The Brueghels. Victoria Charles
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Pisa conveys the sentiment of the perishable; Bruegel’s painting throws us into death’s arms. The fresco provides a sense of regret, but a consolation as well. The smile of the young woman, in spite of the painter’s intentions, is stronger than the rictus of the rejoicing Death. Bruegel’s work is more brutal, leaving only the physical sensation of profound coldness and the sudden betrayal of our vital forces, as though on the brink of crossing the supreme divide between life and death. The painter of The Triumph of Death, who would not be rivalled by the other Bruegels that followed him, was Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
What was Bruegel’s position in relation to the other painters of his time? In 1525, a few years before his probable date of birth, Jan Gossaert, known as Mabuse or Maubeuge, returned from his stay in Italy. He was the first Flemish painter to admire the masterpieces accumulated for over two centuries in the churches and palaces of Rome and Florence. This was the era of Michaelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci, who represented the most blinding brilliance of the blazing light of the Italian Renaissance. Yet, less than fifty years before, the Italians had borrowed aspects of the Flemish method of painting from nature, and the taut and powerful technique used by Jan de Bruges (as they called the elder Van Eyck), Hugues Van der Goes and Rogier Van der Weyden. These borrowed techniques enabled the blossoming of Florentine art under Masolino da Panicale, Masaccio and Andrea del Verrocchio, who were the direct precursors of the great Italian masters of the first half of the sixteenth century.
24. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Christ Carrying the Cross, detail, 1564.
Oil on wood panel, 124 × 170 cm.
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
25. Hieronymus Bosch, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, triptych, 1505–1506.
Oil on wood, 131.5 × 119 cm (central panel); 131.5 × 53 cm (side panels).
Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon.
26. Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Christ Carrying the Cross, 1603.
Oil on wood, 116 × 162 cm.
Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp.
During this period, there were no Flemish artists who could distract from the great dawn of art in the south. Not even Quentin Metsys was able to counteract this taste for the exotic. The time had come for Flemish artists to seek their principles elsewhere, principles, which after a period of bastardisation, revived their art, with Rubens finally showing what the Flemish were capable of. The Romanist paintings of Mabuse were immensely popular, and certain of his works demonstrate the contemporary craze for powerful and fleshy nudes, heads of Madonnas whose perfection did not distract from the power of the total composition, vivid colours, golden lacquers, emerald greens, indigo blues, in sum, brilliant examples of an art previously unknown in the Netherlands. Between the original and profound Quentin Metsys, who possessed a great gift for illustrating pathos inherited from the great Rogier Van der Weyden, and the brilliant but superficial Mabuse, a constellation of painters would choose the Italian model, entering this dead end of exoticism.
The preference of the powerful and the general public lay with these Romanists, as they were called. The mediocre Bernard Van Orley, whose work seems to attest to the sense of poverty he must have felt in the presence of his teacher Raphael, was named the official court painter of Margaret of Austria, where he was overwhelmed with commissions and honours. The more nervous talent of Frank Floris, admired by Vasari, deserved his nickname, ‘The Flemish Raphael’. Worthy of this remark, Floris was equally ready to construct the victory arches of Philip II as he was to copy the work of Italians. The rich bourgeoisie and proud nobility that was connected to the Netherlands’ Spanish rulers must have preferred the flourishing of a foreign school. A gulf formed between the popular and the upper classes of the country. Although it would seem that art cannot flourish without encouragement from the powerful, the Flemish people had such an intense need to express themselves through original works that they never lacked their own painters.
27. Jan Brueghel the Elder, Christ Carrying the Cross, ca. 1606.
Oil on copper, 13 × 18 cm.
Gift of Betty and David M. Koetser, Kunsthaus, Zurich.
28. Hieronymus Bosch, Christ Carrying the Cross, 1510–1535.
Oil on wood, 76.7 × 83.5 cm.
Palacio Real, Madrid.
Firstly, there was Joachim Patinir, who Dürer praised as “a good landscape painter” when he passed through Antwerp in 1520. Patinir’s habit of decorating his paintings with the little figures of men stooped over their fields attests to his humble origins, a habit that annoyed Van den Branden. Josse de Clèves comforted himself over the lack of esteem held for him by his countrymen in answering the call of François I to paint his portrait. He was less happy in England, where the craze for Italian art drove him insane with resentment. Corneille Metsys, the son of Quentin Metsys, did not allow himself to be seduced by the foreign beauty of Italian art like his brother Jan Mandyn and Pieter Aertsen, known as ‘Lange Peer’, can also be counted among those, one of whom was Bruegel, who during this time of development in Flemish art pursued a traditional Flemish style of painting more or less happily.
Too frequently, the painters of the humorous schools are exclusively cited as Bruegel’s precursors, particularly Hieronymus Bosch, who lived less than half a century before Bruegel. Yet a rapid examination of Bruegel’s work convincingly shows that he worked through direct observation; he studied the spectacles of daily life more than the paintings of his predecessors. Regarding certain comical works, he simply employed the widespread technique of appropriating the traditional caricatured style of portraying clowns, without there being a clear connection between his paintings and drawings and those of his predecessors.
Bruegel’s art is not the result of any particular school in the strict sense of the word. The best of his students, his son Pieter, known as the ‘Hell Brueghel’, simply copied him. Pieter Bruegel the Elder occupies an exceptional place in the history of Flemish painting, as much for the creative power of his genius as for his personal technique. It would be fair to consider him an extreme, a crowning achievement of the realist tendency that characterises Netherlandish painting. He applies himself to his subjects drawn from the daily lives of the Flemish people with a primary concern for sincerity before satire. It was only after completing a scene of daily life that he would attach a proverb or a certain moral sense to it. His work is so natural that he frequently does not seem to have set out with the preconceived idea of painting a particular moral lesson or proverb.
Bruegel’s precursors include Flemish painters since Melchior Broederlam, whose Flight into Egypt, is a diminutive painting of profound and ingenious realism, with its splendid portrait of Joseph raising a cup to his lips. There is also Hugues Van der Goes with his triptych The Adoration of the Sheperds, in the Uffizi in Florence, the very image of Flemish rustics whose rude features seem to be lit with the purest flame of idealism that burned in this master’s heart.
Closer to Bruegel, again, is Quentin Metsys, who, in one of the panels of his triptych in Antwerp, shows the boozy faces of the executioners stoking the fire around the cauldron where Saint John can be seen from the waist up, imploring the heavens. In Bruegel’s preferred genres, it is necessary to seek out those artists who worked in similar veins before him, artists attached to popular subjects, particularly when taken from the lives of rural dwellers: in sum, the satirists, humorists, and moralists. The work of Hieronymus Bosch, exhibits many traits in common with that of Bruegel without it being possible to confuse these two profoundly original masters.
29. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, 1559.
Oil on oak panel, 118 × 164.5 cm.
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
30. Pieter