The Brueghels. Victoria Charles
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the refuse of the town dump to miserably fill up hats, little sacks, pots, and other receptacles with their bare hands. To add to the desolation of this spectacle, the gallows remained erected throughout the land. Sometimes the executed hung in groups of four or five, strung together to serve as an example”. The Duke of Alba would soon add to this when he set alight the executioner’s pyres, thereby consummating the ruin of what were once the richest of provinces.
18. Pieter Aertsen, Peasants by the Hearth, 1556.
Oil on wood panel, 142.3 × 198 cm.
Museum Mayer van den Bergh, Antwerp.
This tormented period, when the violence of religious struggles degenerated into a series of vendettas, had its painter: Pieter Bruegel. Unlike the painters of the first Flemish Renaissance, he no longer felt the need to express an ideal faith. The noble compositions of Jan and Hubert Van Eyck, the pleasant figures of Memling, and the passion that pains with gentle clarity the Virgin’s face in the works of Rogier Van der Weyden conveyed powerful realism. He lived in a time when the Dukes of Burgundy finally forced the Flemish to agree willy-nilly among one another.
The Flemish were left to enjoy their wealth and spend their disorderly energy at parties and banquets. For these people, among whom later the remarkable John Ruysbroeck was born, the rapture of pure idealism and the call of abject materialism entwined to the point they became impossible to separate. This curious dual character inevitably manifested itself in the work of painters, who were also a spontaneous product of their milieu in the same way that the great Flemish Primitives had been. These painters revealed their particular genius for realism – in the precision of each detail, the striking accuracy of their portraits with all of their moral and physical flaws intact, the indefinable solidity, and the integrity of this art that draws from nature its power to please and to touch the viewer – despite their bias for subjects that portrayed the prodigious eruptions of faith typical of their time.
Following the relaxation of religious discipline, new abuses had plunged honest and timorous souls into a state of painful astonishment. Thirty years of Lutheranism had thrown their spirits into disarray and cast doubt into their hearts. In these troubled times, the preoccupation of personal and material preservation, and the vengeance of deaths left little time for meditations on serene ecstasy. The brutal explosions of joy in the form of village fairs, games and endless feasts were a necessary antidote. The people’s need to believe transformed itself into fanatical hatred. Blows from the arquebus, and the unfortunate exploits of the iconoclasts took the place of works of good faith and charity; while the violence and cunning ever present in the Flemish character, which no longer maintained any discipline, became the new rules to live by.
It has already been remarked how wealthy Flemish cities, and particularly Antwerp, became during the reign of the crude and gluttonous Charles V, a man who accurately reflected the vices as well as the patient virtues of his people. This opulence encouraged the development of the arts, and a necessity to exteriorise, particularly through painting, the confused aspirations for beauty that touch the human heart. The arrival of an original artist whose work could summarise this critical moment in his people’s history was inevitable.
19. Hieronymus Bosch, The Adoration of the Magi, triptych, ca. 1510.
Oil on panel, 138 × 72 cm (central panel); 138 × 34 cm (side panels).
Museo del Prado, Madrid.
Even in their paintings of gentle fire-lit interiors, the old masters always included a window that opened onto the landscape beyond that showed details of contemporary daily life. Pieter Bruegel brought to the foreground these tiny realist compositions designed to bring closer to the viewer’s heart the already poignant scenes of Christ’s Passion. Religious subject matter seems to have almost disappeared from Bruegel’s concerns.
At a time when Catholics and Protestants were fighting to the death over the interpretation of the scriptures, religious matters were increasingly reserved to the individual’s conscience, and thus foreign to the work of artists. Bruegel was left with the attractive material of the changing seasons and the spectacle of the common man whose vehement passions, in groups or individually, exhibited their own stigmata. This became the subject upon which Bruegel, with his jolly and satirical Flemish verve, exerted his keen sense of observation, and his marvellous gift for capturing the burlesque or tragic nature of the masses.
But what of the much-discussed humour of Bruegel? Many authors see only this aspect, citing works like The Battle between the Fat and the Thin, The Fight between Carnival and Lent, and The Stones of Folly, where the portrayal of grotesques set in fantastic and nightmarish scenes seems to betray the bitter philosophical outlook beneath the mask that is often worn by misanthropes. Yet, too much emphasis has been placed on the purely exterior qualities of these fanciful works, to the point that they are the only works retained in Bruegel’s oeuvre. His people called him, ‘Bruegel the Droll’, ‘Vieze Bruegel’, or ‘Zotte Bruegel’, as some critics continue to do, as though they believe it is possible to encapsulate the nature of his diverse productions with such a simple epithet. René Van Bastelaer has written an important work consecrated to the glory of Bruegel that justifies treating the work of one of the most original painters of the sixteenth century with such limited perspective.[6]
But Bruegel is not just amusing. Though he is frequently accomplice to unmeasured buffoonery testifying the fertility of his imagination, it is buffoonery in the style of Rabelais. In his Gargantua and Pantagruel, Rabelais captured the people and thinking of his time, and combined tragedy, drama, and the character studies of both ancient and modern comedies in one epic farce. Just as the work of Rabelais does not necessarily evoke laughter, even a hasty evaluation of the work of Bruegel must also surpass its evaluation as purely comic.
Of course, the crude verve, good humour and the satire of Bruegel make up an essential aspect of his production, but these are also qualities inherent in the work of numerous Flemish painters of the same period, and even of previous centuries. Traditional Flemish folklore contains hundreds of comical characters, and numerous cases where it was normal to mock one’s neighbours to excess: cuckolded husbands, stolen wives, young women still unmarried at twenty-five, abandoned mistresses: in sum, all those whose misery and vice gives amusement to others. Almost every Dutch village has a nickname that mocks or ridicules the inhabitants of the neighbouring town. At the time of the religious struggles, sniping insults, satirical proverbs, and crude jokes struck like clubs. This kind of humour, which never manifested itself with as much intensity as in the sixteenth century, found its place in Bruegel’s works, which were intimately tied to the popular culture of their time. But again, humour constitutes just one of the characteristics of Bruegel’s genius, one of the vastest and most profound of which the Dutch school can be proud to call its own.
When considered from another point of view, it is tempting to define Bruegel, as does Van Mander, as a painter of the peasantry, for it is true that he produced a great number of pastoral scenes. In particular, Bruegel studied the morals of rural life and seems to have been attracted to his subjects through a secret sympathy and certain affinity for their thinking and sentiments that were born out of his own common origins. This connection withstood his stays in large cities, his contact with elite circles of scholars and artists, and his encounters with Italian landscapes and masterpieces. None of this would change Bruegel’s powerful originality, which resisted influence like a diamond resists the marks of other stones.
20. Dominicus Lampsonius, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, in Portraits of Famous Netherlandish Painters, Antwerp, 1572, plate 19.
Royal Library of Albert I, Print Collection, Brussels.
Translation:
TO PIETER BRUEGEL, PAINTER
A second Hieronymus Bosch,
Who retraced the vivid images of his master,
Whose masterful brush rendered his style with fidelity,
And in doing so, perhaps surpassed