elevate yourself, Pieter, when through your fecund art,
In the style of your old master you draw pleasant things
Made to amuse; with him, you merit
The praise of the greatest artists.
Although Bruegel found lasting pleasure in the portrayal of the lives of the peasantry, this is not a sufficient reason to reduce this illustrator of life to the specialised label of genre painter. His characters, be they rustic or bourgeois, must be seen in the light of the appetites, ulterior motives, material needs, and moral aspirations that were reflections of their time. With a sudden glow, each face, by the hundreds in certain canvasses, illuminates anecdotes from Van Vaernewyck’s memoirs: blinking eyes in a face creased with malice, others with angular, hastily composed features possessing a carved marionette’s strange wooden steadiness, or a particular flat-browed profile with a lipless gash of a mouth. The group compositions reveal the depth of Bruegel’s genius even more than their individual faces.
Take for example, the famous Massacre of the Innocents that hangs in the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna. It is the snowy scene of a Flemish village, its houses huddled beneath their white hoods. To each side, a few trees slash the grey winter sky that swells with a mysterious hostility. In the centre of the background, a compact group of soldiers on horseback advances slowly. They are covered head to toe in blue armour and their spears rest on their saddles, thrusting upwards, vertical and parallel. In the foreground, horsemen wearing feather-adorned felt hats gallop with their lances at the ready. On foot, other soldiers unsheathe their cutlasses, while some of them hack into the houses’ plank doors. In the middle of it all, a group of weeping women, dismayed villagers, and perceptibly terrified children, complete the intense realism of this composition. Bruegel renders this scene with sober effects, and achieves an intense pathos without exaggerating a single bearing or gesture.
21. Hieronymus Bosch, Haywain, triptych, 1500–1502.
Oil on panel, 140 × 100 cm.
San Lorenzo Monastery, El Escorial.
22. Pieter Brueghel the Younger or Jan Brueghel the Younger, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, after 1616.
Oil on wood, 73.5 × 106.5 cm.
Copée Collection, Tenneville.
Of course, Bruegel was little concerned with the cruel Herod or the individual emotions suffered by the mothers of Bethlehem, whose children were being torn from their grasp, and disregarded the details of the historical setting. The subject matter, inspired by a fallacious legend, is here only a pretext, a simple label useful for classifying the canvas within the complete work of Bruegel or in a museum catalogue. This painting holds a deeper meaning. Bruegel had seen marauding bands of German, Walloon and Spanish soldiers that terrorised the countryside and unfortified towns, bursting into villages to pillage and sometimes kill. The Massacre of the Innocents represents all of the arrogance, insolence and the unbearable burden of foreign domination at the hands of these mercenaries, clustered together like a block of steel, contemptuous and invulnerable, pushing before the chests of their horses the hounded flock of unfortunates. These mothers, these peasants clasping their hands, these women collapsed in suffering, are those that Bruegel saw begging for their husbands, themselves, or even for their children to be spared. These are the unfortunate women he found weeping alongside the road, under the same December sky, and in the same atmosphere of inexpressible sadness that envelops The Massacre of the Innocents. A singular combination of the familiar and the tragic, this work moves us to our very core and surpasses the powerful masterpiece by Rubens by the same title that hangs in the Pinakothek in Munich, with its dishevelled mother, “Hairy, screaming, savage/A literal dog”, leaping with her nails bared, ready to bite the face of one of Herod’s soldiers. The sincere Bruegel remains superior to his great rival.
It is clear that the epithet “painter of the peasantry” does not suffice to describe such a profoundly human body of work. All the same, an analysis of the extraordinary Triumph of Death in Madrid’s Prado justifies his reputation for buffoonery, and does justice to his nickname ‘the Droll’.
It has already been mentioned that Bruegel visited Italy, but it is not clear if he saw the famous fresco on the subject of the Triumph of Death, in Pisa’s Campo Santo. This fresco, attributed to Orcagna, is a remarkable commentary on the work of Dante. In his writings, Vasari praises the mystical terror and earthly weakness for the voluptuous that infuses this painting. The horror of death resides less in the horrible figure of death himself, an old man with bat’s wings, than in the spectacles he gestures to with his scythe: a group of horsemen representing the grace and beauty of youth are stopped before three open coffins; in one, rotting flesh is still clinging to a skeleton, and in another a monstrous gut bloats beneath an ermine robe. On a hillside, pious hermit monks go about their work, and farther in the distance women smile, expressing their happiness to be alive and beautiful. They do not think to raise their eyes to the battalion of vampires and spectres that are rushing out of the distant sky.
In this manner, the artist portrays the contrast between life and death. On the one hand, he illustrates the pleasantness that exists in life, the gazing upon blue skies and experiencing the world with a voluptuous shiver of excitement, but on the other he also shows the inevitable horror and pestilence that life becomes. Beneath it all, he reveals the laughter of hideous demons, as though to express the irony of this contrast. The philosophy of death in Bruegel’s work is not thrown into such relief. Rather, death is featured without the foil of life. His conception of death seems to have been borrowed from a little panel in the Academy of Fine Arts in Siena, a simple illustration for Petrarch’s Triumph of Death. In a snowy landscape at dusk, the figure of Death recedes into the distance, with the slow pace of the oxen that pull his wagon. His wake is littered with cadavers. Yet the work of Bruegel is far more vast, boldly executed, and teeming with movement.
23. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Christ Carrying the Cross, 1564.
Oil on wood, 124 × 170 cm.
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
In the left foreground of Bruegel’s Triumph of Death a horse of the Apocalypse draws a cart heaped with skulls, with the shovel used to collected them thrown across the top. A skeleton, ringing a bell with one hand and holding an hourglass in the other is seated on the nag, which grips the waist of a horrified and wild-eyed woman in its jaws. Before them, we see a king dressed in royal purple, a miser counting his gold and a priest seized by bony arms; a woman and her baby are nibbled by a frail greyhound. The gates of Hell open at the base of a hill, and an army of skeletons armed with scythes descends on the human race. The unfortunate are driven off with blows of lances and rods in a horrific stampede, others are snatched up head-over-heels in a net. Over the top of this fantastical free-for-all rides a particularly daring skeleton, even skinnier than the others, wielding a scythe in one hand, his horse stretching its neck, vertebrae protruding. Similar scenes can be seen in the background; in a little cemetery, the dead rise up and welcome a funeral procession with fierce rejoicing. Elsewhere, bodies are hanged and decapitated, gallows and executioner’s wheels are thrown up against a sky blackened by the smoke of fires and stakes, while ships sink on the distant sea that stretches to the horizon.
This is not a nightmare, but the lucid vision of a man capable of descending into the abyss with a clear head, the literal translation of a rare philosophy that probes the depths of emptiness, the secret aspiration of a soul astonished to discover its taste for ashes. One thinks of the executioner’s stakes lit across the Netherlands by Charles V, of the atmosphere to which the lovely Flanders awoke, the occasional foetid whiff of a distant mass grave, and the great shadow which darkened the sunny countryside, the dark queen that took to the air. Bruegel was familiar with its presence and rendered it palpable in his work, nailing it up by its wings like some rural-dwellers still nail bats above the doors of their houses. Though a Trappist monk digging his own grave must sometimes have the same thoughts as a gardener spading his garden, one cannot get used to Bruegel’s canvas, which places a particular emphasis on “brother, one must die”.
Orcagna’s