean Pisani-Ferry and Nicolas Véron in 2002. It was officially endorsed by former French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder at the 40th anniversary of the Elysée Treaty in January 2003. 
The management team ensures the coordination of both research and non-research staff, and it is composed by Guntram Wolff (Director), Maria Demertzis (Deputy Director), Paola Maniga, (Head of Development till January, 2020), and Giuseppe Porcaro (Head of Communications and Events).
Bruegel was to work for Cock until his last years, but from 1556 on he concentrated, surprisingly enough, on satirical, didactic, and moralizing subjects, often in the fantastic or grotesque manner of Hiëronymus Bosch, imitations of whose works were very popular at the time. Other artists were content with a more or less close imitation of Bosch, but Bruegel’s inventiveness lifted his designs above mere imitation, and he soon found ways to express his ideas in a much different manner. His early fame rested on prints published by Cock after such designs. But the new subject matter and the interest in the human figure did not lead to the abandonment of landscape. Bruegel in fact extended his explorations in this field. Side by side with his mountain compositions, he began to draw the woods of the countryside; he turned then to Flemish villages and, in 1562, to townscapes with the towers and gates of Amsterdam.
There is but little information about his life. According to Carel van Mander’s Het Schilderboeck (Book of Painters), published in Amsterdam in 1604 (35 years after Bruegel’s death), Bruegel was apprenticed to Pieter Coecke van Aelst, a leading Antwerp artist who had located in Brussels. The head of a large workshop, Coecke was a sculptor, architect, and designer of tapestry and stained glass who had traveled in Italy and in Turkey. Although Bruegel’s earliest surviving works show no stylistic dependence on Coecke’s Italianate art, connections with Coecke’s compositions can be detected in later years, particularly after 1563, when Bruegel married Coecke’s daughter Mayken. In any case, the apprenticeship with Coecke represented an early contact with a humanistic milieu. Through Coecke, Bruegel became linked indirectly to another tradition as well. Coecke’s wife, Maria Verhulst Bessemers, was a painter known for her work in watercolour or tempera, a suspension of pigments in egg yolk or a glutinous substance, on linen. The technique was widely practiced in her hometown of Mechelen (Malines) and was later employed by Bruegel. It is also in the works of Mechelen’s artists that allegorical and peasant thematic material first appear. These subjects, unusual in Antwerp, were later treated by Bruegel. In 1551 or 1552 Bruegel set off on the customary northern artist’s journey to Italy, probably by way of France. From several extant paintings, drawings, and etchings, it can be deduced that he traveled beyond Naples to Sicily, possibly as far as Palermo, and that in 1553 he lived for some time in Rome, where he worked with a celebrated miniaturist, Giulio Clovio, an artist greatly influenced by Michelangelo and later a patron of the young El Greco. The inventory of Clovio’s estate shows that he owned a number of paintings and drawings by Bruegel as well as a miniature done by the two artists in collaboration. It was in Rome in 1553 that Bruegel produced his earliest signed and dated painting, Landscape with Christ and the Apostles at the Sea of Tiberias. The holy figures in this painting were probably done by Maarten de Vos, a painter from Antwerp then working in Italy.
Van Mander records that before he died he told his wife to burn some drawings, perhaps designs for prints, carrying inscriptions “which were too sharp or sarcastic. either out of remorse or for fear that she might come to harm or in some way be held responsible for them”, which has led to much speculation that they were politically or doctrinally provocative, in a climate of sharp tension in both these areas. 
The two main early sources for Bruegel’s biography are Lodovico Guicciardini’s account of the Low Countries (1567) and Karel van Mander’s 1604 Schilder-boeck.  Guicciardini recorded that Bruegel was born in Breda, but Van Mander specified that Bruegel was born in a village (dorp) near Breda called “Brueghel”,  which does not fit any known place.  Nothing at all is known of his family background. Van Mander seems to assume he came from a peasant background, in keeping with the over-emphasis on Bruegel’s peasant genre scenes given by van Mander and many early art historians and critics. 
He was a formative influence on Dutch Golden Age painting and later painting in general in his innovative choices of subject matter, as one of the first generation of artists to grow up when religious subjects had ceased to be the natural subject matter of painting. He also painted no portraits, the other mainstay of Netherlandish art. After his training and travels to Italy, he returned in 1555 to settle in Antwerp, where he worked mainly as a prolific designer of prints for the leading publisher of the day. Only towards the end of the decade did he switch to make painting his main medium, and all his famous paintings come from the following period of little more than a decade before his early death, when he was probably in his early forties, and at the height of his powers.
His nickname was “Peasant Brueghel,” as he would often don peasant’s clothing and attend social gatherings and weddings, in order to mingle and interact with the locals, and gain insight and inspiration for his paintings. He also fathered two other prominent Flemish painters, Pieter Brueghel the Younger and Jan Brueghel the Elder, although it is thought that they were not taught by their father, as he died when they were young children.
Despite the lack of direct evidence about who and what he saw in Rome, it is worth remembering – as Katrien Lichtert has recently noted – that such artistic pilgrimages by northern European artists were undertaken precisely, in Vasari’s formula, per apprendere la maniera italiana.
The truth, though, is less open faced. For all the temptation that the figure who emerges from the Schilderboek biography – natural genius, comedian, ethnographer – exerts, the fact is that we know little about the life behind the works that remain to us. Writing some 45 years after Bruegel’s death, van Mander may have had access to people who knew the painter – Bruegel’s own mother-in-law, for instance, outlived him by 30 years – but there is no guarantee of his reliability. Not least because of his concern to memorialise the artists of the Low Countries and Germany just as Vasari had the artists of Italy, van Mander’s anecdotes tend toward the flattering and formulaic. And the peasant Bruegel he describes is in no small part a posthumous artefact, amplified by market demand for the dead artist’s village scenes, and the innumerable copies of them painted to cash in on it. With no fewer than 127 known versions of Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap (1565) alone circulating in the 17th century – some 50 of them emanating from the workshop of Pieter Brueghel the Younger – it is little wonder that van Mander should think of Bruegel as a documenter of village life, and that he recount the stories that fit that image best. When it comes to his Bruegel vignettes, it is hard to say which have the ring of truth, and which the ring of too much truth.