PIETER BRUEGHEL (CA. I525/30-1569). HEAD OF AN OLD PEASANT WOMAN, CA. 1568.

(8 % x 7 % n)
ALTE PINAKOTHEK, MUNICH.

7
 Our knowledge of Brueghel's life is very meager. vVe know for certain neither the PIETER
date-some time between 1525 and 1530-nor the place of his birth; probably he carne BR JEGHEL
from North Brabant, which forms part of present-day Holland. The earliest mention
of him is an entry in the membership rolls of the Antwerp Painters' Guild for the
year 1551. In 1552, going by way of Lyons, he traveled to ltaly where he is known
to have resided in 1552-1553. Back in the Netherlands, he went into partnership with
Hieronymus Cock in 1555, producing landscape drawings which the latter engraved.
Brueghel's interest seems to have centered for years on engraving, the bulk of his
paintings dating from after 1562.
He made a trip to Amsterdam in 1562 and the íollowing year married the daughter
of Pieter Coeck, under whom, according to Van Mander, he had studied painting.
From now on he made his home in Brussels, where in 1565 the City Council ordered
a painting from him to commemorate the opening of the Brussels-Antwerp canal,
but he died in 1569 without having filled the commission.
Success carne quickly to Brueghel and his work was much sought after by contem-
poraries. The most infiuential Catholic dignitary in the Netherlands, Cardinal Antoine
Perrenot de Granvella, eagerly collected his pictures. Niclaes J onghelinck, a wea1thy
Antwerp burgher, bought sixteen of his canvases and in 1565 commissioned the series
of Months, one of Brueghel's finest achievements.
He had many friends in intellectual circles. One of his intimates was the famous
geographer and humanist Abraham Ortelius, and in Rome the miniature-painter
Giulio Clovio, then at the height of his fame, welcomed Brueghel's collaboration. In his
Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi written in 1567, two years before Brueghel's death,
Ludovico Guicciardini refers to him with much respect. Vasari gives a detailed account
of several prints made after Brueghel's designs and Dominicus Lampsonius (1572)
voiced his admiration of his work. His friend Ortelius, hailing him as the greatest artist
of his age, contrasted his bold originality with the stylizations of the mannerists. In
1604 Carel van Mander, in his Schilderboek, published the first biography of Brueghel.
By the r Sth century, however, his reputation was at its lowest ebb; the great French
connoisseur Pierre-Jean Mariette was alone in appreciating his genius, as was Baudelaire
in the rçth century. Brueghel began his return to favor about 1890 and today he is
one of the most popular of all Old Masters.
In the absence of fírsthand documentary material, great artists' lives become the
helpless prey of legend-mongers; Brueghel's is a typical instance. Because peasant life
and carousals were stock themes of his paintings, it was taken for granted that he too
was of peasant extraction. Then, more recent1y, when light was thrown on his familiarity
with the ltalian Renaissance, it was prompt1y assumed that Brueghel was a humanist
of the Platonic school. But what do the paintings themselves tell us about the man?
They tell us that he painted scenes of peasant life because he was an original artist of
a refined yet lusty temper, highly conscious of his powers; they tell us, too, that, for ali
his intimacy with it, he reacted against the ltalian Renaissance. Given the period and
place in which he lived, Brueghel's art necessarily owed something to mannerism (an
important point first made by Max Dvorák), but it was more in the nature of a counter-
blast to it. Even if he is not the "anthropologist and social philosopher" that Aldous
Huxley (in Along the Road) sees in him, he is certainly a poet, adept in comedy and
tragi-comedy, as well as a shrewd assessor of national character in the Netherlands
(Friedlãnder). And, as we shall see presently, there can be no question of separating
form and factual content (the "human comedy") in his work.
Brueghel's contemporaries, so Lampsonius informs us, looked on him as a kind
of improved edition of Bosch, and this view, in the main, is still current. What Bosch
had done-and he was the first artist in the Netherlands to take this step-was to paint
religious and edifying subjects without the least regard to the long-established traditions
of ecclesiastical art; he went out of the church, mingled with the people of his native
Flanders, and voiced the feelings of the common mano So far as is known, Brueghel
never painted a single picture intended to figure in a church, thus radically departing
from a tradition that went back to Van Eyck; in this he took a liberty whose only
precedent was that of Bosch. To Bosch, too, he owed his handling of color, in particular
a nicety of tonal values brought out by contrasting touches of bright, pure hues.
Unthinkable without Bosch is his way of patterning the composition with tiny figures
arranged, not in depth, but on the surface-and this despite his thorough knowledge
of perspective.
This, however, is not to say that Brueghel rnerely carried on and perfected the art
of his great predecessor. Rather, he followed his own bento Bosch had peopled the
workaday world with visions of saints and demons; Brueghelleft them out altogether,
painting nature and daily life without any celestial or diabolic interventions, yet
imparting to the passing moment an accent of eternity. Bosch, too, had treated nature
as ever-present in mari's daily life, but with an eye to stressing everywhere the conflict
between good and evil. Brueghel, on the contrary, takes a broad, synthetic point of view
of good and evil, thanks to his wider sympathy with human nature and the world
around him, even its least pleasing elements.
A picture by Brueghel-in this he follows Bosch and medieval tradition-presents
itself as a sequence in time, as against the ltalian conception of a sequence in space
rendered by perspective. But with Brueghel this chronological arrangement acquires
a new efficacy owing to his presentation of the motifs as successive acts in a comedy,
following each other like the happenings of a day. It was not from Bosch that he got
this notion of an actuality without transcendence; it was Brueghel himself who, thanks
to the climate of his time, achieved a new sense of reality, of the "mechanism of the
world," as it then was called. This new viewpoint owed much to the ltalian Renaissance,
but even more perhaps to the typically Nordic conception of what Luther called the
"servum arbitrium," i.e. the total subordination of human will to the inscrutable designs
of Divine Providence. In this respect, then, Brueghel's art may be considered as a
synthesis of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, of the Reformation and the science
of nature, of the morallife and freedom of thought. A child of the Middle Ages, Brueghel
heralded the da wn of modern times.
 PIETER BRUEGHEL (CA. I525/30-I569). THE HARVESTERS, I565. (4612 x 63 Y4 ")
BY COURTESY OF THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK.

There is another antinomy in his art. Though patronized by Cardinal Granvella

and the Emperor Rudolph lI, Brueghel again and again portrayed the sufferings of
the victims of catholic and imperial persecution in the Netherlands. Hence the stress
usually laid on his friendship with Ortelius, who sympathized with the so-called
"libertines" or Anabaptists, regarded as heretics by orthodox Catholics. At this time
patriots all over the Low Countries were rallying against the Spaniards and beginning
the fight for independence; so there is some justification for reading anti-Spanish
-in other words patriotic-intentions into his pictures. This is borne out by a passage
in Van Mander's life of the artist: "As some [of his drawings] were too biting and sharp,
he had them burnt by his wife when he lay on his death-bed." It is impossible to come
to a definite conclusion on the matter, but there is certainly no question that Brueghel's
social satire, far more pointed and more daring than that of Bosch, was hardly likely
to be appreciated by those responsible for the tragic plight of the Low Countries. Or was
it simply that they took pleasure in the spectacle of others' sufferings, like the Roman
aristocrats of the next century who so gleefully collected the low-life scenes painted
by the "Bambocciantí" ?
As suggested above, comedy is implicit in Brueghel's form no less than in his
themes. Ris is neither the polished form of the Italians nor the grotesque extravagance
of Bosch. Indeed it might be said that he lays little stress on formo Yet if we inspect
his figures closely, we find that they are carefully built up in terms of volumes and
adjusted to a geometric structure of cones, cylinders and the like. The results are,
first, that their inherent energy as constructive elements of a whole is intensified; and,
secondly, that their expressive power as individual forms is attenuated in the interest
of compositional unity.
Precisely because he passes no judgment, moral or aesthetic, on the persons he
depicts, Brueghel attains a reality beyond good and evil, beyond the beautiful and
the ugly, the noble and the base. Human life writ large obliterates the individual and
his personal aspirations; personality is submerged in anonymity, faces express neither
joy nor fear, but dwindle to moon-like masks. There is here no intimation of destiny,
for that is something operating from outside; each man bears his own fate within
himself. Brueghel's attitude is that of a disillusioned observer, perhaps embittered,
but assuredly resigned to the vagaries of the human situation. This impersonality
inevitably led up to the genre scene; indeed both the Procession to Calvary and the
Conversion of St Paul might be described as such, so completely are the figures of Christ
and Paul merged into the mass of secondary figures. The "hero,' idealized and set
on a pedestal by the Italians, was eliminated from the field of art in Brueghel's work,
and the historical picture shared his fate. Tolnay has pointed out the striking parallel
between Brueghel's hordes of undistinguished figures and a passage in the writings
of Sebastian Franck, the German freethinker, who died while Brueghel was still a boy:
"Life is one and always the same on this earth. Every man is but a mano When we see
a man as nature made him, we see all men."
As far as is known, Brueghel began his career by drawing and painting landscapes.
In his quaint but telling style Van Mander writes: "On his journeys Brueghel did so
many views from nature that it was said of him that, when he traveled through the
Alps, he had swallowed all the mountains and rocks, and spat them out again, after
his return, on to his canvases and panels." Ris pictures confirrn these words. As a
landscape painter, he aimed at an exact representation of reality, neither prettifying
nor idealizing what he saw. Thus while a drawing in Berlin (I552) shows a featureless,
quite ordinary mountain, another in the Louvre, dated I553, shows a majestic, rugged
mountain looming above a plain, with storm-clouds gathering overhead. When he was
in Italy Brueghel must have seen one of those drawings by Leonardo which seem like
pitched battles between natural elements. The earliest dated landscape painting (I553)
is Christ appearing to the Apostles at the Sea of Tiberias; here the figures are so small that
they almost pass unnoticed in the landscape, which, however, still owes much to Patinir.
Far more original is the View of Naples (Galleria Doria, Rome), in which the scene
is viewed from above and forms are so well adapted to the circular sweep of a mountain
range that the breakwater too-rectangular in reality-has become a semicircle.
The city is placed far back so as to leave ample room for a fine seascape dotted with
boats of various shapes and sizes and for a view of the crowded wharves. The presen-
tation is still topographical, embracing a vast panorama, but the handling of the scene
is painterly and strikingly effective.
In 1555 he began work on the Large Landscape Series, engraved by Hieronymus
Cock. The variety of motifs-trees, mountains, rivers-and the deep spatial recession

PIETER BRUEGHEL (CA. I525/30-I569). THE NUMBERING AT BETHLEHEM, I566. (45% x64%")
MUSÉE DES BEAUX-ARTS, BRUSSELS.
 PIETER BRUEGHEL (CA. 1525/30-1569).THE LAND OF COCKAIGNE, 1567. (20 Y2X 30% H)
ALTE PINAKOTHEK, MUNICH.

testify to the artist's desire to include as vast a prospect as possible. Then, to please
his public with a touch of "human interest," he added figures, for example soldiers
resting on the march, pilgrims on the way to Emmaus, or the Magda1en. ,
The expressive tension of the 1andscapes is stepped up by the colors. The FaU of
Icarus (Brussels) is a case in point. Far from being the tragic scene suggested by the
title, it is a 1yrical depiction of a sunlit bay and foreshore. Here a high viewpoint
helps to bring out the convexity of the sea stretching into the distance, while a subtle
play of light vivifies and individualizes each element of the picture. Quite unaffected
by the fate of the young fiyer, who is seen sinking beneath the waves in the lower
righthand comer of the picture, are the ploughman, shepherd and fisherman, but even
more striking is the vast serenity of nature shown in.all her smiling beauty. The other
side of nature, her elementa1 fury, is illustrated in the Storm ai Sea (Vienna). No human
figure is visible; driven by the gale, ships are laboring in the troughs of gigantic waves
that weave a sinuous linear arabesque across the picture surface, while gleams of livid
light slash the blue-black expanse of sea and sky. This is not so much a representation
of nature as the eye beholds her as the revelation of one of her moods.
OccasionalIy Brueghel forgoes the panoramic approach, as in a drawing at Bruns-
wick, Village Landscape (IS6z), in which the subject is treated as a mere pretext for
the rendering, in tiny lines of yelIow ink, of the vibration of the light enveloping objects.
The more he narrows down his subject-matter, the closer he gets to the life of nature.
And it is this perception of the spiritual and eternal present behind the here-and-now
that purifies and universalizes his art, and, differentiating him from Bosch and Patinir,
links him up-as Van Mander rightly observed-with Titian.
A1though the pictures he painted in the last decade of his life (ISS9-IS69) form
a group apart, we can trace in them a gradual evolution of his style-as was only natural,
considering that the artist was stilI a relatively young mano The Fight between Carnival
and Lent (Vienna) and the Netherlandish Proverbs (Berlin) date from ISS9; the Children' s
Games from IS60. AlI three have much in common: the distribution of a number of smalI
figures along an inclined plane running up to a high horizon-line, which reduces the
problems of space representation to a minimum; a simplified type of composition,

PIETER BRUEGHEL (CA. I525/30-I569). THE PARABLE OF THE BLIND, I568. (33% x 60% ")
MUSEO NAZIONALE, NAPLES.
though in the last two pictures figures are grouped diagonalIy in order to suggest
patial recession. Notable is the union of ground and figures by means of color, and the
scaling down of the latter to the aspect of automatons whose comic, apparently pointless
antics are a perpetual source of surprise. The sudden beauty of certain figures and bits
of landscape stresses the temporal values implicit in the motifs; we seem to be watching
a comedy unfolding itself scene by scene.
One of the most remarkable of Brueghel's pictures, the Triumph. of Deatb (Prado),
differs radicalIy from medieval versions of this subject in that here it is visualized
as a pitched battle between the living and the dead-the victory of the latter being
assured by sheer numbers. There are dramatic touches such as the bleak desolation
of the background and gruesome acts of violence, but these are merely incidental.
The message Brueghel sought to convey was one of forlom resignation: "Such is the
human condition, whether you like it or not."
Three major pictures date from I562. The first of these, the FaU of the Rebel Angels
(Brussels), is also a meditation on death, a theme which seems to have obsessed the
artist at the time. The falIen angels are monsters worthy of Bosch, while the celestial
angels are graceful figures carrying out their murderous task with joyous unconcem;
the tragic drama of divine reprisal is submerged in comedy. The Dulle Griet or "Mad Meg"
(Mayer van den Bergh Museum, Antwerp) represents a hag whose greed has emboldened
her to visit Hell in quest of plunder. The disproportion between her tall ungainly
figure and the Lilliputian creatures swarming around her is a throwback to medieval
tradition, but the mordant satire of the scene as a whole, especialIy the group of shrews
cudgeling a hapless pack of devils, is strangely modern in spirit. Presumably the
Two Monkeys (Berlin) has some symbolic meaning yet to be elucidated. Meanwhile
we can enjoy for its own sake this picture of two monkeys chained in a low dark archway
opening on a sunlit view of Antwerp and the Scheldt.
We have another type of picture altogether in the Suicide of Saul (I562) and
the Conversion of St Paul (I568), both in Vienna. In each a rugged Alpine landscape
lends an epic grandeur to a scene of armies locked in battle or on the marcho In a comer
of the first we see Saul running himself through with his sword, while in the middle
distance of the second Paul has just been thrown from his horse; but these incidents
almost pass unnoticed, the artist's interest manifestly lay elsewhere. The Procession
to Calvary (I564, Vienna) is a biting satire of the calIous indifference of the crowd present
at the tragic scene. In striking contrast is the delicately sensitive rendering of the little
group in the foreground surrounding the weeping Virgin.
In I565 Brueghel was commissioned to paint the series of Months, of which today
only five are extant: J anuary or Hunters in the Snow (Vienna), February or The Gloomy
Day (Vienna), July or Hay Making (Prague), August or The Harvesters (Metropolitan,
New York) and November or The Return of the Herd (Vienna). These rank among his
finest works. We have seen him as a satirist, tilting at the follies of mankind, the
futility of their griefs and joys. But he was a bom landscape painter and if there
was one thing he held sacred, one thing his satire spared, this was nature. VilIage
 PIETER BRUEGHEL (CA. 1525/30-1569). THE MAGPIE ON THE GALLOWS, 1568. (18 Ys x 20")
LANDESMUSEUM, DARMSTADT.

life in the snow and gloom of winter, the lush exuberance of summertime, the wistful
melancholy of autumn-these themes, in his hands, become so many evocations of the
very soul of nature. Most popular of these scenes is Hunters in the Snow, in which
dark silhouettes of peasants and ice-skaters, the descending line of tall bare trees
and the structural perfection of the snowbound landscape give the full measure of his
greatness. Broader and vaster is the landscape of the Gloomy Day; instead of standina
out against the snow, tonal values melt into the prevailing grey, creating a sense of
endless depth and distance. ln The Harvesters the rendering of volumes in the half-
reaped wheatfield and the sheaves is singularly "modern," while the figures of the
harvesters seem strangely small and frail beside the monumental permanence of nature.
Beyond them is a glimmering lake stretching out to the dim horizon. The poetic quality
of Brueghel's landscape backgrounds is particularly striking in some slightly later
works such as the famous Magpie on the Gallows (I568, Darmstadt), where the real
theme is the wooded hillside in the foreground, sloping away towards a spacious valley.
Though in the Numbering at Bethlehem (I566, Brussels) the subject is given promin-
ence, the landscape is no less fine than in the Months. Here there is more, far more,
than satire, thanks to the moral and poetic elevation of the scene and the sensitive
treatment of the poor folk flocking around the census-taker's table, amongst whom,
unnoticed by anyone, is the Virgin.
ln Brueghel's final phase we find a shift of emphasis from landscape to figures
and individual expression. A new earnestness appears, though he still cannot refrain
from an occasional fling at comical humanity, as in the Wedding Banquet (Vienna),
the Peasant Dance (Vienna) and the Land of Cockaigne (Munich, I567). The grotesqueness
of the last-named is ingeniously heightened by the bird's-eye perspective and the quaint
arrangement of the figures, disposed around the central tree like spokes of a wheel.
Dated to I568, the year before his death, are The Crip ples (Louvre), The Misanthrope
(Naples) and the Parable of the Blind (Naples). ln the first, the plight of the poor wretches
is so poignantly conveyed that the grotesque merges into the tragic. The composition
of the second is a masterpiece of simplicity. The picture is a tondo, in which the
misanthrope, a somber figure slowly moving across a pale-hued landscape, is painted
with illusionist realismo Beneath him the following explanation is inscribed in Flemish:
"Because the world is so faithless I am going into mourning." But the world is already
taking its revenge: a figure in a glass globe (symbol of vanity) is stealing the purse
(symbol of earthly riches) which the misanthrope has been concealing under his volu-
minous cloak. The last, unquestionably Brueghel's most tragic and pessimistic work,
illustrates the Gospel parable of the blind leading the blind. By increasing the number
of blind men to six (there are only two in the parable) Brueghel "protracts our tension
and fearful expectation of the fall we know to be inevitable for all" (F. Grossmann).
And he points the moral of the parable by the contrast between the stumbling progress
of the blind and the rock-like stability of the church in the offing.
Thus Brueghel's artistic evolution falls into three phases. After interpreting his
responses to scenes of nature, he moves on to satirical depictions of the human comedy,
the absurdities of men's private and public lives. And the satire is all the more
convincing because he makes us feel behind these the iron hand of destiny. Then in
the last phase he reveals the pathos of the human predicament with a poignancy rarely
equaled and never surpassed by any other artist.
 RENAISSANCE PAINTING
FROM BRUEGHEL TO EL GRECO

TEXT BY LIONELLO VENTURI

 Originally published in the
GREAT CENTURIES OF PAINTING
series created by Albert Skira

*
Colour pkue on lhe cover:
El Greco (1541-1614). St Maurice, detail from The Martyrdom
of St Maurice, ca. 1580-1582. Monastery of the
Escorial, near Madrid.

*
Colour plate on the title page :
Pieter Brueghel (ca. 1525/30-1569). Hunters in the Snow, 1565
(46x 63%") Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

© 1979 by Editions d'Art Albert Skira S.A., Geneva

First edition © 1956 by Editions d'Art Albert Skira, Geneva

Translated by Stuart Gilbert

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