Two Currents in Low Countries Art
Apart from Pieter Bruegel and tapestry, the art of the Low Countries in this period was barren. Painting swung between two fronts: on one, rivalry with the Italians in refined technique, rich coloring, classical mythological subjects, nude women's bodies and backgrounds of Roman architecture; on the other, the national taste for drawing the real character of notable persons through portraiture and for showing everyday life. Patronage came not only from the court, the Church and the nobility but increasingly from the purses of wealthy merchants who wished to pass their stout bodies and hanging double chins before the admiring eyes of posterity, or to have domestic scenes and country views reflected on canvas just as they were in real life. In the works of Flemish painters a kind of humor, and sometimes a taste for the odd, replaced the dignity and grandeur of the Italian masters.
Michelangelo criticized Flemish art, which seemed to him to lack gravity and grandeur, in these terms, in outline: in Flanders they paint only to occupy the outward eye with things that please, the grass of the fields, the shade of trees, bridges and rivers, and small things found anywhere else, without regard to selection and omission. In Michelangelo's view art meant choosing the important and meaningful elements to show greatness, not presenting existing facts without discrimination. His stately nature, lodged inside indestructible boots and in the isolation born of his disgust with human society, stood aloof from the temptations of green meadows and the attachments of the family hearth.
A Debt of Gratitude
For our part we bow in gratitude to the Flemish painters: to Joachim Patinir, if only for the landscape he made in the manner of Leonardo in his St. Jerome; to Joos van Cleve for the skill he showed in painting the beautiful face of Eleanor, former queen of Portugal; to Bernard van Orley for the Holy Family in the Prado and for his designs for tapestries and the stained glass of St. Gudule in Brussels; to Lucas van Leyden, who in a short life of thirty-nine years left so many masterly engravings on copper and woodcuts; to Jan van Scorel for the Magdalene showing the saint caressing the jar of ointment with which she washed the feet of Christ; and finally to Antonis Mor for the firm, penetrating portraits of the Duke of Alba, Cardinal Granvelle, Philip II, Mary Tudor, and of himself, which is no less than the others.
Notice how the profession of painting passed from hand to hand in families. Joos van Cleve left some of his skill to his son Cornelis, who, before he went mad, painted several very good portraits. Jan Massys, who inherited the workshop of his father Quentin Massys, made nude figures his specialty, as in the paintings of Judith and Susanna and the Elders; his son Quentin Massys II continued the same kind of painting, while the brother, Cornelis Massys, took his art to England and painted Henry VIII in old age, with his wrinkled and unpleasant face (as the book relates). Pieter Pourbus and his son Frans made portraits and religious pictures at Bruges; and Frans's son, Frans Pourbus II, painted portraits at Paris and Mantua. There was also the family of the Bruegels, all of whom took up painting: Pieter Bruegel, his painter wife, his painter mother-in-law, his sons Pieter "of Hell" and Jan "Velvet," and the painter grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Bruegel's Life
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, whose fame has become an inevitable ritual of today's intellectual class, probably took his name from one of two villages called Brogel in Brabant. One of those villages lay near 's-Hertogenbosch, the birthplace of Hieronymus Bosch, and Bruegel surely saw in that city's churches a number of Bosch's pictures, which after nature left the greatest mark on his paintings. At twenty-five (about 1545) Bruegel left his native land and at Antwerp became a pupil of Pieter Coecke; Coecke's woodcut landscapes roused in the young painter a love of fields, forests, water and sky. This Pieter had a daughter, Mayken (the book calls her Maria), who as a child learned to walk in Bruegel's arms and when grown was chosen as his wife. In 1552, following the custom of artists of the time, Bruegel went to Italy to study painting and returned to Antwerp with a thick sketchbook full of drawings of Italian landscapes, but without having accepted any influence from the Italian masters, and for the rest of his life ignored the southern masters' technique of relief, chiaroscuro and coloring. At Antwerp he had a relationship for a time with his landlady, and promised to marry her if she gave up lying; to keep count of her lies he cut a notch in a long stick each time she told one; and when the notches reached the end of the stick, since he had no stick left to measure his own sins, he left her and went his way (as Mander tells it). In his middle years (1563) he married Mayken Coecke, now seventeen (the book's figure), at her request, and moved to Brussels. Only six years of life remained to him.
Although Bruegel's works were of a style that earned him the nickname "Peasant Bruegel," in fact he was a man of learning and culture who read Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Rabelais, and perhaps Erasmus. Karel van Mander, called the "Vasari of Holland," describes him as "quiet, orderly, of few words, and yet good company, who took great pleasure in frightening people with tales of ghosts and spirits"; and perhaps for this reason a friendly nickname (the book writes "Jenny") was added to his name. His humor ran to satire, but an innate sympathy tempered the sharpness of his jibes. A lead engraving of the time shows him with a thick beard and a face marked with lines of deep thought. Sometimes, following Bosch, he too saw life as the hurried scramble of the majority of souls to reach hell. In Dulle Griet (Mad Meg) he painted hell as ugly and chaotic as Bosch's visions; in The Triumph of Death he pictured death not as the natural sleep of worn-out frames but as a dreadful severing of limbs and cutting off of life: skeletons assaulting kings, cardinals, generals and peasants with arrows, axes, stones and scythes, with condemned figures at the gallows and the wheel, and wagons loaded with remains. This is another example of that "dance of death" that spread its ominous wings over the whole art of that unlucky time.
Religious Pictures and Proverbs
Bruegel's religious pictures are all serious in mood. They lack the grandeur and heavenly grace of Italian pictures; they merely retell the stories of the Bible with a fresh Flemish interpretation and with the faces and dress of the people of that land. They seldom show religious feeling, and most are only pretexts for showing and composing crowds of people. Even the faces of these people contain no feeling: they jostle one another to see Christ carrying his cross; apparently no one pays attention to the severity of his suffering, and everyone is only trying to see the scene better. Some of his pictures use Biblical parables, such as the famous The Sower; others, in imitation of Bosch, take proverbs as their main subject. The picture The Blind Leading the Blind shows a line of peasants with dull eyes and strongly ugly faces following one another into a ditch; and Netherlandish Proverbs gathers into one scene nearly a hundred current sayings and maxims, while giving off an air of the garden of Rabelais's ideas.
Peasants and Landscape
Bruegel's chief attachment was to the swarming groups of peasants and to scenes of nature, a nature that with its blind kindness or harm furnished the ground for human efforts, futile but forgivable. Perhaps in his view safety lay in the crowd, and then he had no need to distinguish the faces of individuals or show their bodies fully and in relief. He would never sit someone in front of him to paint the face for art or for history; he preferred to show men, women and children walking, jumping, dancing and playing, that is, in all states of movement and natural life. He returned to scenes of his childhood and took great pleasure in watching, or joining, peasant festivals, merriment, music and weddings. Bruegel and one of his friends often dressed as peasants, took part in fairs and wedding feasts, and, introducing themselves as relatives, brought gifts for the bride and groom.
No doubt on these outings Pieter carried his sketchbook, for among his works there are many drawings of faces and scenes of rural life. He showed no taste for painting the faces of the aristocracy and received no commissions from them, though such commissions were so profitable to painters like Mor and Titian; he put only simple people on his canvases, and even the dogs he painted were the unbred dogs of the market found in every lane and beside every country hut. He knew the bitter and dark side of peasant life and sometimes pictured it as a confused heap of madmen. But above all he loved to portray the games of village children, the dancing of their elders, and the uproar and tipsy mirth of their wedding feasts. In The Land of Cockaigne peasants worn out by work, or love, or wine, lie sprawled on the green meadow and think of "Utopia." As if Bruegel meant to say that only the peasant knows how to play and sleep, just as he knows how to work, take a mate and die.
Against death he shows only one comfort: that death is an inseparable part of that same nature which he accepted and liked with all its manifestations of beauty and terror, growth and decay, renewal and change. The sweep of nature makes up for the insignificance of man; futility is forgiven only in the glory of the whole. Until then landscape had served as an appendix and background for human figures and historic events; Bruegel made landscape the principle of his painting and added man as a small accident upon it. In The Fall of Icarus, sky, sea, mountain and sun claim all the attention of the painter, and also of the persons in the picture, and Icarus himself is only two small legs absurdly sinking into the sea. In the same way in The Storm the human figure is barely visible, for its weak being is dissolved in the struggle with nature and in the power of the elements.
The Seasons
Bruegel's art and philosophical view reach their height in five works, the remains of a series of paintings he meant to make to show the different moods of the year. The Corn Harvest shows in brief the reaping and gathering of sheaves, workers eating lunch or dozing in the heat, and the visible stillness of summer air. In The Hay Harvest, girls and boys carry baskets of autumn fruit on their heads, a peasant sharpens his scythe, strong women mow the hay, and men load it onto the huge heap on the wagons; the horses eat fodder in their short rest. The Return of the Herd announces the coming of winter; the sky has grown dark and the cattle return to their barns. Finest of all is The Hunters in the Snow: roofs and earth are white; the village houses lie in an astonishing perspective along ridges and flats; men slide on the ice, play a game like hockey, and fall; hunters and their dogs head out of the village to find game; the trees are dry and bare, but birds on their branches promise spring. The Gloomy Day shows a winter that takes its leave in a dull mood. In these pictures Bruegel reached the peak of his mastery and created a standard for later Dutch snow scenes.
What Did He Mean?
Only a painter or art critic can judge the technique and artistic nature of these pictures. It seems that Bruegel is entirely content to show human figures in two dimensions, and unwilling to trouble himself with shading their bodies; instead he leaves the spectator's imagination free to add a third dimension if it sees fit. He is too attached to crowds to give special attention to each individual, and he draws nearly all his peasants in one form, like shapeless masses of human flesh. He claims no realism except in a general way. He usually put so many persons and incidents into each picture that artistic unity seems sacrificed; but in return he records on canvas the inner unity of a village, a group of people, a wave of life.
What did the man mean to say? Did he only mean to mock mankind as a strange "sliced radish," or to ridicule life as a foolish scratch on the way to decay? He took delight in the merry whirl of the peasants' dance, sympathized with their hard toil, and with indulgent humor looked on their drunken sleep. But Bruegel never freed himself from the unhealthy influence of Bosch. Like that saint Jerome, he felt a pleasure mixed with a sting of mockery in describing the bitter sides of the human comedy, the lame and the idle, exhaustion and impudence, and the unyielding rule of death. As if on purpose he picked ugly-looking peasants to caricature them, but never let them smile or laugh; and if he meant to give their rough faces an expression, it was surely one of foolish indifference, or of a sensitivity driven out of their frames by the lashes of life. He was astonished and disgusted to see the indifference of the fortunate to the misery of the unfortunate, and how gladly and quickly the living hand their dead over to oblivion. Bruegel was stifled by the depth and breadth of nature: the infinite expanse of sky beneath which all human events seem small, and virtue and vice, growth and decay, greatness and infamy lose their value and meaning before it; the view of a world that swallows individuals in its grandeur.
We do not know whether the foregoing was Bruegel's real philosophy or merely the result of his artist's pen at play. Nor do we know why he gave up his struggle so soon, for he died at forty-nine (1569); perhaps more years would have softened his anger a little. He gave one of his paintings, The Merry Way to the Gallows, whose subject is enigmatic, to his wife. In this picture, in which brilliant greens are masterfully combined with distant blues, we see a group of peasants dancing near the village gallows while a black magpie, a sign of idle chatter, sits atop it.