The Brueghels. Victoria Charles
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on the customs and life of the inhabitants of Antwerp are illustrated by the various drawings and paintings of Pieter Bruegel. This painter’s work constitutes a definitive illustration for the most scholarly of historical treatises of this period. In the same way that even the most accurate pages of official histories always reveal less than a given line of direct observation or turn of phrase by the sagacious Guichardin, the same can be said of the details depicted in a scene by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. He succeeded in capturing the soul of his people in his figure of a dancing peasant or in a delicious interior with a few figures seated around a table.
In a study of sixteenth-century Holland, one cannot disregard certain documents of the period. Nor is it possible to speak of Bruegel’s work without also addressing the era, which not only served as its setting, but also its source. An intimate relationship, even a penetration exists between the two. Never has an environment had such an important role in the creation of art, and never has an environment been evoked with such sincerity. As a peasant himself, and the son of peasants, Pieter Bruegel was the Dutch painter who best maintained his sense of the national and the traditional. He was gifted with an originality that was not only powerful enough to resist the trend of Romanism that swept his century, but that was also deaf to the call of Italian masterpieces. It is true that Bruegel travelled to Italy, but he did so more out of his taste for adventure than a wish to round out his artistic education.
The catastrophic wars undertaken by Charles I, Duke of Burgundy, and Pope Leo X’s endless thirst for money did not impede the Netherlands’ development and continuing prosperity. At the beginning of Charles V’s reign, this tiny country, situated on the coast of the North Sea, was the richest in the world and had the densest population, with its towns and villages squeezed up against one another.
5. Melchior Broederlam, The Annunciation and the Visitation, Presentation at the Temple, Flight into Egypt, 1394–1399.
Tempera on wood panel, 167 × 125 cm.
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon.
6. Jan Brueghel the Elder and Hans Rottenhammer, Rest upon the Flight into Egypt with the Temple of Tivoli, 1595.
Oil on copper, 26 × 35.5 cm.
Private collection.
“The excellent and splendid city of Antwerp” was the largest port in Europe, and every year it imported over thirty million florins’ worth of goods. The city’s stock market handled business worth forty million ducats. The town had some 100,000 inhabitants, of which between 10,000 and 15,000 were foreigners. Guichardin counted 13,500 “attractive, agreeable, and comfortable” houses, composed generally of six rooms, which could be rented for 200 crowns a year, the larger ones at 500, an enormous sum at that time.[2]
The wealth accrued in Antwerp was not due simply to the city’s cosmopolitan element, but also to its rich and hardworking bourgeoisie, who were very influential in its business. While town dwellers went about their industrious efforts, the rough labour of the peasants also continued. In no other country did the peasantry enjoy more freedom: the edicts of 1515 had abolished the last remnants of serfdom, and in consequence intensive agriculture sprang up across the Netherlands.
These are the reasons for which the inhabitants of Antwerp were “pleasingly well-dressed, their houses kept tidy, well-ordered, and stocked with all kinds of domestic objects”. “There is not a single household that does not butcher and salt a cow or two and just as many pigs every year… The air of the land is heavy and damp, but it is healthy and good for the digestion of meat, and especially for fertility and regeneration”. So much information given in a glimpse of just three lines! They reveal a region with a population that is rustic, fond of eating (and eating well), and prolific.
However, Guichardin also noted the characteristics that particularly offended his refined and civilised sensibilities. He was shocked by the natives’ excessive fondness for alcohol. They drink night and day and “do not know how to abstain or subdue this disorderly passion”. Ultimately, he excuses them this behaviour because their cloudy climate makes them melancholy. Wine brings warmth back into their veins, and beer (which Guichardin praises highly) replaces the function provided to the peoples of the south by the Mediterranean sun.
7. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Flight into Egypt, 1563.
Oil on wood, 37.2 × 55.5 cm.
Courtauld Institute of Art, Count Antoine Seilern Collection, London.
Yet the air is healthy; “Such that, if the inhabitants of the land were not so excessive in their manner of living, and if they did not neglect to care for themselves when they fell ill, they would certainly live very long lives. And though there are very few who grow old, there are also very few who die young, as we saw in the region of Brabant, where the land is naturally fertile and where the inhabitants, living stingily and working enough, live very long lives”. And indeed, nor have the Flemish people changed. They still possess a patience, a love of work and an admirable tenacity that are the results of a certain seriousness at the essence of their character, one that alternates with abrupt bursts of humour and joyful frenzies that push them to the worst excesses. In a sense, these apparently conflicting characteristics constitute the price of their gravity.
Today the soil is no longer as fertile as Guichardin tells us it once was, particularly in certain parts of Brabant, and especially in the north where Bruegel was born. If Guichardin was captivated by the abundance and beauty of the harvest, he should have paid homage to the secular efforts of the inhabitants rather than to the natural fertility of the region. Bent low over the poor soil in a constant struggle against the sand, which the sea left behind long ago, their were only provided with moments of respite when they delivered their exhausted bodies to the interminable feasts and drinking bouts whose typical pretext was a wedding or village fair. “Official events are very dear to them, […] they are a people so devoted to pleasure, to joy and to pastimes, that it does not bother them to travel 30, 35, or 40 miles to go to a feast”. These thrifty peasants had outbursts of extravagance. “They are open and generous at the births and baptisms of their children, at weddings, wakes, and funerals, or at any festival or ceremony”.
These twin, conflicting, states of festivity and desperately hard work did not leave much place for refined culture or an extremely developed sensitivity. Nor did the Flemish peasant suffer from corrupted morals, in that it seemed that a very permissive display, in regard to manners, went hand in hand with a profound honesty; for example, the spectacle of public lovemaking did not scandalise the typical Flemish person, who found it only a subject of coarse pleasantry. Guichardin also praised Flemish women as being beautiful, clean, and very pleasant.
Since it was the custom of the Flemish to speak freely with everybody from childhood, “they become bold and are always ready to speak with extreme liberty and permissiveness”. Yet Guichardin affirms that they remained honest. Another characteristic of the people was that they married easily. “A teen-age boy will marry an old grandmother, and an old man will couple himself with a young girl”. And it was not uncommon for a commoner to marry a noblewoman, a master his serving girl, or a mistress her servant, thus the intermixing of the classes was an early occurrence in the Netherlands. The nobility speculated on the stock market and worked as traders, and the rich bourgeoisie bought land. The commoner had a great deal of common sense, as well as a sense of equality. He may have lacked certain refinements, but he possessed a sense of the ridiculous.
8. Gentile da Fabriano, The Adoration of the Magi, 1423.
Tempera on wood panel, 303 × 282 cm.
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.
9. Hubert and Jan Van Eyck, Adoration of the Lamb, 1432.
Oil on wood panel, 350 × 461 cm (open); 350 × 223 cm (closed).
Saint Bavo Cathedral, Ghent.
10. Jan
Dürer, in the account of his stay in Antwerp in 1520, praises highly the luxury of the houses in which he is welcomed.