When it comes to making pictures of sixteenth-century life, no one is more bold or more subtle than Pieter Bruegel, the Dutchman who more than any other captured for us the look and feel of ordinary life, while enriching his images with a depth of perception seldom equaled in any art. Bruegel was most likely born in a village in Brabant, now part of the Netherlands, sometime between 1525 and 1530, but we know nothing more than that. When he died in Brussels in 1569, he may have been in his late thirties or his mid-forties. He was by then quite famous, and a number of his paintings had already entered some of the most important collections of his time and place, including the collection of the emperor himself.
Any number of his early drawings and prints, however, have been lost, so we have a somewhat broken narrative of his early development. He appears to have begun in the creative shadow of his fellow Dutchman Hieronymus Bosch, born at least seventy-five years earlier and best understood as a late medieval painter, who provides the viewer entry into a world of dreams and nightmares replete with both delicious and deformed creatures, as in his famous Garden of Earthly Delights, which contains, besides the panel of delights, a panel illustrating the torments of Hell. Luther would have had no trouble understanding Bosch, nor would Loyola—though the delights might have made both men more than a little nervous.
Though Bruegel appropriates some of Bosch’s medieval-style surrealism, he comes gradually to serve a less sensational, more meditative, more profound point of view. Good examples of Bruegel’s Boschian aspects may be found in his earlier images, such as hisdrawing Big Fish Eat Little Fish, which illustrates a typical folk saying. Pulsing with activity and a multiplicity of forms, the drawing is a ghoulish nightmare that depends on excess to make its point. But neither sixteenth-century viewers nor we in the twenty-first century could fail to grasp immediately what Bruegel is telling us. The drawing might even be employed to illustrate the predatory nature of certain leading businessmen or churchmen and their collaborating politicians, whether then or now. (What a sensational logo for a super PAC such as the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity or Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS.) I particularly admire the detail of the grandfather (in the lower right) lovingly instructing the child in how to go about the depredation of others, and the fish (upper right) that has grown innovative legs to assist him in his spoliating—and this long before anyone had thought of the evolution of species.
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When Bruegel made this drawing he was already a resident of Antwerp, then one of Europe’s largest cities, and a regular contributor to the press of the famous printer Hieronymus Cock. Big Fish was made with the intention of turning it into an engraving, though we have but one extant copy of the engraving, attributed—wrongly—to Bosch. It’s certainly possible that some now-forgotten news item of the day made someone feel that mass distribution of this image was imprudent, or Bruegel himself may have decided not to put his name on it, though his signature and the date, 1556, are clearly seen in the lower right corner of the drawing. (He would later change the spelling of his name from “Brueghel” to “Bruegel.”) Or it may be that someone thought the Bosch name would make for better sales.
While in Antwerp, Bruegel studied with a local artist, Pieter Coecke. He also took at least one extended trip to Italy, by now an almost required venture for any ambitious northern artist. And years later he would marry Coecke’s daughter, Mayken, who was considerably younger than Bruegel. According to one witness, Bruegel “often carried her in his arms when she was a child.” By the time of the wedding, Coecke was long dead, but Mayken’s mother insisted, before she gave her consent, that Bruegel agree to move from Antwerp to Brussels “in order to separate himself from his former relationship and forget it,” according to the same witness. Bruegel had lived in Antwerp with a young woman whom he loved but who was “niggardly with the truth,” which led to their parting. Bruegel was not niggardly with the truth.
The longer he worked, the further he seemed to move away from his early, Bosch-like visions, his images becoming simpler, his scenes less crowded with alien forms. But he never lost his flair for suggesting that the real world is as full of odd, even nightmarish realities as are our dreams. Beekeepers (facing page), a drawing he made twelve years after Big Fish, is, though much pared back visually, full of the feeling that the world is indeed a very strange place. The three faceless beekeepers, lugubriously dressed, silent, and ghostly, could almost be beings from another planet, carrying out some incomprehensible ritual. In the branches of the tree we spot a bird-nester, a character that appears in other Bruegel images. He could not be more earthbound, more usual: he is stealing eggs. The legend in the lower left says in Dutch: “He who knows where the nest is has knowledge, but he who raids it possesses it.” Another folk saying, but what does Bruegel mean by it here? Are the out-of-this-world beekeepers, whose work is approved by social convention, not stealing from the bees as the bird-nester steals from the birds? Does their weird getup somehow render them absolved from the social condemnation that falls upon the scared little bird-nester? Is there something skewed about the way we human beings make our moral judgments? Are we all victims of convention, unable to see straight and judge aright because of differences in costume, class, and convention? Should we rather applaud the pluck of the humble bird-nester and stand back a bit from the conventionally approved but somewhat creepy beekeepers?
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Of course, if some busybody, especially some magistrate or religious censor, were to inquire as to the meaning hidden in the drawing, Bruegel could easily claim that there was no hidden meaning. It’s just a local scene I happened on, nothing more than that. It is, after all, entirely realistic: no Boschian symbolism, no excess, no challenge intended to anyone’s intelligence or spirit. (Had the young antecedent-less Bruegel himself possibly been a bird-nester?)
In the same year that he drew Beekeepers Bruegel painted one of his smallest oils, Beggars [Plate 54], little more than seven inches square. It would be easy to mistake this panel for a simple genre painting, a slice of contemporary life and nothing more. But the picture is “full o’ the milk of human kindness,” as Lady Macbeth puts it scornfully. We are shown five crippled beggars, at least three of whom lack feet. They are managing on crutches and assorted crude appendages. Four of the five wear foxtails, which, in a time when clothes defined who you were and where you belonged, were the badges of beggars and other licensed fools—that is, of those allowed to play the fool in designated public spaces for the occasional penny.
The three whose faces we can see are brutish, probably moronic. Are these their constant expressions or are they playing expected parts? All wear hats, the man on the left wearing a sort of red crown, the man on the right a pretend bishop’s miter. Whether we know it or not, we are being asked: Is this the best we can do for these poor souls, one of whom might be our secret king, another of whom might be our spiritual superior? Can our society offer them nothing more? Look, they are human beings. How would you like to be one of them?
Beyond the beggars a woman walks by. She is not handsome but ordinary—but she can walk and go about the normal business of life. What a difference that makes, how lucky is this ordinary woman. Is she a beggar? She carries a plate: will it be used as a beggar’s bowl? Her coat looks like the remnant of a torn sack. Whatever her status, she is far better off than the beggars in the foreground.
And beyond the beggars and the woman, who takes no notice, there is an open, arched portal, leading to a lovely orchard and private garden, the very symbol of the good life, a life our beggars can have no part in. There we can just make out the horizon, the place where the earth touches the sky, where our poor, sad human hopes touch God’s great cosmos. So take pity on the beggars.
One of Bruegel’s most famous paintings is the (supposedly) jolly The Wedding Dance [Plate 55], which can be viewed at the Detroit Institute of Arts, one of the few Bruegel paintings to be found on American soil.18 It is a spectacular demonstration of painterly rhythm. Of course, we are watching people dance, which should be rhythmic. But here the rhythm is in the multiplicity of lines and shapes, coalescing and separating against one another, and in the ballet of colors, clashing and complementing one another. Let your eye follow the eruptions of red, for instance, from foreground to farthest figures, and you will see what I mean. The last grouping to be seen before the horizon is a kissing couple, though not the only kissing couple to be spotted within this assemblage. Are they perhaps the next bridal couple? Well to the right of the kissers, near the horizon, is the traditional place for the bride in front of an unfurled sheet, in this case extended between two trees and bearing the bride’s paper crown above her chair. But the bride is not sitting beneath her crown, as would be expected. There, instead, two old crones are conferring, gossiping no doubt; and perhaps they have plenty to gossip about. The bride, after all, is close to the front of the dancers, distinguished by her bare head and flowing bridal hairdo. She is dancing. With her new husband? I don’t think so. And where is he? Who knows.
So Bruegel gives us here a complex sociogram, full of questions and possibilities for both happiness and misery. The three strapping lads who occupy the foreground positions sport red, white, and blue erections, seen quite prominently beneath their bursting codpieces. (The codpieces look nearly transparent because so many censors in so many earlier eras tried to disguise or erase these swellings.) Two are dancing with ladies who may or may not be their wives or girlfriends. The third lad is single, playing the pipes, to which everyone else is dancing. Is this single musician, who sparks the joy of all the dancers, the eternal artist, Bruegel himself, the one who gives pleasure but never wholly owns it?
Are the dancers simply full of joy? Rather, they seem a little subdued, certainly less than ecstatic, knowing that the dance will end and the party be over, that tomorrow their usual, dreary lives will resume once more. In most other northern artists, a genre painting like this one would exude a certain contempt: Look at those silly, feckless peasants. But in Bruegel’s art, peasants are always people, just like you and me. And don’t forget to contemplate that long, mysterious horizon.
Bruegel made many pictures like The Wedding Dance, employing scads of individuals, discovered in an immense variety of attitudes. Not a few of Bruegel’s larger paintings cannot be reproduced here, requiring as they do a large-format art book if there is to be any hope of presenting them adequately. This is true especially of Christ Carrying the Cross, an immense oil panel, nearly seven feet across, hanging in Vienna. Though Christ, fallen under the weight of his cross, is to be found at the exact center of the painting, the viewer is unlikely to spot him right away. He is so small against the foreground figures, and there is so much human activity in this painting to distract the eye. The casual viewer might take away the impression that Bruegel believed that the way to Calvary and the subsequent crucifixion were not all that important. Rather, what is being said is that the most important things happen while we are distracted by unimportant things and fail to take note of the life-altering moments that should claim our full attention.
But there are so many themes pulsating through this complex field that a great many critics have found here proof of Bruegel’s subversive political and religious opinions: he hated the Spanish overlords of the Netherlands, sneakily depicted as red-coated Roman soldiers, just as the Spanish mercenaries then occupying the Netherlands wore red; he is anti-Catholic, pro-Protestant, because Mary, prominent in the foreground and acknowledged symbol of the Catholic Church, turns aside from her son, whereas a peddler, also in the foreground (and probably having Protestant tracts in his enormous backpack, as many peddlers had), turns toward Christ. The vivid red coats are undeniable and would surely have sent the imaginations of contemporary viewers in an anti-Spanish direction. The partisan religious intentions are teasingly less certain.
Fortunately, there is a complex Bruegel image—one with very nearly the same theme as Christ Carrying the Cross, though depicting an ancient pagan story—that we can reproduce here, The Fall of Icarus [Plate 56]. Daedalus, the legendary Greek inventor, made wings for himself and his son Icarus, so that they could fly away and escape their imprisonment by King Minos. Daedalus warned his son to take a middle way, neither too near the earth nor too near the sun, lest the sun melt the wax to which the wings’ feathers were affixed. In his pleasure Icarus, young and soaring, forgot his father’s advice, flew too near the sun, crashed into the sea, and drowned.
Here is “Musée des Beaux Arts,” W. H. Auden’s great meditation on the painting:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there must always be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
In the lower right quadrant of the picture between ship and shore, the “white legs” are “disappearing into the green water” with a momentary splash, accompanied by a swirl of feathers.
Icarus was painted sometime between 1555 and 1560. In 1568, Bruegel made what may well have been his final picture, The Magpie on the Gallows [Plate 57], which he specified in his will was his gift to his wife. In less than a year he was dead.Magpiecontains a sort of reprise of The Wedding Dance, a peasant woman dancing with two men, the picture’s most prominent human feature. Nearby is the inevitable piper, source of the music. But the dancing threesome lacks a second woman. Ah, well, we do what we can, we humans; we manage in this imperfect world of ours, taking our pleasures where we find them, not expecting everything to be just as we would have it. To the left of the dancers, two men and their dog serve as an enthusiastic audience. To the left of them, another man shits in the woods. That’s it, isn’t it? Dancing, defecating, dying: they’re all necessary human actions.
Where does dying come into it? The center of the picture is not the dancers or the musician but the gallows. That is where we dance, do we not, in the shadow of the gallows? Alighting for a moment on its splintery wooden frame is a magpie, the bird that, when it appears singly, foretells the early death of someone nearby:
One’s sorrow, two’s mirth,
Three’s a wedding, four’s a birth,
goes an old rhyme about magpies.
To the right of the gallows is a simple wooden cross (a Protestant-style “old rugged cross”?), something for a condemned man to gaze on while he is being hanged. Well in the distance is a town, bustling with activity. On a promontory high above the town is the extensive castle of the local lord; across the valley atop a cliff is a monastery. In the river valley we can see farms and pastures, fishing boats and seagoing ships, and in the farthest distance another human settlement. We labor as well as we can, conducting our lives with as much merriment as we can muster, always in the shadow of death, always overseen by the forces of church and state, miters and magistracies. But, whether appropriately or inappropriately, we do dance. In the sky above whirl birds of various species, donors of eggs to us poor humans, mediators of a sort between earthlings and Heaven. All this is part of Bruegel’s final message to Mayken. Perhaps in the dancing threesome he is even letting her know that he would have no objection to her taking a second husband. You must do what you can, dearest Mayken.
Surely Bruegel did not want to die just then, leaving Mayken with three small children, the youngest, Jan, but one year old. One child was a daughter, and of her we know only her name, Marie. There were also two sons, Pieter the Younger (who would be known as Hell Bruegel) and Jan (who would be known as Velvet Bruegel). Both sons became artists of considerable skill and reputation, though never surpassing their father, never even coming near him in inventiveness.
In his last days, Pieter the Elder must have felt the forces of social judgment—whether of Catholic inquisition or Protestant reformation—closing in on him. Various European societies were becoming more vigilant, more insistent on utter acquiescence to their norms, less tolerant of any hint of deviation. It was anyone’s guess where the “Spanish” Netherlands would end up, which ideological camp it would finally choose to join. If it got to choose at all. Were the sly messages concealed in Bruegel’s paintings really so capable of stirring the pot of social upheaval? He certainly thought so. He instructed Mayken—no doubt for her own protection—to destroy all his remaining satirical drawings. Apparently, she followed those instructions.
We can say with some confidence that Bruegel felt the gathering forces of political and religious instability impending around him. Just a couple of years before his death he painted what may be his most subtly beautiful panel, Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap (see endpaper). The skaters are enjoying themselves on the frozen river, while the silent spires of church and state prick the sky. The whole world is aureoled in a golden glow—to such an extent that we can designate this image the world’s first impressionist painting. The many birds gathering on the snow-laden lawn to the right have no clue that a trap has been set for them, that some of them at least will soon be flattened and caught as the wooden panel crashes down on them. In the slush beneath the trap we note that the snow is melting. Indeed, the golden glow suffusing everything is a silent warning that the temperature is rising and that soon, out on the rural river, there will be a cracking sound, as the ice disintegrates beneath at least some of the skaters. Passing scenes of unearthly beauty, fleeting coalescences of social happiness, moments of restorative peace are just that—passing, fleeting moments. Though they may portend a very different tomorrow, we may easily miss their message, grateful for the present joys, for the seeds scattered so generously beneath the trap.
1 The German artist most closely associated with Luther was Lucas Cranach: the two were friends, even godfathers to each other’s children. A compelling defense of Cranach’s artistic excellence, as well as of his undoubted historical role in Luther’s Reformation, is provided by Steven Ozment in his The Serpent and the Lamb: Cranach, Luther and the Making of the Reformation. I, nonetheless, confess to finding Cranach cloying and second rate.
2 For an analysis of the actual meaning of Revelation, as opposed to its many wacky interpretations, see Desire of the Everlasting Hills, pages 158ff.
3 The horns of the altar referred to bulges that were part of the construction of ancient Israelite altars. Dürer misunderstands the reference and shows God the Father holding musical horns over the heavenly altar.
4 The preference for condemning church over state is abundant through much of Western European literary history, starting with Dante and Boccaccio, taking us through Chaucer, Langland, and Villon, and ending, if at all, only toward the late twentieth century.
5 This is, of course, classicism much sweetened in the course of the Renaissance by Christian optimism, not the original Greco-Roman fatalism. See this page.
6 Two schematic anatomy sketches apart, this is the only front-and-center, fig-leaf-less nude in all of Dürer’s work. Even his woodcuts of the interiors of bathhouses do not depict complete nudity. The northerners were, at this time, far more modest than the Italians. In time, this would change, very nearly reversing itself over the last century. Today, Italians may appreciate nudity in art, but in swimming pools and on beaches they exhibit far more pudency than the Germanic peoples, who allow and sometimes even prescribe nudity for both sexes in certain public places. The northern European Lebensreform (“life reform”) and “naturist” movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which often enough progressed in tandem with hypernationalism and Nazism in Germany, are largely responsible.
7 It was even claimed by the National Socialists, that is, the Nazis, as their kind of art.
8 Our English title, The Republic, derives from the Latin translation, Respublica. In the Greek original, the title, Politeia, would be better translated as Society or simply The State.
9 A third model for Utopia should be mentioned, Augustine of Hippo’s Civitas Dei (City of God). In this work of the early fifth century, the great African bishop (and Neoplatonist) was much preoccupied with defining the characteristics of the Earthly City, preeminently the Rome of his day, against the characteristics of the Eternal City or Heaven. If not quite a utopian/dystopian work, it is certainly the political critique that over the long course of Western history may have had more influence than any other. In his early twenties and while still a law student, More lectured on Civitas at his neighborhood church, Saint Lawrence Jewry. Unfortunately, his lectures are lost and the twelfth-century church itself was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666 (though rebuilt in neoclassical style to the design of Christopher Wren).
10 More, though elaborately respectful, even at times servile, toward his sovereign, was never in the dark about Henry’s true character. More than once Sir Thomas predicted that his head might well be removed from his body if Henry had need of it. On hearing that Anne Boleyn, Henry’s second queen, was dancing her days away, More prophetically confided to his favorite daughter, Meg: “Alas poor soul, her dances will knock our heads off like footballs; but ere long her head will dance the like dance.”
11 The phrase comes from the compliments of a contemporary, Robert Whittington, but may ultimately derive from Erasmus’s Latin description of More as a man omnium horarum (for all hours). Nor have such compliments been lacking down the centuries, the great Anglican satirist Jonathan Swift, for instance, bluntly naming More “the person of the greatest virtue this kingdom ever produced.”
12 In Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea (pages 201-2), I point out that this is a form of racism.
13 For a full account of the Roman attitude toward the Germanic barbarians, see How the Irish Saved Civilization, Chapter I.
14 See Mysteries of the Middle Ages, Chapter III (Paris, University of Heavenly Things).
15 One of Rabelais’s grandchildren, Jacques Rabelais, would in time become a respected literary historian, specializing in folktales.
16 The arms of the Loyolas featured a black cauldron suspended between two wolves against a silver field.
17 Ignatius did not invent this technique: evidence of it may be found in Ludolph of Saxony’s Jesus, as well as in the widely treasured Imitation of Christ (see this page and this page). In the thirteenth century, Francis of Assisi had used a similar technique in approaching the scene in the stable at Bethlehem. (See Mysteries of the Middle Ages,pages 235ff.)
18 Besides The Wedding Dance in Detroit, there are but two: the breathtakingly “simple” Harvest at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and Landscape with the Parable of the Sower at the Timken Art Gallery in San Diego. Besides these paintings, there are three Bruegel drawings in the United States, one each at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. The great treasuries of Bruegel’s art are the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, in Brussels.