The picture

Tempera on canvas, 124 × 169 cm — Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels. A large, damaged Tüchlein of the Adoration in a ruined building with a crowd, of much-disputed status: accepted by Tolnay and Glück as an early Bruegel of c. 1556, doubted by Grossmann, given by Sellink and the Brussels museum's recent studies to the workshop or to a follower, with the possibility that it reflects a lost original. Wikidata lists it as Bruegel's; it is kept in the main sequence here with the caveat stated.

The scene

The Virgin and Child at the centre in a ruined stable under an arch; the three kings with their retinue approaching from the left with gifts; a crowd of soldiers, onlookers and horsemen filling the space; a landscape at the back. The composition is the traditional Netherlandish Adoration of the Bosch and Aertsen type, with a crowd where the panoramas would have a landscape.

The condition

The cloth is in poor state: the size-paint has faded and abraded, the colours are dulled to greys and browns, and much of the detail is lost; this condition has made the attribution harder to judge, and the picture's relation to the London Adoration of 1564 — which it resembles only in subject — has been used both for and against it.

The place in the early work

If it is Bruegel's, it is the earliest large figure composition and the first evidence of his use of the Tüchlein medium, twelve years before the Naples pictures; if it is not, it is the work of someone close to him in the Antwerp of the 1550s, when the Adoration-with-crowd was a staple of the Aertsen circle. Either way it documents the world in which the London Adoration was conceived.

Readings of the crowd

What is visible through the damage is a crowd in the Bruegel manner: soldiers with halberds, a man with a dog, onlookers at a wall, horses — the population of the Calvary, gathered round a manger. If the picture is early and autograph, it shows that the crowded sacred scene was in Bruegel's repertory before the prints made his name; if it is a follower's, it shows how quickly the manner was imitated. The Brussels museum, which has studied the cloth closely, now labels it as 'attributed to' and hangs it apart from the Census and the Rebel Angels; the visitor can judge.

Seeing it

The cloth is large — the size of the Calvary — and faded to the tone of an old tapestry; the viewer who gives it time sees the composition's bones: the arch, the Virgin at the centre, the diagonal of the kings, the crowd's ring. It is a picture for the patient, and a reminder that the Tüchlein technique, which Bruegel used for his last works, was a medium that could lose most of what it held.

What to look at

The Virgin's calm at the centre; the kings' retinue; the ruined arch; the soldiers; the faded surface, which is the picture's history.

The picture

Oil on oak panel, 73.7 × 102 cm, signed and dated BRVEGHEL 1557 — Timken Museum of Art, San Diego. The earliest dated painting by Bruegel that survives, and a rarity in America; with the Brussels Adoration and the Doria Naval Battle it belongs to the handful of works that precede the great panels of 1559. The spelling of the signature, with the h, places it before the change of 1559.

The scene

A vast river valley opens from a high foreground at the left — a rocky bank with trees — toward a distant estuary and a range of blue mountains, under a sky of cloud and sun. On the near bank, among ploughed furrows, a peasant in a white shirt broadcasts seed from a bag at his hip; a sower in the act, bent and striding. Birds wheel above the furrows. Below, a road with a cart, a farmhouse, a village with a church on the far bank, a boat on the river; and in the middle distance, almost too small to find, a crowd on the shore listening to a figure in a boat — Christ preaching the parable of the sower from the ship, as in Matthew 13.

The structure of a Bruegel landscape

The picture is the template for the Months eight years early: the high near ground at the left, the plunge to the valley, the river winding to the horizon, the mountains as the far wall — the structure of the Alpine drawings of 1552–54 and of Cock's Large Landscapes translated into paint. Tolnay called it the first of the 'world landscapes' in Bruegel's own hand; the genre, descended from Patinir and Herri met de Bles, put a small sacred subject in an enormous panorama, and Bruegel kept the formula while changing its weight. The sower is large and the Christ is tiny; the labour, not the sermon, is in the foreground. This inversion — the biblical event reduced to a detail in the world's business — is the method of the Calvary and the Census, and this is its first statement.

The parable

The sower's seed falls on the path, the rock, the thorns and the good ground, and the birds eat what falls on the path: Bruegel's birds are doing exactly that. The parable's interpretation — the Word received variously by various hearers — was a Reformation favourite, preached from both sides, and the picture's placement of Christ in a boat preaching to a shore-crowd is the Gospel's own staging. Whether the painting's first owner read it as a Catholic or a Protestant picture cannot be known; it was a picture about hearing, and in 1557 everyone was listening.

Technique

The panel is thinly painted over a light ground, with the sky's blue and the river's silver laid in broad strokes and the village and the crowd added with a fine brush; the handling of the distant mountains, in blues that fade toward the horizon, is already the aerial perspective of the Months. The figure of the sower is drawn in dark contour with a few strokes of white — the print designer's economy. Infrared examination has shown the composition drawn directly with few changes. The painting has been cleaned and is in good state; some of the greens have browned.

History

Unknown until the twentieth century; in a private collection in the 1920s, when it was published; acquired by the Putnam sisters for the Timken in the 1950s and in San Diego since. It is one of four Bruegel paintings in the United States (with the Met's Harvesters, Detroit's Wedding Dance and the Frick's Three Soldiers) and the earliest of them.

What to look at

The sower; the birds on the furrows; the boat on the far shore with the crowd — bring a glass; the mountains; the road with the cart; the signature's spelling. Then the structure: left high, right low, the valley falling between, as in every landscape he would paint afterwards.

Coda

The Sower is a young man's picture and a complete one: the world landscape of the Antwerp tradition made new by the Alps and by a decision about scale — the labour large, the miracle small — that would organise the rest of the career.

The landscape tradition behind it

To see what the Sower changed, put it beside its ancestors. Joachim Patinir (d. 1524) invented the 'world landscape' in Antwerp: a panorama seen from a height, with a blue distance, a winding river and a small religious subject — a Flight into Egypt, a St Jerome — placed in it. Herri met de Bles and the Antwerp painters of the 1540s repeated the formula with ever more fantastic rock formations. Bruegel kept the height and the river and the blue, and replaced the fantasy with the Alps — mountains that have weight and geology, seen by a man who had crossed them — and the saint with a peasant. The shift is the one that would make the Months: the world landscape becomes a picture of a place and a labour, with the sacred story present but subordinated. The San Diego panel is where the shift is first visible in oil.

Dating and the early paintings

The Sower is one of three or four paintings from before 1559 that scholarship accepts without serious reservation — the Brussels Adoration (c. 1556), the Doria Naval Battle and a few small landscapes being the others — and its firm date makes it the anchor for the early chronology. It shows that by 1557, while still working chiefly for Cock, Bruegel could paint a landscape of this ambition; the implication, which the lost works recorded in inventories support, is that the painting career did not begin in 1559 but was running alongside the prints from the mid-1550s, in pictures that have mostly been lost. The Timken's panel is thus not only the first dated Bruegel painting but the witness to a painting practice older than the record, and its assurance is the best evidence of how much has gone. The Timken, a small museum in Balboa Park built around the Putnam collection, shows it among its Old Masters as the earliest picture in the room, which it is in more than one sense.

The picture

Oil on oak, roundel, 18 cm in diameter — private collection (on loan in the Netherlands). A single proverb on a round panel: a drunkard, held by two figures, is being shoved into a pigsty with the pigs, as the Flemish saying has it — 'to be pushed into the pigsty', to be treated as a pig for one's drunkenness. The roundel came to public attention in the 2000s, when it was sold at auction and recognised, after technical examination, as an autograph early Bruegel of around 1557 — one of the very few additions to the painted œuvre in the last century, with the Wine of Saint Martin's Day.

Attribution

The roundel's acceptance rests on its quality, on the dendrochronology of its oak, and on its relation to the proverb-roundels tradition that the Twelve Proverbs represent; the Mayer van den Bergh roundels are now generally given to the workshop, but this one's handling — the quick contours, the fluent modelling of the drunkard's limp body — is considered the master's. A minority reserves judgement.

The form

The proverb roundel, discussed under the Twelve Proverbs, was a domestic and tavern decoration; this one is of the same size and type, and shows what the Proverbs panel of 1559 grew from: a single saying, a single act, a comic figure, in a circle.

Proverbs on plates

The roundel's size and type correspond to the wooden plates — tellers or houten borden — on which Antwerp painters made single proverbs for sale at the fairs; a set of such plates would have decorated a room or a tavern, and several series survive by other hands. Bruegel's contribution to the genre, if the roundel is his, was a figure drawing of a fluency that the plates by other hands lack: the drunkard's limp weight, the pushers' strain, are a painter's observation of a body, not a sign-painter's. The panel's emergence was reported in the Dutch press as the finding of a 'new Bruegel'; it is a small one, and a convincing one.

The date and the place in the early work

A date around 1557 places the roundel with the Sower and the Sins drawings — the years in which Bruegel was establishing himself in Antwerp as a designer of comic and moral subjects — and it would make the roundel the earliest surviving proverb-painting from his hand, two years before the Berlin panel. The Twelve Proverbs roundels in Antwerp are its nearest relatives and, on the current view, its workshop descendants; the comparison between the Mayer van den Bergh set and this single roundel is the best available test of what Bruegel's own hand looks like at this scale and in this format.

What it adds

Beyond its own small comedy, the roundel tells us that Bruegel's proverb-pictures began as a popular, domestic form — the plate on the wall — and that the 1559 panel, which made the form into a world, was a transformation of something ordinary. The drunkard in the sty is the Proverbs' hundred figures at the beginning, one at a time.

What to look at

The drunkard's slumped body; the pushers' effort; the pigs; the circle's framing of the group.

The picture

Oil on oak panel, 42.2 × 71.2 cm, unsigned and undated — Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome. A small seascape that is, by general agreement, the only painting by Bruegel to record directly a place he saw in Italy, and one of only a few early pictures accepted as his; its date is disputed between about 1558 and 1562, and a few scholars have doubted it altogether. It has been in the Doria Pamphilj collection in Rome since the seventeenth century.

The scene

The Bay of Naples from above and from the sea, with the city's waterfront along the left — the Castel Nuovo, the mole with its lighthouse, the round harbour — and the coast curving away toward Vesuvius and the Sorrento peninsula; a fleet of galleys and sailing ships in the bay, some engaged, with smoke from their guns; the harbour's circular mole, which Bruegel made rounder than it is, so that it reads as a perfect ring with a gap. The sky is a pale blue with cloud; the sea is silver-green. The viewpoint is very high, as if from a bird or a map.

Naples and the map

Bruegel was in Naples in 1552 or 1553, on his way to Sicily — the View of Reggio drawing and the Doria panel are the evidence — and the picture is partly a memory and partly a construction from maps and views: the round harbour is a deliberate geometry, the coastline is compressed, and the ships are a fleet rather than a record of any engagement. Whether a battle is in fact shown has been questioned; the 'battle' may be a naval exercise, a salute, or simply the ordinary traffic of a war-port with its guns going. The picture's real subject is the shape of the bay — the same cartographic instinct that made Bruegel a friend of Ortelius.

The round harbour

The mole's circle is the picture's idea. Naples' Molo Grande was not round; Bruegel curved it into a near-complete ring, with the lighthouse at its end and the ships passing through the gap, so that the harbour becomes a geometric figure set in the irregular coast — the built against the natural, as in the Tower. Scholars have connected the form to the ideal-harbour designs of Renaissance treatises and to the round harbour of Carthage in the maps of the time; it may also be a memory of Messina's sickle-shaped harbour, which Bruegel had drawn and which Cock engraved. The round port appears again in the Vienna Tower of Babel, which confirms that it was a form he liked.

The ships

The ships are painted with the exactness of the Sailing Vessels prints that Cock published after Bruegel's designs around 1561–65: galleys with their banks of oars, carracks with high castles, galleons, boats under sail and under tow. Bruegel's knowledge of ships was Antwerp's — the busiest port in the world taught its painters rigging — and the Doria picture's fleet is the port's learning applied to the Mediterranean. The smoke of the guns, rendered in soft grey puffs, is the picture's only action.

Attribution and date

Tolnay accepted the panel as Bruegel's and dated it around 1558; Grossmann and later writers moved it to the early 1560s on the basis of the handling; Sellink's catalogue (2007) keeps it as autograph with a query; a minority — on the grounds of its unusual subject and somewhat loose execution — give it to a follower. The 2018 Vienna exhibition included it as Bruegel's. Its early arrival in a Roman collection, where Bruegel's Roman connections through Clovio may be relevant, supports an origin in his own hand.

History

In the Doria Pamphilj collection, recorded in the seventeenth-century inventories of the family's palace on the Corso, and still there — one of the few Bruegels never to have changed hands since the 1600s, and one of only three in Italy (with the two at Capodimonte).

What to look at

The round mole and the ships passing through its gap; the Castel Nuovo; Vesuvius; the galleys' oars; the smoke; the height of the viewpoint. Compare the Tower of Babel's port.

Coda

The Naval Battle is the one picture in which the Italian journey is a place rather than a mountain: Naples seen from the air, its harbour made into a figure, its fleet at exercise. It is a small picture about the shape of the world, painted by a man who would become famous for putting the world on a panel.

The Sicilian journey

The Doria panel belongs with a small group of works that document the furthest reach of Bruegel's travels: the drawing of the Strait of Messina, engraved by Cock in 1561 as the Naval Battle in the Straits of Messina (a large print with a fleet in the strait and Reggio burning); the Rotterdam View of Reggio Calabria, where the town is shown in flames after the Turkish raid of 1552 — a dated event that places the painter there that year or soon after; and this painting of Naples. No other Netherlandish artist of the century is known to have gone so far south, and the reason is unknown; a commission, a pilgrimage, simple curiosity, or the company of a patron have all been suggested. What is clear is that Bruegel's Italy was not Rome's statues but the Mediterranean's coasts and the Alps' passes — the geography, not the antiquity.

The cartographic eye

The picture's closest relatives are not paintings but maps: the bird's-eye city views that Antwerp's presses produced — the Civitates Orbis Terrarum of Braun and Hogenberg began in 1572, but its manner was already established — and the harbour plans of the military engineers. Bruegel's Naples is a view of this kind, raised to the point where the coast becomes a diagram, and it is worth remembering that Ortelius was a friend: the painter who could turn a bay into a figure was of the same world as the man who turned the earth into a book. The round harbour, in this light, is not an error of memory but a cartographer's idealisation — the port as the form it ought to have.

The picture

Oil on twelve oak roundels, each about 21 cm in diameter, set in a single panel 75 × 98 cm with inscriptions beneath — Museum Mayer van den Bergh, Antwerp. A set of proverb-roundels, each a single saying illustrated by a single figure, with a Flemish caption: 'to hang the cloak according to the wind', 'to fill the well after the calf has drowned', 'to sit between two stools in the ashes', 'the pillar-biter', 'to piss at the moon', 'to throw roses before swine' and six more — the repertory of the Berlin Proverbs broken into its parts.

Attribution

The roundels were long given to Bruegel as early works of c. 1558, on the strength of their subjects and the Mayer van den Bergh provenance; most recent scholarship (Sellink, and the 2019 Antwerp museum's own study) regards them as the work of the workshop or of a close follower, perhaps after lost designs by Bruegel, with the frame and inscriptions added later. Wikidata records them as Bruegel's; this catalogue keeps the entry in the main sequence with that caveat, because the roundels are the best evidence we have of the proverb-picture's popular form in Antwerp around 1560.

The form

The single-proverb roundel — a figure, a saying, a circle — was a tavern and domestic decoration; roundels of this kind were painted on wooden plates (tellers) for the wall. The format gives each saying the concentration the Berlin panel's crowd denies it: the pillar-biter alone, the man with the two stools alone, the moon-pisser alone, each a small comic portrait. Several of the roundels reproduce figures from the Proverbs almost exactly, which suggests either a common model or direct derivation from the 1559 panel.

History

Mayer van den Bergh's purchase in the 1890s; the museum since, where the panel hangs near the Dulle Griet.

What to look at

The pillar-biter; the man pissing at the moon; the roses before swine; the captions, which are the proverbs in their sixteenth-century spelling. Then compare each with its counterpart in the Berlin picture.

The twelve sayings

For the record, the twelve: to hang the cloak according to the wind (the opportunist); to carry daylight out in a basket (wasted effort); to fill the well after the calf has drowned; to sit between two stools in the ashes; the pillar-biter (the hypocrite); to cast roses before swine; to piss at the moon (to attempt the impossible); to fall through the basket (to be exposed); to be armed to the teeth and bell the cat; to be a gambler and a drunkard; to hide behind one's fingers (to pretend not to see); to shear the pig. Each is illustrated by a half-length or full-length figure in a landscape or an interior, and each caption beneath is in rhymed Flemish. The man pissing at the moon became the most famous: his figure was repeated on tavern plates for a century. The panel's frame, with its painted inscriptions, was probably assembled in the seventeenth century from roundels that had been separate; the set's unity is thus partly a later construction, which is another reason for caution about the attribution.

The picture

Oil on oak panel, 117 × 163 cm, signed and dated BRVEGEL 1559 at the lower right — Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. The earliest surviving large painting that is beyond doubt by Bruegel's hand, and the first of the three great 'encyclopaedic' panels of 1559–60 in the standard Antwerp format. Its seventeenth-century name was De Blauwe Huyck, 'The Blue Cloak', after the adultery at its centre; the modern title is a museum convention and a slight misnomer, since the proverbs are not specifically Netherlandish but the common stock of sixteenth-century Europe.

What is in it

A village of brick and timber, with a castle tower, a farmyard, a river and a sea beyond, seen from a point slightly above the rooftops, filled with something over a hundred people, each of whom is enacting a saying. The count depends on who is counting and what is accepted as an idiom rather than a proverb; the Berlin museum's own tally gives 126, Jan Grauls's classic study of 1957 found 118, and several are disputed. The essentials, moving from lower left: a man bites a pillar (the hypocrite, the pilaarbijter); a woman carries fire in one hand and water in the other (two-faced); a man bangs his head against a brick wall; one shears a sheep while his neighbour shears a pig (one has the advantage); a man fills in the well after the calf has drowned; another throws roses — the Flemish version of pearls — before swine; a woman puts a blue cloak on her husband (she deceives him); a man 'lets the world spin on his thumb'; two women spin gossip, one winding what the other spins; a man confesses to the devil; a fool gets the best cards; a roof is tiled with tarts (a land of plenty); an arrow is shot after another, lost; a man 'pisses at the moon'; a man plays the jawbone; a ship sails before the wind while the world — the globe with a cross, upside down — hangs on the inn wall. In the distance, the blind lead the blind into a ditch — a first appearance of the subject of the last painting.

The genre

The proverb-picture had a history. Frans Hogenberg's engraving of The Blue Cloak of about 1558 — a year before the panel — shows forty-three proverbs in a similar village setting, and Bruegel almost certainly knew it; the Rotterdam Twelve Proverbs roundels and the Antwerp Twelve Flemish Proverbs panel in the Mayer van den Bergh show the format's popularity. Behind the pictures lies the literary fashion: Erasmus's Adagia, first printed in 1500 and swelling through edition after edition to over four thousand entries, had made the collection of sayings a humanist industry; Flemish collections followed, and the Rederijker theatre turned proverbs into plays. The 'world upside down' — the verkeerde wereld — was a stock theme in print, and Bruegel's picture is a representation of it: not a village where proverbs happen to occur but a world whose every inhabitant is in the grip of a folly.

The construction

What Bruegel added to the genre was space. Hogenberg's print is a row; Bruegel's panel is a place, with a coherent ground plan, a perspective (slightly raised, so that actions at the back do not hide those in front), weather, and a horizon. He distributed the sayings across this place in groups — the farmyard, the inn, the river bank, the shore — and bound them with colour. The reds (a dozen or so garments) are placed at intervals that carry the eye in a loose anticlockwise spiral from the pillar-biter up to the inn and round to the sea; the blues are fewer and mark the pivots — the cloak, the devil's cushion, the river. The picture has no centre: the blue cloak is at the geometric middle but no larger than anything else, and Christ — at the upper left, being given a false beard by a monk, a proverb about deceiving the Lord — is a small figure among others. This refusal of hierarchy is the painting's intellectual position. Nobody is exempt.

Readings

The older view, derived from Van Mander's drollery, made the picture a comedy of folly for laughing at. The iconological tradition of the 1950s read it as a moral sermon — the world of sin under the sign of the upside-down globe, painted for an audience that would retrieve the lesson. Recent scholarship has stressed the pleasure of the encyclopaedic form: this was a picture for a learned dining room, where the game of identifying sayings was itself the use, much as guests would identify the adages in Erasmus or the costumes in a costume-book. There is a political reading too — the globe reversed as the Netherlands under Spain — which the date (1559, before the troubles) makes improbable. Perhaps the most useful modern observation is Margaret Sullivan's: that the proverbs chosen are overwhelmingly about stupidity, self-deception and waste rather than about wickedness, and that the picture's Erasmian tone is rueful rather than damning.

A second walk through the village

Since the pleasure of the picture is the walk, it is worth taking a second one, this time along the upper half. At the upper left, under the castle tower, a man 'sits between two stools in the ashes' — hesitation; next to him two dogs fight over a bone; a woman 'would tie the devil himself to a cushion' — obstinacy stronger than evil; a man carries daylight out of the house in a basket — wasted labour; a candle is held for the devil — flattery of the powerful; a man confesses to the devil — secrets told to the enemy. On the roof of the tower a man shoots arrows one after another into nothing; on the roof below a man 'has a hole in his roof', his house open to the weather. In the farmyard at the left, the pig is being shorn; a man 'hangs his cloak according to the wind'; another 'throws his feathers into the wind' — futility again. Along the river bank at the upper right a man 'cannot see the sun shine on the water' — envy; a pair 'swim against the stream'; a man catches fish behind the net — opportunity missed; a large fish eats a small one — the subject Bruegel had engraved three years earlier; a man 'hangs his habit on the fence' — the monk leaving his order; another 'runs his head against the wall' in a second version. On the shore, a man sits on hot coals, another 'sails with the wind', a third 'has the world on his thumb'; a figure 'cannot reach from one loaf to another' — poverty; a man in armour bells the cat; a woman 'carries the cake on the roof'. Above the sea, a man 'shits on the world' — the globe inverted on the inn wall beneath him — and 'the world is turned upside down' is written in the globe itself. There are two or three sayings in every square foot, and the village has about thirty square feet.

The copies and the original

The popularity of the composition is attested by the copies. Pieter Brueghel the Younger's workshop produced at least sixteen versions, several of them signed, in which the proverbs are repeated almost exactly but the handling is harder and the colours brighter; some of them add a few sayings of their own. Klaus Ertz's catalogue of the Younger (2000) lists them and establishes that the copies derive from a cartoon rather than from the panel — the Younger worked from tracings of his father's designs, which passed down in the family — which is why the copies are the same size as the original and reproduce its layout to the centimetre. For three centuries the existence of the copies confused the original's identity; the Berlin panel's primacy was established by its signature and date, its quality, and the fact that the underdrawing shows the creative process — changes of mind that a copyist does not make. Among the many derived works is a print series and a majolica dish; the composition became, in effect, a proverb itself.

The count, and why it does not matter

The numbering of the proverbs has been a scholarly pastime since the nineteenth century: Wilhelm Fraenger found 80, Grauls 118, the Berlin catalogue 126, and several websites offer over 130. The variation is instructive. Some 'proverbs' are idioms, some are double (the man who bangs his head is also 'armed to the teeth'), some are modern guesses at lost sayings, and some figures may be there only to fill the square. The counting, however, is not beside the point: it is what the picture was for. A humanist dinner party in Antwerp in 1560 would have done exactly what the folklorists did, and the picture's inexhaustibility was its value. Bruegel, who in the Proverbs created a painting that cannot be finished, had found a form that would keep his buyers looking for as long as they owned it.

Two details for the close viewer

Two passages repay a long look. The first is the group at the lower centre: the woman with the blue cloak, her husband bent beneath it, and beside them a man who 'fills the well after the calf has drowned' — a red-shirted figure shovelling with an intensity that makes the futility comic. The cloak is the only large area of pure blue in the picture, an expensive azurite laid flat, and its placement at the exact centre of a picture that otherwise refuses centres is a joke of the kind Bruegel liked: the one thing that organises the village is a deception. The second is the tiny group at the upper right, on the headland below the inn: a man in a boat sailing, a man on the shore doing something unspeakable to the globe, and a figure hanging a cloak according to the wind. These three are painted in a dozen strokes apiece, at a scale where the brush could hardly have been finer than a single hair, and they are as complete as the foreground. The equality of attention across scale is the thing to take away; it is what Ortelius meant by nature.

The place in the career

The Proverbs is the picture of a thirty-year-old who had been making prints for four years and who had, apparently, never before painted a panel of this size or complexity — or, if he had, it has not survived. The immediate command of the large format is hard to explain except by the print work: the Sins and Virtues of 1556–60 are the same kind of field, with the same distributed actions and raised viewpoint, and the panel is the print method carried into colour. It was followed within a year by the Carnival and the Games, and the three together constitute, in effect, a manifesto: a declaration that painting could do what the encyclopaedia did — contain the world — and do it in a form that was also a picture.

Technique

The handling is already the mature one: a thin, fast paint over a light ground, figures drawn with the brush in dark contour and filled with flat colour, the distances in cool greys and greens. Infrared examination shows an assured underdrawing with few changes. The panel has been cleaned and studied in Berlin (the museum's 2009 study devoted a volume to it) and the surface is in good condition for its age, though some of the copper greens have darkened.

History

The early provenance is unknown. Pieter the Younger's workshop made at least sixteen copies, mostly with slight variations, which implies the original was accessible in Antwerp into the 1600s. It appears in English collections in the nineteenth century and was bought by the Berlin museums in 1914 — the Wilhelmine state's purchase, on the eve of the war, of a picture that became one of the Gemäldegalerie's defining possessions.

What to look at

Find the blue cloak, then the world upside-down on the inn wall, then the man pissing at the moon on the other inn sign. Count the reds. Follow the river to the shore and find the blind. Look at the faces, which are not caricatures but blank with absorption — the proverbial acts done with total seriousness. Then go close to the pillar-biter and see how a figure is made from four strokes and a line. And notice the one thing in the picture that is not a proverb: the weather, grey and ordinary, the same for everyone.

Coda

The Proverbs is the picture of a painter who has found his method at a stroke: the world as a field of independent small actions, the viewer placed above it, meaning distributed rather than concentrated. Everything after it — the Carnival, the Games, the Calvary, the Months — is a variation on the discovery made here. It is also, for all its learning, very funny, and the laughter was part of its design.

The picture

Oil on oak panel, 118 × 164.5 cm, signed and dated BRVEGEL 1559 — Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. The second of the three encyclopaedic panels of 1559–60, painted in the same year as the Proverbs and in the same format; in the Habsburg collection by the seventeenth century (it is in Leopold Wilhelm's inventory of 1659).

The scene

A town square seen from a high window, with an inn at the left — its sign the Blue Boat, a fool's emblem — and a church at the right. In the foreground the two principals joust: fat Carnival, astride a beer barrel pushed by masked revellers, wielding a spit with a pig's head on it, against thin Lent, a gaunt woman on a chair drawn on a cart by a monk and a nun, armed with a baker's peel bearing two herrings; Carnival's side of the square is all revelry — a play being performed, dice, waffles, a procession of masks, a cripple; Lent's side is all observance — the faithful leaving the church with ashes on their foreheads, the almsgiving, the cripples and beggars receiving bread, children with rattles, a woman scrubbing a window, fish being sold. In the middle, a well; a couple walking away from us led by a fool with a torch; and some two hundred figures in all.

Carnival and Lent

The theme was a literary and theatrical one: the Rederijker plays staged mock battles between Vastenavond (Shrove Tuesday) and Vasten (Lent), the one personified by the glutton, the other by the ascetic, and the contest was a standard of the pre-Lenten festival across Europe. Bruegel staged the play in the square where it would have been acted and surrounded it with the real customs of the season: the Carnival plays (Die Vuile Bruid, 'The Dirty Bride', is being performed at the left; Ourson and Valentin is at the back), the throwing of waffles, the burning of straw men, the Lenten fish and pretzels, the children's rattles used in Holy Week in place of bells. The ethnographic exactness is the Children's Games' and the Proverbs', and the same arguments about its purpose have been had.

The two halves

The composition divides the square by its centre line: Carnival's left, with the inn, is warm in colour and crowded; Lent's right, with the church, is cooler and more ordered. The division has been read as a contrast of folly and virtue (the older view); as a balanced representation of two halves of a single popular culture (the ethnographic view); and — increasingly — as a picture of the religious situation of 1559, in which the Catholic observances of the right and the popular festivities of the left face each other across a square, with neither given the victory. The couple walking away from us in the centre, led by a fool, have been read as the viewer's surrogates, turning their backs on both.

Technique

The paint is the quick, thin, contour-drawn manner of the Proverbs, with the colour distributed in the same calculated scatter; the underdrawing, studied for the 2018 exhibition, shows some changes in the foreground figures. The panel has been cleaned; its condition is good, with the usual browning of some greens.

Copies

Pieter the Younger made several versions, one of which (in Brussels) was long considered a second original; the composition was among the most reproduced of the father's inventions, and its reproductions spread the Carnival-and-Lent image through the seventeenth century.

What to look at

The two champions — the pig's head and the herrings; the play at the left; the ash-crosses on the foreheads of the churchgoers; the beggars; the woman scrubbing; the fool with the torch; the well; the pretzels. Then the line down the middle.

Coda

Carnival and Lent is the picture in which the encyclopaedic method is given a structure — two sides, one square — and the structure is an argument that refuses to conclude. It has been read as a satire on both sides; it may be a picture of a country that was about to stop being able to hold both in one square.

A closer walk

The left half, in more detail: the inn, the Blue Boat, with a woman at its window and a beer-drinker at its door; before it the play The Dirty Bride acted on the ground by masked players with a bridal tent of rags; beside it a table where waffles are baked and a game of dice is played; a procession of revellers with a man in a mask, a woman with a pot, a fool; a cripple on stumps begging; a man carrying a table on his head; Carnival himself on his barrel, with his spit and his pie-hat, and his pushers. The right half: the church porch, from which the faithful come with ash-crosses on their foreheads, a sacristan at the door; women distributing bread to the beggars and the sick laid on the ground; a procession of children with rattles; a woman with pretzels and fish; Lent on her cart, with her beehive hat, her peel and her herrings, and her attendants; a couple praying; a fish-stall. At the well, a woman drawing water. Everywhere, the alternation of feasting and fasting foods — waffles and pretzels, pork and herring — as a map of the season.

The condition and the date

The date was read as 1559 from the first; the signature beside it is in the new spelling, which makes the panel, with the Proverbs, the earliest evidence of the change. The condition is good; the panel has the usual small losses at the joins. The Vienna restoration of the 2010s cleaned it for the 2018 exhibition, which hung the three encyclopaedic panels in one room for the first time since they were made. The three together confirmed what the dates suggest: that 1559–60 was the year in which Bruegel decided what kind of painter he would be, and that the decision was made on three panels of the same size. The Carnival is, of the three, the one with the clearest plan and the least resolved meaning.

The picture

Oil on oak panel, 118 × 161 cm, signed and dated BRVEGEL 1560 — Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. The third of the encyclopaedic trilogy (after the Proverbs and Carnival and Lent), of the same Antwerp standard format, and probably conceived with them as a set, though no document links the three. Acquired for the Habsburg collection by the Archduke Ernst or Rudolf II — it is in the 1659 inventory of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm's collection in Vienna — and in the imperial gallery since.

The census

A town square, broad and sandy, with a large public building at the right (a town hall or guildhall with a loggia), a row of houses at the left, a street running away to the vanishing point at the upper right and a river at the upper left, seen from a first-floor window, and filled entirely with children — over two hundred of them — playing some eighty games. The inventory, which has been compiled by folklorists since the nineteenth century, includes: hoops, stilts, leapfrog, blind man's buff, tug-of-war, piggy-back jousting, whip-tops, knucklebones, a game of marbles, spinning in a skirt, the 'mill' on a fence, blowing bubbles through a straw, a child riding a hobby-horse and another a barrel, a mock wedding procession, a mock baptism, girls playing with dolls, children playing shop with bricks and a brick dust 'flour', a boy inflating a pig's bladder, a line of children with their faces in a pile of hats, a girl swinging on a bar, boys climbing trees and swimming in the river, a child in the foreground holding a twig of three hazelnuts. The games are drawn with the precision of an ethnographer; most can be matched to Flemish names in sixteenth-century sources, and several are still played.

The faces

The first thing any viewer notices is that the children are not children. They have the proportions of small adults — the heads large, certainly, but the faces closed, blank, heavy-lidded, absorbed without joy. Bruegel never painted a child as charming; the child with the plate in the Peasant Wedding is the nearest he came, and that is a portrait of appetite. Here the effect is uncanny and deliberate. The square is a town's whole adult population in miniature, and its pursuits — the mock wedding, the mock shop, the jousting, the procession — are the adult world's. This was the point of the older moral reading: that the picture shows mankind as children, playing at life with the same seriousness with which adults play at power, and that the viewer, placed above it like God, is invited to see the futility of both. An Erasmian text is ready to hand: 'the whole life of man is a kind of children's game'.

The other reading

Against this stands the ethnographic view, which has gained ground since the 1970s: that the picture belongs to the Antwerp culture of collection — proverb-books, costume-books, encyclopaedias of customs — and that its primary pleasure was the recognition of games, like the recognition of proverbs in the Berlin panel. Under this reading, the moral is not absent but is not the point; the point is the inventory. Sandra Hindman's influential article (1981) argued for a specific occasion — the picture as a representation of the 'folly' of children contrasted with the building at the right, perhaps a school or town hall, standing for reason; others have found a calendar (the games of a particular season, with the river-swimmers placing it in summer) or a wedding-custom subtext. None is conclusive. What is certain is that the painting's form — the encyclopaedic field, the absence of hierarchy, the viewer's height — is the form of the Proverbs transposed, and that a buyer who owned one would have understood the other.

Construction

The composition is a trapezoid: the square narrows toward the upper right, where the street runs out under a line of houses, and this single strong diagonal gives the crowd a direction, so that the whole mass of children seems to be drifting away from the viewer into the town. The building at the right, with its loggia and its children sliding down its stairs and hanging from its rail, is the picture's one large architectural mass and balances the long recession. The colour is brighter and more evenly distributed than in the Proverbs: a scatter of reds, blues, whites, with ochre ground and pale sky, a sunny picture in which the absence of shadow (the light is diffuse and almost shadowless) increases the strange emotional flatness.

Technique and condition

The paint is thin and quick; the underdrawing, examined in the Vienna campaign before 2018, shows the composition fully planned with a few figure adjustments. The panel is in good condition, cleaned for the 2018 exhibition, when it was hung beside the Carnival and the Proverbs (lent from Berlin) for the first time since the sixteenth century — the trilogy reassembled.

Afterlife

The Games has been the most reproduced 'educational' Bruegel — a staple of folklore museums and children's books, which has partly concealed its strangeness. Its most serious modern readers have been the historians of childhood: Philippe Ariès used it in Centuries of Childhood (1960) as evidence of a world in which children were 'small adults', which is a misreading of a deliberate pictorial convention as a social fact, but a misreading that shows how strongly the picture imposes its vision.

What to look at

The boy in the foreground with the mask; the mock wedding procession at the lower centre with its tiny bride; the children playing with brick-dust and a knife on the left; the three boys in the river, painted in a few strokes of lead white. The hats. The building on the right, where children are using a civic façade as a playground, with one hanging from the window. The one adult presence: a woman at the upper left, dousing two fighting boys with water from a window. And the street to the vanishing point, empty of adults, where the game seems to go on forever.

Coda

The Children's Games is the most literal of Bruegel's world-pictures and the most unsettling. It offers a day in a square without a shadow, without an adult, without a joke, and it leaves the viewer to decide whether the children are happy. Four and a half centuries of viewers have not decided.

A fuller inventory

Since the picture is a census, the census should be given more fully. Along the left edge, from the bottom: a child blowing bubbles through a straw from a soap-dish; two children with a spinning top and a whip; girls playing knucklebones with the small bones of sheep; a child on a hobby horse; a mock shop where a girl grinds brick into 'flour' on a stone; two children playing with a doll at a table; girls tossing their skirts to make them spin; a procession of children carrying a 'bride', the mock-wedding; children playing leapfrog; a boy walking on stilts; a girl swinging on the bar of a fence; boys playing a game with a hat pile. In the centre of the square: a tug-of-war; a game of 'bowling' with a skittle; boys wrestling; a line of children playing at a 'bridge' under which others pass; a boy riding a barrel; a line of boys on each other's backs in a 'horse and rider' joust; a boy climbing a tree; children with hoops; boys playing marbles with walnuts; a girl with a basket on her head; two boys carrying a third on a pole. Along the right: the loggia of the town hall with children sliding down its stair-rail, one hanging from the window, others blowing a horn; children playing 'king of the castle' on a bench; a boy with a pig's bladder; a child spinning a top with a whip; boys playing with a fence-rail as a see-saw. In the far left, the river with swimmers; in the street at the back, more hoops, a game of 'blind man', running children, and a single adult couple walking away with a broom — the only people in the picture going about anything but play.

The game-names have been matched to Flemish sources: the tolleken (whip-top), the bikkelen (knucklebones), the haasje-over (leapfrog), the kinderbruiloft (mock wedding). Several are recorded in Rabelais's list of Gargantua's games (1534), which was known in Antwerp, and one theory holds that Bruegel used Rabelais as a checklist, as he used Erasmus for the proverbs. That is unproven; the games are also simply the games of every Flemish street.

The town as a stage

One thing distinguishes the Games from its sister pictures: the square is not a village but a city, with a civic building whose loggia and arched windows suggest the Antwerp or Brussels town halls, and the receding street has the regularity of planned urban space. The children occupy the civic stage. This has suggested to some readers an allegory of the commonwealth — the state as a children's game — and to others a theatrical source in the Rederijker processions, where children carried allegorical tableaux. The building's emptiness is telling: its windows are blank, its loggia is a climbing-frame. Whatever adult institutions it stands for, it is occupied, for the length of the painting, by the young.

Technique in detail

Close inspection rewards. Each child is a few strokes: a round of pink for the face, a dark comma for the eye, a flat shape of colour for the smock, a dark contour round the whole. The dresses are lead white, yellow ochre, vermilion, azurite, a rose-madder pink, and an unusually bright green that has held its colour better than the copper greens of the Months. The ground of the square is a warm ochre laid thinly so that the panel's pale preparation lights it from beneath; the shadowlessness is partly this — the ground acts as a diffused light source. In the river the swimmers are three or four touches of white and pink on the dark water. The whole was painted in weeks, not months, by a man who had the picture in his head.

The trilogy question

Whether the Proverbs, the Carnival and the Games were painted as a set has been argued back and forth. In favour: the common format, the common method, the consecutive dates (1559, 1559, 1560), and the fact that all three are inventories of a kind — of sayings, of seasonal customs, of games — which would make a natural triad for a collector's room. Against: no document records them together, and their early histories diverge (the Proverbs surfaces in the nineteenth century in England, the other two in the Habsburg collection). The likeliest account is that they were made for the same kind of buyer rather than for one buyer — the Antwerp merchant-humanist for whom the encyclopaedic panel was a new and fashionable thing — and that the Games is the third essay in a form Bruegel had discovered with the first.

Later readings

In the twentieth century the Games has served as a document for three disciplines: folklorists, who have identified the games; historians of childhood, who have argued about what the picture says of attitudes to children; and art historians, who have used it to test the limits of iconology. Jeanette Hills's monograph of 1957 catalogued ninety-one games; Amy Orrock's recent research (2012) reads the picture as a humanist allegory of education, the building being a school and the games the 'exercises' of a Renaissance pedagogy. What every reader agrees on is the picture's refusal to tell us how to feel, which is the thing Bruegel shared with no other painter of his century.

Coda, again

If the Proverbs is a world going wrong and the Carnival a world divided, the Games is a world not yet begun — a square full of people rehearsing the lives they will lead. It is the gentlest of the three in colour and the least comfortable in feeling. To stand before it in Vienna, between the Carnival and the Tower of Babel, is to watch a painter discover that the whole of human life could be laid out on a board and that, laid out, it looked like play.

The picture

Oil on oak panel, 117 × 162 cm, signed and dated BRVEGEL M.D.LXII at the lower left — Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels. The most brilliant in colour of the three great Boschian panels of 1562–63, and the one whose attribution was for a long time wrong: it was acquired by the Brussels museum in 1846 as a Bosch, and was returned to Bruegel only when the signature was found under the frame in 1898.

The scene

Revelation 12: 'there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon'. From a golden-white circle of heaven at the top, where trumpets sound and the good angels hover in white and blue, the rebel host tumbles down the panel, changing as it falls — from angels to monsters, from light to dark — into a writhing mass at the bottom of creatures that are a whole invented zoology: fish with wings and legs, a butterfly-bodied thing with a human face, armoured insects, a toad with a lute, a bird with a bagpipe, an egg with arms, a creature that is a mussel shell with legs, a crab, a frog, a hybrid of porcupine and bishop. In the centre Michael in golden armour with a shield bearing the cross plants his foot on the seven-headed dragon and drives his sword into it; at either side other angels in white and pale blue fight with swords and trumpets. The dragon's heads and the monsters' bodies fill the lower two-thirds; the colour of the fall goes from the gold of heaven through rose and blue to the browns and greens of the bottom.

Bosch, Floris and the heavens

The subject was an Antwerp one: Frans Floris, the city's leading Romanist, had painted a Fall of the Rebel Angels for the fencers' guild in 1554 (now in Antwerp), a Michelangelesque tumble of muscular nudes that was the most famous picture in the city. Bruegel's panel is, among other things, a reply to Floris: where Floris gave the fall to heroic bodies, Bruegel gave it to monsters, and where Floris's angels are Italian, Bruegel's are Flemish and Boschian. Bosch's Last Judgment and the Vienna triptych supplied the creatures; the Haywain's heaven, with its angelic fall in the top of the left wing, supplied the form. But the invention is Bruegel's own: scholars have counted the creatures and found few repeated from Bosch and many — the butterfly-people, the fish-birds — that appear nowhere before. The natural-history cabinets of Antwerp, with their shells, dried fish, insects and exotic animals, have been proposed as the source of the new fauna, and the picture read as a Wunderkammer of the fallen.

Colour and light

This is Bruegel's most luminous panel. Heaven is a disc of white-gold laid over a pale ground, the angels in it barely indicated in white; the good angels below it are in lead white and azurite with gold; the falling creatures shade through pink and salmon into the dark. The monsters are painted with a jeweller's precision — the butterfly's wings have their spots, the fish their scales, the armour its rivets — and the effect is of a picture that gets more exact as it gets more fantastic. The handling of the whole is finer than in the Proverbs and closer to the miniature, which has suggested that the panel was made for a collector's cabinet rather than a dining room.

Readings

The subject's meaning was not in doubt in 1562 — pride falls, the Church militant triumphs — and the picture was probably a straightforwardly orthodox commission. The modern literature has added the reading of the monsters as the new science's creatures, the fallen as the 'wonders' of nature that the cabinet collected, and the picture as a meditation on metamorphosis: the angels become monsters as they fall, and the transformation — visible in the half-changed figures in the middle register — is the subject. A political reading (the rebels as the Netherlands' heretics, or as the Spanish) has been tried and does not hold; the date is too early and the subject too conventional.

History

The panel's early history is unknown; it was acquired by the Brussels museum in 1846 from a private collection as a work by Bosch; the signature and date were discovered in 1898 when the frame was removed, and the attribution to Bruegel followed. It has been in Brussels since and was restored in the 2010s; the museum hangs it with the Census and the Bird Trap in its Bruegel room.

The companion panels

With the Prado Triumph of Death and the Antwerp Dulle Griet the Rebel Angels forms the trio of the Boschian summit; the three were shown together for the first time in Vienna in 2018, and seen side by side they are not a series but a spectrum: the Rebel Angels all light and creature, the Griet all fire and figure, the Triumph all bone and field. This is the brightest of the three and the most orthodox, and it is also the most inventive, creature for creature.

What to look at

Michael's shield; the dragon's heads; the butterfly with the human face at the lower left; the fish with the bagpipe; the egg; the creatures half-changed in the middle; heaven's white disc; the trumpets. Then stand back and see the fall as a single pour of colour from gold to brown.

Coda

The Fall of the Rebel Angels is the picture in which Bruegel out-Bosched Bosch: more creatures, more colour, more precision, and a fall that is an argument about change. That it hung for fifty years under Bosch's name is the last irony of the 'second Bosch' label — the picture was so good at being Bosch that it passed for him.

A note on the creatures

A partial inventory, for the pleasure of it: at the lower left, a creature with a fish's body, a man's legs and a toad's head; beside it a flayed thing with a lute; a butterfly with a human torso and spread wings marked like a peacock's; a bird-headed angel in a ruff; a creature made of a mussel shell with legs and a crab's claws; an egg-shaped being with a face and two thin arms; a hybrid with a bishop's mitre and a porcupine's quills; a fish with butterfly wings; a frog in armour; an insect with a human face and a trumpet. The invention has been connected to the printed natural histories of the 1550s — Belon's birds and fishes, Rondelet's marine animals, Gesner's Historia animalium — whose woodcuts Antwerp's collectors owned, and several of the creatures are exotic animals seen true (an armadillo's plates, a puffer-fish, a flying fish) before they are monsters. The fall of the angels, in this reading, is the moment when the wonders of the new world became the devils of the old.

The picture

Oil on oak panel, 33.5 × 55 cm, signed and dated BRVEGEL M.CCCCC.LXII at the lower left, with the subject inscribed — SAVL. XXXI. CAPIT. — in a rare instance of Bruegel labelling his text — Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. A small, dense battle-piece, the first of the small-format panels of the 1560s in which a sacred subject is hidden in a landscape, and one of the few pictures by Bruegel with an Old Testament subject.

The scene

1 Samuel 31: the Philistines defeat Israel on Mount Gilboa, Saul's sons are killed, and the king, wounded, falls on his own sword to avoid capture; his armour-bearer does the same. Bruegel put the suicide at the lower left, on a rocky ledge: Saul, in armour and crown, has fallen on his sword, and the armour-bearer is in the act; and he gave the rest of the panel to the battle — two armies of pikemen, a forest of lances in the gorge below, cavalry charging, banners, a river, a city, a mountain range and a sky of smoke and light. The armies are painted as masses — thousands of lance-points, each a single stroke, in diagonal blocks that collide in the valley — and the effect is of a swarm rather than a fight.

The swarm

The painting of armies as masses of lances was a device Bruegel learned from Altdorfer's Battle of Alexander (1529), which he could have known from Nuremberg prints, and perfected: the Conversion of Paul of 1567 is the same device at four times the size. The lances make a texture that catches the light — in the gorge they are a grey mist with glints — and the individual soldier disappears into it. The moral of the picture, if it has one, is in this: the king's private death in the corner against the anonymous mass in the valley. The subject has been read as a warning against pride (Saul as the disobedient king), as a reflection on suicide (which the Counter-Reformation condemned), and as an image of the Netherlands' wars; the 2018 catalogue noted the parallel with the Calvary two years later, in which the principal event is likewise pushed to a corner of a crowded landscape.

Landscape

The setting is Alpine: a gorge between a rocky cliff at the left and a mountain at the right, the river winding to a distant city, the peaks blue. It is the structure of the Alpine drawings of the 1550s with an army poured into it, and the handling of the rocks — in greys and ochres with sharp, broken edges — is the handling of the Large Landscapes prints. The sky, with a break of light at the horizon under a dark cloud, is a small masterpiece of weather.

Technique

The panel is painted with miniature care, the lances drawn with a fine brush in thousands of single strokes, the cavalry in the foreground indicated with a few touches of colour each, the distant city with a hair's breadth. The inscription of the biblical reference is unique in the œuvre and suggests a learned owner who wanted the text identified. The condition is good.

History

In the Habsburg collection by the seventeenth century; in the Vienna gallery since; one of the museum's twelve Bruegels and, with the Two Monkeys and the Flight into Egypt, one of the small pictures that show what his brush could do at cabinet scale.

What to look at

Saul on his sword at the lower left, and the armour-bearer beside him; the lance-forest in the gorge; the cavalry with banners in the foreground; the city; the light under the cloud; the inscription. Then the proportion: the king is a hundredth of the picture.

Coda

The Suicide of Saul is the picture that first makes the point the Calvary would make at scale: that history is an event in a corner and a crowd in a valley, and that the painter's eye, which sees both, is the only thing that gives the event its size.

The Old Testament and the cabinet

Bruegel's Old Testament subjects are few — the Tower, this Saul, a lost David and Goliath recorded in inventories — and all are subjects of pride and its fall, which suggests a patron's programme rather than a painter's preference. The small format and the inscribed citation place the panel among the cabinet pictures for learned buyers: a viewer who needed SAVL. XXXI. CAPIT. written on the rock was a viewer who would open the Bible at the chapter and find the text's details — the sons, the armour-bearer, the Philistine archers — in the picture, which is where they are. The panel is in this sense an illustrated verse, in a landscape the verse never imagined.

Altdorfer and the battle-piece

The comparison with Altdorfer's Battle of Alexander at Issus in Munich is more than formal. Altdorfer's picture of 1529 had invented the cosmic battle-piece — the whole world's surface seen from above, with armies as textures and a sky that participates — and it had been commissioned by a Duke of Bavaria for a series on the heroes of antiquity. Bruegel's is the same idea at a tenth of the scale and with the hero dead in the corner; the sky's break of light, which in Altdorfer is the sun and moon at once, is here an ordinary evening. The panel is, in this respect, a small act of correction: the cosmic battle made into a Flemish one.

Seeing it

In Vienna the Saul hangs in the Bruegel room among the large panels and is easy to walk past; it should not be. At thirty-three centimetres it needs the viewer within arm's length, and at that distance the lances resolve into individual strokes, the cavalry into horses with riders, the city into walls and towers. The experience of a Bruegel battle is the experience of a swarm becoming an army as one approaches — and then of the king, found at last in the corner, becoming a man. The panel's frame is modern; the picture has never been enlarged, and its edges are original.

The picture

Oil on oak panel, 117 × 162 cm, unsigned and undated — Museo del Prado, Madrid. Generally placed around 1562–63, at the end of the Boschian phase and alongside the Dulle Griet and the Fall of the Rebel Angels, the three pictures in which Bruegel made the language of Bosch his own and then abandoned it. Restored at the Prado in 2017–18 — a cleaning that removed old discoloured varnish and overpaint and returned the picture to a brilliance and legibility it had not had in centuries — and shown afterwards with the Vienna exhibition in 2018.

The subject

An army of the dead overruns the living. On a scorched plain beneath a sky the colour of smoke, with burning ships on a black sea, a gallows-field, wheels on poles with corpses broken on them, a dead tree and a hill whose top is a skull, the skeletons advance in formation — a phalanx of them carrying coffin-lids as shields at the right, a mounted Death with a scythe driving a cart of skulls in the centre, others on horseback ringing a bell, a drummer, trumpeters, skeletons at a dinner table, skeletons fishing corpses from a pool with nets, a skeleton pouring out the wine cellar. The living are everyone: a king in ermine, his barrels of gold being counted by a skeleton, and a cardinal being helped toward his death by one wearing his hat; a pilgrim having his throat cut; lovers at the lower right, a young man playing a lute to his lady while a skeleton behind them plays along; gamblers upsetting their table; a fool hiding under it; a woman with a spindle, fallen, a skeleton's arms round her; a dog nosing the face of a dead child in its mother's arms. The living are funnelled toward a huge trap — a coffin-shaped box whose lid is propped open, marked with the cross, into which the skeleton army drives them like cattle. There is no Christ, no judgement, no heaven; only the machine of death working.

Sources

The Triumph of Death was an Italian subject: the Petrarchan Trionfi gave the title, and the great fresco in the Camposanto at Pisa and the Palermo Trionfo della Morte of c. 1446 (in the Palazzo Abatellis) gave the imagery of Death on a skeletal horse among the estates of man. Bruegel, who had been to Italy and as far as Sicily, may have seen the Palermo fresco; he certainly knew the Northern Dance of Death tradition — the woodcuts of Holbein (1538), in which Death takes each estate in turn, the king, the cardinal, the lovers, the peasant — and the Bosch apparatus of the burning city and the torture-wheel. The genius of the Madrid panel is to fuse the two: the Italian procession of Death becomes a Netherlandish battle, and the Dance's series of individual encounters is compressed into a single panoramic field in which all the encounters happen at once.

The colour and the cleaning

Before the 2018 restoration the panel was brown: its varnish had yellowed, old retouchings covered damaged passages, and the picture read as a dun-coloured chaos. The cleaning revealed a surprisingly chromatic painting — the king's red and ermine, the cardinal's scarlet, the lovers' pink and green, the blue of the fallen woman's gown — set against the grey-brown plain and the bituminous sky, so that the living are the only colour in a world of bone and ash. The restoration also returned detail: the corpse-nets, the skeleton at the keyboard, the writing on the trap. It is now evident that the sky was painted with the same meteorological precision as the Months — a low cloud-bank lit from below by fires — and that the distance is a complete landscape of burning, drowning and hanging rendered in a few hundred strokes.

The meaning

The older literature read the picture as a sermon on mortality, a painted memento mori, and that is its evident genre. But the tone is not devotional. There is no consolation in it, no saint, no redeemer, no hint that the well-prepared soul escapes; the cross on the trap is a sign of where everyone is going, not of salvation. The modern literature has connected the picture to the experience of the Netherlands — the plague years, the wars, the public executions that were a feature of Antwerp life — and to Bruegel's own evident fascination with armies and crowds in motion. It is the most pessimistic picture of the sixteenth century, and it is also one of the most formally controlled: the army's advance from the right, the living's flight to the left, and the cart's diagonal give it a single relentless movement.

The Bosch question

Here is where the 'second Bosch' label is both truest and least adequate. The burning cities, the wheels, the hybrid creatures (though there are almost none here — the skeletons have replaced the demons) belong to Bosch's Haywain and Garden and Last Judgment. But Bosch's hells are places where the damned are punished by ingenious demons; Bruegel's plain is a place where the living are killed by the dead, mechanically, impartially, without ingenuity. The difference is between theology and experience.

History

The early history is unrecorded. The picture is probably the 'Triumph of Death' that belonged to the Antwerp collector and mint-master Jean Noirot, whose collection was sold at his bankruptcy in 1572; it was later in Spanish royal and aristocratic hands, passed to the Prado in 1827 from the collection of the dukes of Medinaceli via the royal collection, and is one of the Prado's two Bruegels — with the Wine of Saint Martin's Day, acquired in 2010.

What to look at

The king at the lower left, whose hourglass a skeleton holds; the cardinal behind him. The lovers at the lower right, the only people who have not noticed. The trap, and the crosses on the coffin-lids. The skeleton ringing the bell at the top left, and the dog with the child. The ships burning on the sea. The plain's scale: go close and count the gallows.

Coda

The Triumph of Death is the end of Bruegel's apprenticeship to Bosch and the beginning of something harder. After it, the demons disappear from his painting; what remains is the army, the crowd, the field, the sky, and the steady, unconsoled attention that the last pictures will turn on the peasants, the blind and the gallows.

A catalogue of the plain

The picture's two hundred or so figures can be read as a catalogue of the ways of dying in the sixteenth century, and it is worth going through a portion of it. At the far left a skeleton rings a great bell — the passing bell — in a dead tree; below, another with an hourglass stands beside the king while a third rummages in his barrels of coin; a fourth wheels a barrow of skulls. At the left of centre a pilgrim is being murdered by a skeleton with a knife; a horse drags a cart heaped with skulls, driven by a skeleton with a lantern; beneath it a corpse lies on a cloth on the ground; a skeleton in a shroud hangs a man from a tree. In the centre the great cart is flanked by the skeleton cavalry; a skeleton with a drum and trumpeters sound the advance; the living — a mother with a child, a man in armour with his sword drawn, a woman fleeing with her skirt in her hand — are herded toward the trap, whose lid is held open by one skeleton while others push the crowd in with a coffin lid as a door. At the right, a soldier in armour fights back uselessly; a fool dives under the dinner table; the card-players' table is upset and a skeleton holds the cards; a young man at the lower right reaches for his sword as a skeleton in a hood pours away the wine; the lutenist and his lady play on. In the background the landscape offers a second register of death — a pool where skeletons net corpses; a field of wheels and gallows; a skeleton sawing through a drowning man's boat; ships burning; a city burning; a hanged man on a tree; a horse and rider toppling from a cliff; a skeleton tolling a bell in a ruined tower; two skeletons with a scythe mowing men like grass.

The music

Music runs through the picture like a theme. The bell, the drum, the trumpets, the hurdy-gurdy played by a skeleton near the cart, the lute of the lovers and the skeleton playing along on a second instrument behind them: Death in the Dance-of-Death tradition was a musician who led the estates in a round, and Bruegel kept the idea but militarised it — the music here is military music, the band of an army. The lovers' lute is the one instrument making a different kind of sound, and it is being accompanied by Death.

After the cleaning: new findings

The 2017–18 restoration, conducted at the Prado in collaboration with the Vienna museum, used infrared reflectography and X-radiography to study the underdrawing. The drawing is confident and close to the final result, with a few revisions: the cart was moved slightly, figures in the crowd were altered, and the trap's position was adjusted. The panel is composed of boards of Baltic oak; dendrochronology is consistent with a date around 1562. The removal of the overpaint revealed that several areas had been retouched in the eighteenth or nineteenth century to 'soften' the imagery — a skeleton's face, a wound — and the picture as seen today is harsher than any viewer had seen it since the 1600s.

The companion pictures

The Triumph belongs with the Dulle Griet and the Fall of the Rebel Angels as a trio of the same format from the same year or two; the three were never a set, but they share a palette of fire and smoke, a density of invention, and a point of view from which the whole of hell or the whole of the world can be seen at once. Seen together — as at Vienna in 2018, when the Madrid and Antwerp panels were lent — they show the speed with which Bruegel took up and exhausted the Boschian mode: the Rebel Angels is all colour and creature, the Griet all fire and fury, the Triumph all bone and ash, and after them he never painted a demon again.

Provenance in more detail

The Noirot identification rests on the 1572 inventory of the bankrupt mint-master's goods, which lists a 'Triumph of Death' among several Bruegels, though it cannot be proved that it was this panel; there are old copies (a version in Graz, another in a private collection) and the subject may have existed in more than one autograph version. The Madrid panel's secure history begins in Spain: it is recorded in the collection of the Duke of Medinaceli in the eighteenth century, passed into the royal collection, and was deposited at the Prado in 1827. Its Spanish history is itself a small irony — the picture of the Netherlands' ruin, owned for three centuries by the grandees of the nation that ruined it — and it was in Madrid, not in Flanders, that the painting's reputation as the supreme memento mori was made, in a culture that prized the subject.

The painting and the plague

One contextual fact deserves weight. Antwerp suffered plague epidemics in 1557–58 and in the early 1560s; public executions — hangings, breakings on the wheel, burnings of heretics — were a regular civic spectacle; the wars of Charles V and Philip II had filled the Netherlands with returned soldiers; and the sea in the picture is the Scheldt's estuary with its wrecks. The Triumph is a fantasy, but it is built from a visible repertory. The torture wheels on poles in the background are the ordinary furniture of a Brabant execution-ground; the gallows are those of the Magpie six years later; the soldiers' armour is correct. Bruegel's hell was assembled from the edge of town.

The picture

Oil on oak panel, 19.8 × 23.3 cm, signed and dated BRVEGEL MDLXII — Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. Bruegel's smallest painting, and one of the most discussed: two monkeys, chained to a ring in the sill of an arched window, against a view of Antwerp's harbour in a grey haze. Bought by the Berlin museums in 1931.

The scene

The window embrasure is a stone arch, dark, occupying most of the panel; the two monkeys sit on its sill, each chained by the waist to a ring between them — one facing us, hunched, one turned away toward the view; nutshells lie on the sill; and through the arch the city — recognisably Antwerp, with the cathedral tower and the Scheldt with ships — lies under a pale sky in a bluish haze, with birds flying. The monkeys are red-capped mangabeys, a West African species imported through the Antwerp trade.

The puzzle

No other Bruegel has provoked so many readings in so small a space. The iconological: monkeys were the emblem of sin, of folly, of avarice (the nutshells, the pleasures for which freedom was sold); chained monkeys were the soul in bondage. The political: the two monkeys as the Netherlands' provinces under Spain, the chain as the Inquisition, the city beyond as the freedom lost; the date (1562) and the Antwerp view support the reading for those who want it. The proverbial: 'to go to court for a hazelnut' — to lose one's liberty for a trifle — which fits the nutshells exactly. The personal: the picture as a lament for the artist's own bondage to patrons or to Antwerp (he would leave the next year). The painterly: a study of light, of two animals in a window, of the city seen through haze — the first Bruegel in which mood is the subject. The 2018 catalogue declined to choose, and the picture's capacity to hold all of these is why it has been written about more than paintings a hundred times its size.

The view

The view of Antwerp is the only cityscape in Bruegel's painting — the profile of the cathedral, the towers, the quays with ships, the flat land beyond, all in a grey-blue haze that is among the most delicate passages of his brush. Seen through the arch, the city is a picture within the picture, and the monkeys on the sill are its viewers, as we are theirs. The birds in the air over the city are the free creatures the monkeys are not.

Technique

The panel is painted with miniature care: the monkeys' fur is stroked in fine lines, the chain is drawn link by link, the nutshells are each modelled, and the haze over the city is a scumble of white and blue. The handling is nearer to the grisailles and to the Clovio miniatures than to the large panels, and shows what Bruegel's brush could do at the scale of a hand. The panel is in fine condition.

History

Unknown before the nineteenth century; in a private collection in Germany; bought by the Berlin museums in 1931 and since then the Gemäldegalerie's second Bruegel, hung beside the Proverbs as its opposite in every respect — the one a world, the other a window.

Afterlife

Wisława Szymborska's poem 'Brueghel's Two Monkeys' (1957) — in which the poet sits a final examination on human history while the monkeys watch, and one of them prompts her 'with a gentle / clinking of his chain' — is the most famous literary response to any Bruegel, and it takes the picture as what it is: a small image of captivity, irony and distance that will not say what it is about.

What to look at

The ring and the two chains; the monkey that faces us; the nutshells; the cathedral tower; the ships; the birds; the haze. Then the arch, which makes the picture a window.

Coda

The Two Monkeys is the picture of a year — 1562 — in which Bruegel was leaving the world of Bosch and not yet in the world of the Months, and it is the one in which he first made a painting whose meaning is its atmosphere. Two animals, a chain, a city, a grey light: the smallest Bruegel is the most modern.

The trade in monkeys

A historical detail gives the picture its ground. Antwerp in the 1560s was the European entrepôt for the Portuguese trade with West Africa, and monkeys — mangabeys, guenons — came through the port in numbers as pets and curiosities; the species Bruegel painted, with its red cap and white eyelids, is the collared mangabey of the Guinea coast, and his rendering is exact enough to have been identified by zoologists. The monkeys are therefore also a picture of Antwerp's commerce: two African animals in a window of the city that imported them, chained, with the ships that brought them in the view beyond. Whatever allegory was intended, the fact of the trade is in the picture.

The question of the window

The arch that frames the view has been identified as a window in one of the city's gate-towers or in a house on the Scheldt's bank, and its thick stone embrasure places the monkeys in something like a prison or a warehouse. The device — a scene viewed through an arch — was used by Netherlandish painters since Van Eyck, but never with so much of the panel given to the dark surround and so little to the view; the effect is of a cell with a window, and the monkeys are in the cell.

A last word

The Two Monkeys was painted in the year Bruegel painted the Triumph of Death and the Rebel Angels, and is their opposite: a picture of two creatures and a view, silent, still, grey. It may be the first painting in the Netherlands whose subject is a mood. Its date, 1562, is the year before he left Antwerp; the city in the window is the city he was about to leave. Berlin hangs it at eye level in a small frame; go close.

The picture

Oil on oak panel, 35 × 55 cm, signed and dated on the lower left (the date read as 1563 and, by some, 1567) — Oskar Reinhart Collection 'Am Römerholz', Winterthur. The first painting in European art in which snow is shown falling — the sky is full of flakes, painted as dots of white over the grey — and the earliest of Bruegel's three 'Brabant Nativities' with the Census and the Massacre.

The scene

A village in snow, seen from above at a slight angle, with a ruined shed at the lower left in which the Magi kneel before the Virgin and Child — barely visible, a small group in the shadow; the rest of the picture is the village going about its winter: a crowd at the right drawing water from a hole cut in the frozen river, figures with sledges and bundles, a man carrying faggots, a woman at a door, children, a soldier, the Magi's retinue — a few men in foreign dress — arriving at the left. The houses are of the Brabant type with stepped gables; bare trees stand among them; and the whole is seen through the falling snow, which blurs the distance to a grey haze.

The snow

The falling snow is the invention. Winter scenes before Bruegel showed snow on the ground; this one shows it in the air, as a screen of white dots through which the scene is seen, so that the far houses are softened and the near ones sharp — an atmospheric effect that no painter had attempted and that the Dutch winter painters of the next century learned from him. The technique is simple — a scatter of lead-white touches over the finished picture — and the effect is total: the village is in weather, not merely under it.

The hidden event

The Adoration is pushed to the corner and into shadow, so that a viewer must search for it; the village's water-gathering at the right is larger and brighter. This is the method of the Calvary and the Census — the sacred event in the heedless world — and here it is at its most extreme: the Epiphany, the manifestation of God to the nations, takes place in a shed while the nations fetch water. The reading of this as Erasmian (the Word ignored by the busy), as Reformed (the Church invisible), or as simply realistic (an event in a village is an event in a village) is open; the 2018 catalogue stressed the picture's modesty — the miracle refuses to announce itself.

Attribution and copies

The composition was copied by Pieter the Younger at least twenty times, which created the usual confusion; the Winterthur panel's primacy rests on its signature, its quality, the dendrochronology of its oak (felling date consistent with 1563), and the fact that only it has the falling snow painted with such freedom. The date has been read as 1563 and 1567; the earlier is now generally accepted, which makes the picture the first of the snow pictures and contemporaneous with the move to Brussels.

History

Private collections; acquired by Oskar Reinhart, the Winterthur industrialist whose collection of French and old-master painting became the Swiss Confederation's 'Am Römerholz' museum in 1970; in Winterthur since. Rarely lent; shown in Vienna in 2018.

What to look at

The snow in the air; the Magi in the shed; the hole in the ice with the water-carriers; the retinue at the left; the stepped gables; the haze at the back; the date. Then compare the Census, three years later, in which the same village is larger and the snow has stopped.

Coda

The Adoration in the Snow is the smallest and the most radical of the Nativities: the first painting of falling snow, and a Christmas picture in which the manger is the hardest thing to find. Bruegel's weather began here, and so did his habit of hiding the point.

The village in detail

The village is a complete Brabant hamlet in snow: a row of houses with stepped gables at the back, a larger house with a tower, a church spire beyond, a barn, the ruined shed of the Nativity with its thatched roof and its broken wall, bare trees, a fence, and in the foreground the frozen river with the crowd at the ice-hole — men and women with buckets, a child on a sledge, a dog — and at the right a group gathering faggots and dragging a log. The Magi's retinue enters at the left, three or four men in turbans and exotic cloaks, with a camel perhaps, half-lost in the snow; a soldier with a pike stands by the shed; a woman looks out of a door. The light is the flat grey of a snowfall, without shadow; the colour is the white of the ground, the brown of the timber, a few reds in the crowd, and the Virgin's blue in the shed's dark — the one strong colour, hidden.

Reinhart and the collection

Oskar Reinhart (1885–1965), heir to a Winterthur trading house, assembled two collections: the Swiss and German pictures of the Kunstmuseum's foundation, and the old masters and French painting of his own villa, Am Römerholz, which he gave to the Swiss Confederation in 1958 with the condition that nothing be lent. The condition has been relaxed for exceptional occasions, of which the 2018 Vienna exhibition was one; the Adoration is otherwise to be seen only in Winterthur, in a room with Cranach and Holbein, where its smallness and its snow are a surprise.

The snow in painting after Bruegel

The device of the falling snow — the screen of white dots over a finished scene — was adopted at once by Pieter the Younger in his copies and by the Flemish winter painters of the 1600s (Gysbrecht Leytens, Denis van Alsloot), and from them by the Dutch; it is the ancestor of every snowfall in Western painting down to Monet's Magpie and the Impressionists' effets de neige. The Winterthur panel is the origin of a genre, at thirty-five centimetres. That is a large claim for a small picture, and it is the right one.

The picture

Oil on oak panel, 117.4 × 162 cm, signed and dated — the date, long read as 1561 and so recorded on Wikidata, was read as 1563 after the 2018–19 restoration in Antwerp — Museum Mayer van den Bergh, Antwerp. The wildest of the Boschian panels, bought by Fritz Mayer van den Bergh at a Cologne auction in 1894 for a few hundred marks, in a state that had made its subject unrecognisable; the restoration of 2018 removed the old varnish and overpaint and returned the picture's colour — a blazing red-orange — and its date.

The scene

A giant woman in a breastplate and helmet, a sword in one hand and a basket of loot in the other, a frying pan and a purse at her belt, strides toward the mouth of hell at the left — a gaping face in the rock with a drawbridge for a tongue — with her mouth open in a shout. Behind her an army of women in aprons loots a house, beating demons with household implements; a giant figure on the roof ladles coins out of his backside with a spoon; the sky is red with fire, a burning city at the right, ships on a black sea, and the whole ground crawls with Bosch's creatures — fish with legs, egg-men, walking jugs, a monster with a spoon. A globe with a cross is upside down at the right.

The proverb and the name

Dulle Griet — 'Mad Meg' — was a proverbial virago: 'she could plunder in front of hell and return unscathed', the saying went, and the picture shows her doing it. The figure was a type of the shrewish, greedy, fearless woman — the Rederijker comedies had her, and the cannon of Ghent was named after her — and the picture was long read as a misogynist satire: Mad Meg and her women as the sins of the female, avarice and wrath and lust. The modern reading is less sure: Meg is a hero as much as a monster, the one figure in the Boschian chaos who is going at hell rather than being dragged into it, and the women behind her are fighting the devils. Whether Bruegel meant a joke about women or an allegory of madness, anger, or the Netherlands in arms — the 1563 date brings it closer to the troubles — the picture's energy is on Meg's side.

The restoration

The 2018–19 treatment at the Antwerp museum, in preparation for the Bruegel year of 2019, was transformative. The darkened varnish had made the picture brown; under it was a sky of fire and a ground of red and orange, with blues and greens in the monsters, so that the panel is now one of the most chromatic of all Bruegels. The date, which had been read as 1561 since the nineteenth century, was re-examined and read as 1563 — which moves the picture from the beginning of the Boschian phase to its end, beside the Triumph of Death and after the Rebel Angels, and makes it the last of the demon pictures.

Bosch and after

Every element is Bosch: the hell-mouth, the burning city, the egg-man, the knife-legged creature, the walking fish are from the Garden and the Haywain and the Last Judgment, which Bruegel knew from the originals in Antwerp collections and from Cock's prints. What is not Bosch is the figure: Meg is a giant, a real woman's body in real armour, painted at a scale and with a directness Bosch never attempted, and the army of women behind her is a crowd of the kind that would fill the Calvary the next year. The picture is the Boschian world invaded by the Bruegelian crowd.

History

In the collection of Rudolf II, recorded at Prague in 1621 as 'Dull Gret'; looted by the Swedes in 1648 and lost from view; resurfaced in Sweden and then in Germany; bought by Mayer van den Bergh in 1894 and the foundation of his museum, which opened in 1904 with the picture as its centrepiece. The museum is its house; it was lent to Vienna in 2018, restored, and returned.

What to look at

Meg's face and the shout; the sword and the basket; the hell-mouth with the drawbridge tongue; the women beating the devils; the figure on the roof with the spoon; the ships; the globe upside down; and, since the cleaning, the red.

Coda

Dulle Griet is Bruegel's last and loudest Bosch, and the only one with a hero. A giant woman in armour charging hell, with the housewives of Brabant behind her, is an image that the sixteenth century would have laughed at and the twentieth has not quite known what to do with. After it he painted no more demons, and the restoration has made it possible to see why: he had used the whole vocabulary at once, and there was nothing left to say in it.

Meg herself

The figure deserves a paragraph. She is the largest human figure Bruegel painted before the late peasants — perhaps sixty centimetres on the panel — and her costume is exact: a breastplate over a bodice, a mail-sleeve, a helmet with a visor raised, an apron, a purse at the belt, a knife in a sheath, the sword in her right hand and a basket of pots and pans and coins in the left, a frying pan under her arm and a jewel-box at her hip. Her face is in profile, thin, open-mouthed, with a staring eye; her hair is loose. She is striding — the left foot forward, the body leaning — and she is the only figure in the picture with a direction. Everything else swirls; she goes. The iconographers' Meg is a type of the greedy shrew, but the painted Meg is a Fury, and the energy of the figure is why the picture was loved by the Expressionists and the Surrealists — James Ensor, Antwerp's own, drew her; the Belgian poets of the 1920s made her a national figure.

The museum and the purchase

Fritz Mayer van den Bergh (1858–1901) was an Antwerp collector of the medieval and the early modern who bought the panel at the Cologne sale of 1894, where it was catalogued under another name and went for 488 marks — one of the legendary bargains of collecting history. His mother built the museum in his memory after his early death, in a neo-Gothic house in the Lange Gasthuisstraat; the Griet has hung at the centre of it since 1904, with the Twelve Proverbs roundel-panel nearby, and the two are the city's principal Bruegels.

The picture

Oil on oak panel, 37.1 × 55.6 cm, signed and dated BRVEGEL M.D.LXIII — Courtauld Gallery, London (Princes Gate Collection, bequest of Count Antoine Seilern, 1978). A small, luminous world-landscape with the Holy Family's flight placed on a path in the foreground, and one of the few Bruegels whose first owner is known: it was in the collection of Cardinal Granvelle, and is recorded in the inventories of his Besançon palace.

The scene

A river valley seen from a high rocky path, with a vast expanse of water — an estuary or a lake — filling the middle distance, mountains at the right, a town on the far shore, and a sky of cloud and light. On the path in the foreground the Virgin rides a donkey with the Child, wrapped in a blue cloak, and Joseph walks ahead with a staff and a bundle; the donkey's hooves are on the edge of the cliff. At the left a pagan idol topples from its pedestal on a tree as the Holy Family passes — the apocryphal legend, from the Pseudo-Matthew, that the idols of Egypt fell at the Child's approach — and the small falling figure is the picture's one miracle. A rock arch stands over the path; a ship is on the water; the light comes from behind the mountains.

Patinir and the world landscape

The subject was Patinir's: the Rest on the Flight and the Flight into Egypt in a panoramic landscape were his most characteristic pictures, and Bruegel's panel is his clearest act of homage to the Antwerp founder of the genre — the same high path, the same expanse of water, the same blue distance. What Bruegel added was weight: the rocks are geological, the water has a surface, the light comes from a source. And scale: the Holy Family are small, as in Patinir, but they are placed at the picture's edge, on the cliff, in a way that makes their journey physically precarious — the donkey's next step is into air.

Granvelle

The panel's provenance is exceptional. Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, Bishop of Arras, Cardinal from 1561, Philip II's chief minister in the Netherlands until his recall in 1564, was the most powerful and the most hated man in the country; he was also a great collector and patron — of Titian, of Leoni, of Antonis Mor — and the Flight is recorded in his collection, which passed to his heirs at Besançon. That Granvelle owned a Bruegel in 1563, and tried after his departure to acquire more through his agent in the Netherlands, is the single most important fact against the political Bruegel: the regime's strongman bought the painter of the Massacre. It also shows the class of buyer the small panels were for — the cabinet of a connoisseur, not the dining room of a merchant.

Technique

The painting is in the miniature manner of the Saul and the Monkeys: the Holy Family is a few centimetres high and completely modelled, the idol a few millimetres, the town on the far shore a scatter of touches; the water is a scumble of white over blue-green with a sail on it; the mountains fade in the aerial perspective of the Months. The panel is in very good condition.

History

Granvelle to his heirs; then the collection of the Counts of Besançon; in England by the twentieth century; bought by Count Antoine Seilern, the Austro-British collector whose Princes Gate collection — with its Rubens sketches and its Tiepolos — was bequeathed to the Courtauld in 1978. The Flight and the grisaille Adulteress are the Courtauld's two Bruegels, both from Seilern, and make London's small university gallery one of the few places outside Vienna with more than one.

What to look at

The donkey's hooves on the cliff edge; the falling idol at the left; the rock arch; the ship; the light behind the mountains; the town. Then the Virgin's blue, which is the one strong colour in a picture of greys and greens.

Coda

The Flight into Egypt is Bruegel's Patinir, and his most delicate landscape: a world of water and light with a family on the edge of it, owned by the man who ran the country. It is the picture to remember when the politics of the late work are argued.

Granvelle's agent and the later pursuit

The documentary detail deserves a sentence more. After Granvelle's recall to Burgundy in 1564 he corresponded with his agent in the Netherlands, Maximilien Morillon, and the correspondence of the 1570s records the Cardinal's wish to acquire Bruegels — and Morillon's reply that the painter's works had become expensive since his death and were being sought by others. This is the first evidence of a Bruegel market, and of prices rising posthumously; it is also evidence that Granvelle's taste for the painter was not a casual purchase but a considered one. The same correspondence shows Granvelle as a collector of Flemish landscape in general, and his palace at Besançon as one of the great cabinets of the century.

The idol

The falling idol at the left, a small grey figure tumbling from its column under a tree, is the picture's theological content and its only action. The legend from the apocryphal Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew — that the idols of the Egyptian city of Sotinen fell when the Child entered — was a standard detail of the Flight in northern painting, and Bruegel kept it, but made it small, and gave the picture's force instead to the cliff's edge. The reading that this is an Erasmian or Reformed picture, with the false image falling and the true one passing unremarked, has been made; it is also simply the story.

Seeing it

The Courtauld hangs the Flight in a small room with the Adulteress grisaille, at eye level, and the two together are the best place in Britain to see what Bruegel's brush did at cabinet scale. The Flight's colour — grey-green water, grey rock, blue distance, the Virgin's blue — is cool and quiet, and its light, which comes from behind the mountains, is the light of a late afternoon; the whole has a stillness that the large panels, with their crowds, never have.

The record

Wikidata keeps a record for the subject — 'The Tower of Babel' as a group of paintings by Bruegel — as well as for the two surviving panels, the 'Great' Tower in Vienna (dated 1563) and the 'Little' Tower in Rotterdam (c. 1568), each of which has its own entry in this catalogue. This entry takes the subject as a whole: what Bruegel made of Babel, why he made it three times, and why the image became the most reproduced picture of a building in the history of art.

Three towers

There were three. Giulio Clovio's inventory of 1578 lists 'a Tower of Babel on ivory' by Bruegel — a miniature, painted in Rome in 1553 or thereabouts during the two men's association, now lost; the Vienna panel, 114 × 155 cm, signed and dated BRVEGEL FE. M.CCCCC.LXIII; and the Rotterdam panel, 60 × 75 cm, unsigned and undated, usually placed in the last years. The subject had a history in the Netherlands — manuscripts, the Grimani Breviary, a panel by Lucas van Valckenborch among many — but nobody before Bruegel had made it the whole of a picture at this scale, and nobody after him could paint it without him.

Genesis and Rome

The text is Genesis 11: the descendants of Noah, speaking one language, build in the plain of Shinar 'a city and a tower whose top may reach unto heaven', and the Lord confounds their language and scatters them. Josephus added the king: Nimrod, 'a bold man of great strength of hand', who persuaded them to build; and it is Nimrod who appears in the Vienna foreground in crown and robe, inspecting the stonemasons, who kneel to him. Bruegel's tower is Roman. Its tiers of arcades are the Colosseum's — the superimposed orders, the arches, the engaged columns — which Bruegel had drawn in 1553 and which Cock had published in his Ruins of Rome of 1551; the ramps and buttresses are Roman engineering; the whole is a ruin being built, a thing that carries its own collapse in its form. The Colosseum was, for the northern humanist, the emblem of pagan Rome's grandeur and fall; to build Babel from it was to put two empires in one image. Whether the picture intended a third — the Church of Rome, which Protestant polemic of the 1560s called Babylon — has been argued since the nineteenth century, and cannot be settled; Bruegel's patrons were Catholic and the reading was available to Catholics too, as a warning against pride.

The Vienna tower

The Great Tower rises from the edge of a port — Antwerp's, with its quays, cranes, ships and warehouses — and leans; the lean is slight but visible, the consequence of a foundation that is sinking at the left into the harbour. Its form is a spiral: a ramp winds round the core, and the core is a rock, a natural outcrop that the builders have cut into and built around, so that the tower is partly mountain. Seven tiers are distinguishable. The lowest are complete and inhabited — houses built into the arches, washing on lines, a chapel, a procession; the middle tiers are under construction, with the whole technology of sixteenth-century building shown in working detail: treadwheel cranes, hoists, scaffolding on putlogs, mortar-mixing, the dressing of stone, the carrying of hods, a pulley system to lift blocks; the upper tiers are bare masonry and raw rock, barely begun, the spiral ramp cut through the mountain and the top lost in a cloud. Around the base the city spreads out to the horizon, its houses no larger than the tower's bricks. Nimrod and his court occupy the lower left, among blocks of stone. The painting contains some thousand figures.

The Rotterdam tower

The Little Tower is darker, later, and more disquieting. There is no Nimrod, no foreground court; the tower fills the panel almost to the edges, and it is higher in proportion to its base — a narrower, more vertiginous spiral — its upper storeys reaching into the cloud layer, which it pierces; its arches are painted in a deep red-brown that makes the structure look like a furnace or a termite mound. The port at its foot is seen from above; the ships are minute; the landscape is a flat green Brabant. Many readers have found the later tower more pessimistic — the building has outgrown its builders, the cloud is closer, the detail has been replaced by mass — and have placed it among the late 'disenchanted' works with the Blind and the Misanthrope. The panel came to Rotterdam with the van Beuningen collection in 1958.

What the building means

The interpretations fall into families. The moral-theological: Babel as pride, and the tower's collapse as God's judgement on human presumption — the reading the text invites and the sixteenth century would have assumed. The political: the tower as the Habsburg empire, a polyglot construction doomed to fall, or as Antwerp, the polyglot commercial city whose hubris was its stock-in-trade — the second of these is strengthened by the port. The ecclesiastical: Babel as Babylon as Rome. The humanist-technological: the picture as a celebration of building, a Theatrum Machinarum in which the interest is in how things are made. And the Ortelian: the picture as a thing in which 'more is understood than is painted', an image of effort as such, of the human condition as building-against-collapse. The most recent scholarship has stressed how exact the building is — each crane is a working machine, the sequence of construction is correct, the stone is real stone — and has read this exactness as the picture's ethic: Bruegel took human work seriously enough to get it right.

The reception of the image

No other Bruegel has had the afterlife of the Tower. It was copied in the seventeenth century by Pieter the Younger and by Valckenborch, Marten van Cleve and others; it was engraved; it entered every illustrated Bible of the Counter-Reformation at one remove. In the twentieth century it became the universal emblem of the over-reaching project — of the skyscraper, the computer, the European Union (a notorious 1992 Council of Europe poster redrew it with the stars), the Internet — and of the confusion of languages, so that every book on translation and every conference on linguistics has it on the cover. It has been built in Lego, computed in three dimensions and animated; the philosopher Jacques Derrida's essay 'Des Tours de Babel' took its title from the plurality of Bruegel's towers. Its success is the success of an image that is both an argument and a thing — a building you can walk round in your mind.

Technique

Both panels are painted with Bruegel's characteristic economy at astonishing density: the Vienna tower's thousand figures, each a few strokes, are set against a structure drawn with a ruler-straight precision of arcade and shadow; the colour is a warm brick-pink and stone-buff for the tower, a cool grey-green for the landscape and a pale blue sky. The Vienna panel was studied in the campaign for the 2018 exhibition; its underdrawing shows the tower's spiral laid out with care and figures added freely. The Vienna museum's 'Inside Bruegel' website lets the viewer zoom the picture to the brick, which is, for the Tower, the only way to see it.

What to look at

In Vienna: Nimrod and the kneeling masons at the lower left; the crane on the fourth tier with its treadwheel and the men walking inside it; the houses in the arches of the second tier with their washing; the cloud through which the top disappears; the port with its ships at the right, and the hoist lowering a block to the quay. Count the tiers. Find where the tower leans. In Rotterdam: the red of the arches; the cloud pierced; the tiny boats at the foot; the absence of a king.

Coda

Bruegel painted the Tower first in Rome, in miniature, at twenty-five; then in Antwerp, at the height of his powers, at the size of a table; then in Brussels, at the end, in a darker key. It was the one subject he returned to at every stage, and it was the subject in which his two great faculties — the encyclopaedic and the elegiac, the counting of every brick and the cloud over everything — were most completely fused. The two panels that survive are, together, the most famous building never built.

The building in detail: a tour of the Vienna tower

Since the Great Tower is a picture to be walked round, a tour is in order. Begin at the bottom left, with Nimrod: crowned, in a long blue-grey robe with a sceptre, attended by courtiers and a soldier, receiving the homage of the stonemasons, who kneel on the ground among half-dressed blocks; one mason has dropped his mallet to prostrate himself — the first instance of pride, before the tower's. Above and behind them the ramp begins: a paved road with carts hauling stone. The first tier's arcade is complete, its arches glazed and occupied — a town has grown into it, with houses, chimneys, a tiled roof, and a procession with a banner entering an arch. The second tier is finished in the nearer half and under construction behind, where scaffolding is lashed to the arches with ropes and workers lay ashlar. On the third tier the great treadwheel crane stands on the ramp, men walking in its drum, a block rising on its rope; a second crane of the lever type works beside it. The fourth and fifth tiers are raw: red brick being laid over a rubble core, the ramp cut through the living rock of the outcrop on which the whole stands, so that the tower's centre is a mountain wearing a building. The sixth and seventh dissolve into scaffolding and cloud. On the far side the tower is lower — the spiral is uneven, the construction has advanced unequally — and at the rear it has begun to collapse, a section of arcade fallen into the rock. Round the base: the port, with a quay where ships unload stone, a crane on the quay, a row of warehouses, fishermen; and the plain of Brabant with its green fields, its roads, its villages to the horizon. The sky is pale; the cloud that hides the summit is the only weather.

The question of the model

Two sources have been proposed for the tower's form beyond the Colosseum: the ziggurats of Mesopotamia, which the sixteenth century knew only from description, and — more persuasively — the spiral minaret of the Great Mosque of Samarra, which Bruegel cannot have seen but which had entered European imagery through travellers' accounts and through Pieter Coecke's Turkish journey. The more interesting observation is that Bruegel's tower is structurally incoherent: it is built from the outside in, its arcades are laid before its core, the ramp cuts the building in ways that would make the upper storeys unreachable. The incoherence is the point. The tower is an image of a project that cannot be completed because its conception is wrong, and the Antwerp humanists who bought it, some of whom were engineers, would have enjoyed the exactness of the impossibility.

The two towers compared

Set side by side — as they were in Vienna in 2018, when Rotterdam lent its panel — the two towers tell the story of the painter's last five years in one pair of images. The Vienna tower is a morning picture: the light is clear, the sky is blue, the port is busy, a king inspects his works, and the collapse is a detail at the back. The Rotterdam tower is an evening picture: the structure is red-brown as if heated from within, the cloud is low and pierced, the king has gone, the port is tiny, and the tower is not so much a building as a force rising out of the plain. The first is an argument about pride with a thousand illustrations; the second is the same argument with the illustrations removed. Between them lies the Calvary, the Months, and the troubles; the second tower is the first seen after the fall.

The picture

Oil on oak panel, 114 × 155 cm, signed and dated BRVEGEL FE. M.CCCCC.LXIII at the lower left — Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. The larger of the two surviving Towers, the subject of a full treatment in the entry on the Babel paintings as a group; this entry records the Vienna panel's own history.

Provenance

The panel was owned by Nicolaes Jonghelinck by 1566, when the Antwerp financier's pledge of his collection to the city lists 'a Tower of Babel' among his sixteen Bruegels; it passed with the Months and the Calvary to the city, to the Archduke Ernst in 1594, to Rudolf II at Prague, and to the Vienna gallery, where it has been since the seventeenth century. It is therefore, with the Calvary, the Months and the Carnival, one of the core of the Habsburg Bruegels, and it is the picture that Van Mander would have had in mind when he wrote that the Emperor had gathered up the painter's works.

The panel

The Vienna tower's inscription is the fullest Bruegel wrote — 'BRVEGEL FE[CIT]', 'made it', with the year in Roman numerals — and its placement on a block of stone in the foreground, beside Nimrod's masons, makes the signature a part of the building: the painter's name among the stones. The 2018 examination confirmed the Baltic oak, the thin ground, the confident underdrawing with the spiral laid out by compass, and the condition as very good.

The port

The harbour at the tower's foot is Antwerp's, with its cranes and its ships; the round mole that encloses it is the invention of the Doria Naval Battle; the plain beyond is Brabant's. The picture is the Antwerp of 1563 with Babel in its middle.

Seeing it

The 'Inside Bruegel' digital project of the Vienna museum, made for 2018, allows the panel to be examined to the brick, and is the only way to see the figures on the upper tiers; in the gallery the tower reads from across the room as a single form, and from a foot away as a city.

The Vienna panel and Jonghelinck's room

One consequence of the Jonghelinck provenance deserves notice: the Tower hung at Ter Beken with the Months and the Calvary, and a visitor to the financier's suburban house in 1566 would have seen, in a few rooms, the largest concentration of Bruegel ever assembled in the painter's lifetime — sixteen works, including the six Months and this. The Habsburg purchase of 1594 kept the core together, which is why Vienna has what it has; the Tower is the emblem of that continuity, and the one picture in the museum that every visitor comes for. The 2018 exhibition, which reunited the Vienna and Rotterdam towers, was the first occasion since the sixteenth century on which the two could be compared in one room. The comparison, as the entry on the Babel paintings argues, showed two towers and one idea.

What to look at

Nimrod; the signature on the stone; the houses in the arches; the cranes; the cloud at the top; the lean.

The picture

Oil on oak panel, grisaille, 36 × 55 cm, signed BRVEGEL (undated; usually placed c. 1564) — Upton House, Warwickshire (National Trust, Bearsted collection). One of the three surviving grisailles, and the one with the most distinguished early owner: it belonged to Abraham Ortelius, who had it engraved by Philips Galle in 1574 and distributed the prints to his friends with a Latin inscription praising the painter.

The scene

A bedchamber at night: the Virgin lies in a curtained bed at the right, a candle held to her by St Peter in a cope, the apostles and a crowd of holy women and mourners gathered round her in the darkness, some kneeling, some at the bed's foot; a fire burns in a hearth at the left, where a figure sleeps in a chair — St John, in the apocryphal account, who dozed and missed the death; a cat is by the fire; a table with a candle and a crucifix stands at the centre; the light comes from the candles and the fire, and everything else is in shadow.

Night and the grisaille

The panel is the first night scene in Bruegel's work and one of the first in Netherlandish painting in which light is the subject: the candle-glow on the Virgin's face, the fire's light on the sleeper, the darkness between. The grisaille medium — greys and browns, without colour — made the light the picture's only event, and the handling, soft and blended as in the Adulteress, is that of a painter working at the scale of the miniature. The subject, the Dormition, was a medieval one that the Counter-Reformation was beginning to discourage; Bruegel's treatment is devotional and intimate, a deathbed among friends.

Ortelius and the print

Ortelius's ownership makes the panel a document of the painter's circle: the geographer, the friend, the author of the epitaph that says 'more is understood than is painted', chose this picture to have engraved, and the print's Latin inscription — composed by Ortelius himself — praises Bruegel for painting grief without theatricality. The print spread the composition; the panel stayed with Ortelius and then disappeared until the twentieth century.

History

Ortelius; untraced; bought by Walter Samuel, 2nd Viscount Bearsted, the Shell heir whose collection at Upton House — with its Bosch, its Hogarth and its Stubbs — was given to the National Trust in 1948; Upton since.

What to look at

The candle at the Virgin's face; the sleeper by the fire; the cat; the crucifix on the table; the crowd in the dark; the signature. Then the light, which is the picture.

The Dormition in Bruegel's time

The death of the Virgin — her Dormition, surrounded by the apostles miraculously gathered — was a medieval feast and a standard subject of the fifteenth century (Hugo van der Goes's Bruges panel is the greatest Netherlandish example); by the 1560s the subject's apocryphal sources were under suspicion and it was falling from altarpieces. Bruegel's version is not an altarpiece but a night-piece, and its emphasis on the candle, the fire and the crowd in the dark makes it a domestic death rather than a heavenly event: a woman dying in a room, among people who love her, one of whom has fallen asleep. The print's Latin verses, by Ortelius, praise the picture for showing grief without display; the panel shows it without light.

The picture

Oil on oak panel, 112.1 × 83.9 cm, signed and dated BRVEGEL M.D.LXIIII — National Gallery, London, bought in 1920. Bruegel's only large painting in upright format, his only large close-up religious composition, and — with its harsh faces and its whispering Joseph — one of the strangest Adorations in European art.

The scene

The Virgin sits at the centre, veiled, in a blue cloak, with the Child on her knee; he shrinks from the gift the oldest king, Caspar, kneeling at the left in a red robe with an ermine collar and a long grey beard, holds out — a golden ship or a model vessel on a dish; Melchior kneels behind Caspar, his gift a golden object shaped like a nautilus; Balthazar, the black king, stands at the right in a white robe with a gold chain, holding a gold-and-green vessel; Joseph stands behind the Virgin, an old man in a brown hood, listening to a man who whispers in his ear; a crowd of soldiers with lances, pikes and crossbows presses in from the left and the back, their faces ugly, staring; a man in spectacles peers at the gifts from the right edge; the stable's wooden wall and a thatched roof close the top. There is no landscape; the figures fill the frame.

The faces

The picture is famous for its faces, which are the coarsest Bruegel painted: the soldiers are gap-toothed, slack-jawed, squinting; the old Caspar's profile is a beak; the spectacled man at the right is a grotesque; the whisperer at Joseph's ear is sly. Only the Virgin and the Child are gentle, and the Child is afraid. The older literature read this as satire — the world's folly at the manger — and the Reformed reading found in it a critique of the Church's ceremonies (the gifts are luxury objects, the worshippers are soldiers). The modern reading, beginning with Tolnay, is that the faces are the faces of the crowd in the Calvary brought close: humanity as it is, gawping at the miracle without understanding it. The whispering to Joseph has been read as the suggestion that the child is not his — the medieval comedy of the doubting Joseph — and as something darker: the first rumour.

The upright format and the source

Bruegel's large pictures are all landscape-format panoramas; this one is upright and close, and its source is clear: it is a painting in the manner of the Adoration type of Bosch (the Prado triptych), and beyond Bosch, of the Italian Adorations with kneeling kings in three-quarter length that Bruegel would have seen in Rome. The black king in white is Bosch's, almost directly. The picture is an exercise in a borrowed form, and the exercise is what gives it its unease — Bruegel's crowd in a composition built for devotion.

Technique

The handling is broader and harder than in the panoramas: the faces are modelled with a loaded brush, the robes laid in large areas of red, white and blue, the soldiers' armour in greys with highlights. The panel has suffered: it was at some point cut down slightly, and the surface has old damage and restoration, particularly in the background; the National Gallery's cleaning in the 1980s recovered much. The date on the panel is secure.

History

Private collections; in the nineteenth century in Vienna (the Georg Roth collection) and then in England; bought by the National Gallery in 1920 with the aid of the Art Fund — one of the gallery's major acquisitions of the interwar years and its only Bruegel. A second Adoration composition, in Brussels (c. 1556), is earlier and of disputed status.

What to look at

The Child's shrinking; Caspar's beak; the golden ship; Balthazar in white; the man with spectacles; the whisperer; the crossbows; the soldiers' teeth. Then the Virgin, who is the only calm in the picture.

Coda

The London Adoration is the picture in which Bruegel brought his crowd to the foreground and looked at its faces. The result is a Christmas picture without tenderness, except in one figure, and it shows what the panoramas had kept at a distance: that the people in Bruegel's pictures, seen close, are not pleasant, and that he knew it.

The gifts

The three gifts are the picture's most splendid passages and the most discussed. Caspar's is a golden vessel in the form of a ship — a nef, the table-ornament of princely dining — on a dish; Melchior's is a gilt cup shaped like a nautilus shell with a mounted lid; Balthazar's is a covered vessel of green and gold in the form of a sphere on a stand — perhaps an incense-burner, for the myrrh. They are goldsmiths' work of the Antwerp fashion of the 1560s, painted with the exactness of a jeweller's inventory, and they have been read as an index of the luxury that the Reformers attacked in the Church's ceremonies and as a simple record of what the kings would have brought. The Child's recoil from the ship is the picture's psychological centre: the infant does not want the gold.

The Brussels Adoration and the two formats

The National Gallery panel has a sibling in Brussels, an Adoration of c. 1556 in landscape format with a crowd in a ruined building, whose attribution has been much disputed (workshop, early Bruegel, or a close follower); the London picture's upright format and its close-up conception are so unlike the Brussels panel that the two have sometimes been used to argue that Bruegel's early manner was a different one. The better explanation is patronage: the London Adoration was made for a devotional purpose — a chapel or a private oratory — in a format that purpose required, and Bruegel obliged with a picture that kept the format and subverted the mood.

Seeing it

The National Gallery hangs the Adoration in its sixteenth-century Netherlandish room, and it is the picture in that room that visitors stop at with a look of puzzlement; it is not comfortable. The best approach is to go close and look at the faces one at a time — the spectacled man, the soldier with the crossbow, Caspar's profile — and then to step back and find the Virgin, who is painted in an entirely different register of calm. The contrast is the picture.

The picture

Oil on oak panel, 124 × 170 cm, signed and dated BRVEGEL M.D.LXIIII at the lower right — Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. The largest of Bruegel's paintings, and the one in which the method of the hidden sacred event — the miracle in the middle of a crowd that has not noticed — is given its fullest statement. Owned by Nicolaes Jonghelinck, recorded in his collection in 1566; to the Habsburgs with the rest, and in Vienna since.

The scene

A vast landscape — a plain with a rocky outcrop at the left on which a windmill stands, a city at the far left, the hill of Calvary at the upper right, where a circle of spectators already waits around the two thieves' crosses — across which a crowd of several hundred streams from the city toward the hill. In the exact centre, small, Christ has fallen under the cross; soldiers in red coats — the Habsburg militia's colour — drive the procession; a cart carries the two thieves, confessed by friars; a woman resists a soldier who is pressing her husband, Simon of Cyrene, to carry the cross; children play; peddlers sell; a crowd of gawpers runs to get a good place on the hill. In the foreground at the right, on a rocky ledge, in an entirely different style — the elongated, grave, old-fashioned style of Rogier van der Weyden — the Virgin swoons, supported by St John and the holy women. The sky is half stormy, half clear; the mill on its rock is the picture's vertical.

The two styles

The foreground mourners are the picture's boldest device. They are painted larger than anyone else, in the drapery and the pathos of a fifteenth-century altarpiece, as if quoted from a Van der Weyden Deposition; the crowd behind them is painted in Bruegel's own quick, contemporary manner. The contrast has been read as a contrast of time (the sacred past and the profane present), of mode (the devotional image and the genre scene), and of attention (those who see what is happening and those who do not). The mourners are the picture's only figures who are grieving; everyone else is going to a show.

The crowd

The procession is the Calvary of the Flemish tradition — Herri met de Bles, Pieter Aertsen and the Brunswick Monogrammist had painted the way to Calvary as a crowd in landscape — with its numbers multiplied and its indifference made the point. Bruegel's crowd runs, strolls, gossips, sells, fights, plays; it wears the dress of 1564; its soldiers are the red-coated militia of the Brabant towns; its execution is the ordinary Flemish execution, with the wheel on its pole at the right and the crowd circling the place in a ring. Christ is at the centre of the panel and is the hardest thing to find, which is the meaning: the event that would save the world is happening, and the world is not looking.

The mill

The windmill on its pinnacle of rock at the upper left, impossibly high, has been read as the symbol of the Eucharist (the mill that grinds the bread), as the Church, as the wheel of fortune, and as a mill; it is certainly the picture's axis, the one vertical in a composition of diagonals, and its rock is a quotation from the Alps.

Readings

The Calvary is the picture most used by the 'Erasmian' reading of Bruegel: the Passion enacted in a heedless present, in the manner of Erasmus's complaint that Christ's followers do not see him. It is also the picture most used by the political reading — the red-coated soldiers as the regime's — and by the formal reading, in which the great circle of the crowd, the diagonal of the procession and the ring on the hill make a composition of extraordinary control. Lech Majewski's film The Mill and the Cross (2011), built on Michael Francis Gibson's book, reconstructed the picture as a day in the Netherlands under Spanish occupation, with Rutger Hauer as the painter; it is the most elaborate response any Bruegel has received.

Technique and condition

The panel is the largest he used — five boards — and was painted in the standard manner; the underdrawing, examined in Vienna, shows the crowd planned in groups with figures added and moved. The condition is good; the cleaning for 2018 recovered the sky's contrast.

History

Jonghelinck (1566 inventory, as 'a Carrying of the Cross'); to the city of Antwerp; to the Archduke Ernst; to Rudolf II; to Vienna. One of the first Bruegels to enter the Habsburg collection, and the one Van Mander singled out among the Emperor's pictures.

What to look at

Find Christ — under the cross, at the centre, in blue. Then the mourners at the right and their style; the cart with the thieves and the friars; Simon's wife fighting the soldiers; the ring on the hill; the wheel; the mill; the red coats; the peddler; the running children; the sky's division. Count the horses.

Coda

The Procession to Calvary is Bruegel's largest picture and his most argued: the Passion as a public holiday, seen from a hill, with the only mourners painted in a style a hundred years old. It is the statement, at full scale, of what the Sower had done in a corner — that the event and the world are two different sizes, and that the painter is the only one who sees both.

The execution ground

The hill at the upper right repays a long look. The ring of spectators — several hundred figures on foot and horseback, in a circle around the two crosses already raised — is painted with the same touch as the skaters in the Hunters, each a stroke or two; the empty space in the middle of the ring, where the third cross will stand, is the picture's other centre, a hole in the crowd that the procession is moving toward. Beside the ring a wheel on a pole carries a corpse; a gallows stands behind; the landscape beyond is a flat plain with a town. The execution ground is the ordinary Flemish galgenveld, outside the walls, where the crowd assembled for a hanging; Bruegel's viewers had stood in such rings.

The picture

Oil on oak panel, grisaille, 24.1 × 34.4 cm, signed and dated BRVEGEL M.D.LXV at the lower left — Courtauld Gallery, London (Seilern bequest, 1978). One of three surviving grisailles by Bruegel and the one whose history is best recorded: Van Mander says the painter left it to his widow, and it stayed in the family — Jan Brueghel owned it, and it descended to his heirs — for a century; it is the small private picture of the œuvre.

The scene

John 8: the Pharisees bring to Christ a woman taken in adultery and ask whether she should be stoned; he stoops and writes on the ground; 'he that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone'; and they go out one by one. Bruegel painted Christ kneeling at the centre, writing in Dutch on the flagstones — DIE SONDER SONDE IS DIE … 'he that is without sin' — with the woman standing beside him, her hands folded, in a long gown, and the Pharisees gathered at the left, one reading the words, others turning away; a crowd recedes into an arched space behind. The whole is in tones of grey, brown and white — a grisaille — with the figures modelled in a soft light and the architecture in shadow.

Grisaille

Painting in monochrome was the mode of the miniature, of the altarpiece's closed wings, of the demonstration piece, and Bruegel had practised it since the Mechelen altar wings of 1550. The Adulteress is grisaille at its most refined: the figures have the sculptural roundness of relief, the light is a single source, and the handling — soft, blended, without the dark contours of the panoramas — is unlike anything else in the œuvre. Van Mander called it 'very subtly executed', and the subtlety is the point: this was a picture made to be held and examined.

The subject and its moment

The story's moral — judge not — was an Erasmian favourite, and a picture of it in 1565, when the Netherlands' religious divisions were becoming persecutions, has been read as a plea for tolerance; the Dutch inscription, which the viewer can read as the Pharisee reads it, makes the moral explicit. Whether Bruegel meant it as a statement about the heresy trials, about the Inquisition, or simply about the Gospel's most humane episode, cannot be known; it is the one picture he kept.

The figures

The composition is Italianate in a way the panoramas are not: the figures are large, in three-quarter length, arranged in a frieze with a central kneeling figure and a standing one, as in a Raphael or a Sebastiano; the woman's pose, with her hands crossed and her head inclined, has the grace of an Italian Madonna. The Roman journey shows here as it does nowhere else in Bruegel's painting, and it is telling that it shows in a grisaille — the mode of the private demonstration.

History

Bruegel's widow; Jan Brueghel the Elder, who refused to sell it (a letter of 1609 records the refusal); Jan's heirs; then through Flemish and English collections; Count Antoine Seilern, who bought it in 1950s and bequeathed it to the Courtauld with the Flight into Egypt. Engraved in 1579 by Pieter Perret — the print's inscription identifies the painting as Bruegel's — which spread the composition.

What to look at

The inscription on the ground, and the Pharisee reading it; Christ's stooped profile; the woman's hands; the figures turning away at the left; the crowd in the arch; the modelling of the grey. Then the size — the picture is smaller than a sheet of paper.

Coda

The Adulteress is the picture Bruegel kept, and it is the one in which he painted most like an Italian and most like a sculptor, in grey, on a panel the size of a hand. Its subject is mercy; its handling is tenderness; and it is the one work in the œuvre about which we know the painter cared.

The inscription

The words Christ writes on the flagstones are legible: DIE SONDER SONDE IS DIE — and the sentence continues on the next flag, 'werpe de eerste steen' (let him cast the first stone), with the letters partly hidden by the figures. The choice of Dutch rather than Latin is a small but deliberate thing: the viewer who holds the panel reads the words as the Pharisees do, and reads them in the language in which the sermons of the day were being argued. Inscriptions in the vernacular are rare in Bruegel — the Saul has its Latin citation, the Misanthrope its Dutch couplet — and in each case the text is the picture's key.

Jan Brueghel and the refusal to sell

The documentary detail of the picture's history is unique in the œuvre. In 1609 Cardinal Federico Borromeo of Milan, Jan Brueghel's patron and the founder of the Ambrosiana, asked Jan through an intermediary for the grisaille, and Jan refused — the letter survives — on the grounds that it was his father's and that he would not part with it. The refusal is the only evidence we have of what the sons thought of the father's work, and it is eloquent: the most successful painter of his generation in Antwerp kept his father's smallest picture as the one thing he would not sell.

Seeing it

At the Courtauld the grisaille hangs beside the Flight into Egypt in a small room, at eye level, in a deep frame; it is easily missed and should be sought out. Close, the modelling of the grey — the woman's gown, Christ's sleeve, the flagstones — has the softness of a wash drawing, and the faces of the Pharisees, turning away, are among the most subtly characterised in Bruegel's work: not grotesques but men caught out. The print by Perret, which reversed the composition, gives the picture's seventeenth-century fame; the panel gives its intimacy. Seilern bought it in 1950s London, when such things could still be bought, and his bequest brought it into public view for the first time in four centuries. The Courtauld's catalogue entry is the fullest account of its history.

The record

Wikidata keeps an entry for the series of the Months painted for Nicolaes Jonghelinck in 1565, as well as for each surviving panel; this entry treats the cycle as a whole. Its members, each with its own commentary in this catalogue: The Gloomy Day (February–March, Vienna), the lost spring panel (April–May), The Hay Harvest (June–July, Prague), The Harvesters (August–September, New York), The Return of the Herd (October–November, Vienna), and The Hunters in the Snow (December–January, Vienna).

The commission

Jonghelinck's pledge of 21 February 1566 — a document by which the financier, standing surety for a friend's debt to the city of Antwerp, listed his collection as security — names sixteen Bruegels, including 'the Twelve Months'. The phrase has been read as twelve panels (one per month) or as a series representing the twelve months in fewer panels; the survival of five of equal format, each covering two months' labours, and the absence of any trace of seven others, has made six the consensus. The series hung at Jonghelinck's suburban house, Ter Beken, with Floris's Labours of Hercules; it was his and the century's grandest commission from a living Netherlandish painter.

The calendar tradition

The Labours of the Months descended from the calendar pages of books of hours and from the cycles in church sculpture: each month its labour (February pruning, June haymaking, August reaping, November pig-killing, December hunting) under its zodiac sign. Bruegel kept the labours, dropped the signs, and made each panel a landscape whose subject was the weather of its season — the first such series in painting, and the origin of the seasonal landscape in European art.

The common structure

All five surviving panels share a structure: a high near ground at the left with the labour, a fall to a valley at the right, a far range of mountains, and a sky that carries the season's light. Hung together round a room, they would have made a continuous panorama of the year, with the viewpoint moving round the walls. The 2018 Vienna exhibition, which brought four of the five together (Prague, New York and the three Vienna panels), was the nearest approach to the original hang in four centuries.

History

Jonghelinck to the city (1566); to the Archduke Ernst (1594); to Rudolf II at Prague; to Vienna (three panels), Prague (the Lobkowicz Hay Harvest) and, by a dispersal of unknown date, New York (the Harvesters, bought 1919); the sixth panel lost — or, some have hoped, surviving unrecognised.

What to look at

The series as a year: storm, hay, heat, herd, snow. Then the structure, which is the same in all five, and the sky, which is different in each.

The lost panel

The missing spring panel — April–May, with the labours of the garden, the sheep-shearing and the May festival — is the œuvre's most tantalising absence; the Albertina's drawing of Spring (1565), designed for the seasons series of prints, shows what its foreground might have been, and a painting of the Spring subject by Pieter the Younger's circle may reflect it. Searches of the Prague and Vienna inventories have not found it; the hope that it survives under another name in a private house is the Bruegel scholar's oldest daydream.

The picture

Oil on oak panel, 118 × 163 cm, signed and dated BRVEGEL MDLXV at the lower right — Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. The first panel, in the year's order, of the Months painted for Nicolaes Jonghelinck in 1565, representing late winter and early spring — February and March, in the six-panel reconstruction — and the darkest in key of the five that survive. Its Dutch title, De sombere dag, is modern; the Vienna inventories called it simply a winter landscape.

The scene

A high bank at the left with a village, an inn and a church, where peasants are at the season's work — pollarding willows, cutting and binding withies, mending a fence, and, in the foreground, a group of Carnival figures: a man eating waffles, a child in a paper crown with a lantern, a man in a fool's costume, a woman with a bundle; the bank drops to a river valley at the right, where a flooded estuary is lashed by a storm — ships are breaking up on the shore, one has lost its mast, one is aground, and tiny figures are salvaging on the beach — and beyond, a range of mountains under a sky of the most turbulent weather in Bruegel: a black cloud-mass at the left breaking to a livid yellow light at the right, with rain slanting over the far hills. The colours are browns, ochres, dull greens and greys, with the water a leaden silver; the trees are bare.

February and March

The month is given by the labours — pollarding was a February task — and by the Carnival figures, who place the scene in the days before Lent; the waffles are Shrovetide food, the paper crown is the Carnival king's. The storm on the estuary is the season's weather in the Scheldt delta, where the spring tides and the March gales wrecked ships every year. Bruegel painted the turn of the year as a struggle: the village's small orderly labours against a sky and a sea that are tearing the world up.

The sky

The sky is the picture's subject and is painted with a freedom that has no parallel in the series: the cloud at the left is a mass of dark grey-brown laid with a broad brush, the break at the right is a yellow-white scumble, the rain over the mountains is a few diagonal strokes of grey, and the whole is in motion. The 2018 examination found the sky unusually thinly painted, the pale ground used as the light in the break. The storm light falls on the water and the far hills and leaves the village in shadow: the near world is dark, the far one lit, which reverses the convention and gives the picture its unease.

The series

In the reconstruction of the six Months as two months each, the Gloomy Day begins the year (February–March), followed by the lost spring panel (April–May), the Hay Harvest (June–July), the Harvesters (August–September), the Return of the Herd (October–November) and the Hunters (December–January). The alternative reconstruction, twelve panels of one month each, is now generally rejected. The Gloomy Day's structure — high left, valley right, mountains behind — is the series', and its brown palette pairs it with the Return of the Herd: the two panels of the year's dark half, hung, presumably, on either side of the Hunters.

The condition of the greens

The panel's dullness is partly chemical: the copper greens of the fields and trees have browned, as in the Return of the Herd, so that the picture is now more monochrome than it was painted; the Magpie in Darmstadt, whose greens survive, shows what these panels have lost. The Vienna cleaning of the 2010s recovered the sky's contrast and the water's silver.

History

Jonghelinck (1566); the city of Antwerp; the Archduke Ernst (1594); Rudolf II; Vienna. One of the three Months that have been in the imperial gallery since the seventeenth century.

What to look at

The ships breaking up; the figures on the beach; the pollarders on the bank; the waffle-eater and the child with the lantern; the fence-mender; the church; the yellow break in the sky; the rain; the bare trees against the cloud. Then the whole from a distance: a picture that is dark on the left and light on the right, with the light on the wrong side.

Coda

The Gloomy Day is the hardest of the Months to love and the most daring in its weather. It opens the year in storm, with the village at its chores and the ships on the rocks, and it was the first picture in European painting to make a sky the thing that happens.

The foreground figures, and the Carnival

The figures on the bank are worth separating. At the far left, two men pollard a willow with a billhook and an axe, a third bundles the withies; a man mends a fence with a mallet; a woman carries a bundle on her head; behind them, a man loads a cart by the inn, whose sign hangs from a bracket. In the right foreground, the Carnival group: a man in a brown cloak eating a waffle, a small child in a paper crown and a bell-hung collar carrying a lantern — the Carnival 'king' of the children's processions — a man in a hood with a woman on his arm. Beyond them the bank falls to the river and the beach with the wrecks. The placing of the Carnival figures at the front of a landscape whose subject is labour and storm has been read as a comment (folly in the face of the weather) and as a calendar mark (Shrovetide falls in February); it is both, and the child with the lantern is the tenderest figure in the series.

The wrecks

The shipwrecks on the estuary are a painting within the painting: a carrack with a broken mast and its sail in the water; a second ship driven onto the shore, with men on the beach pulling at a line; a third under bare poles, riding the storm; boats; the far shore with a town and a church. The sea is a leaden grey-green with white crests painted in single strokes, the beach a pale curve. Bruegel's shipping is Antwerp's, exact to the rigging, and his storm is the North Sea's; the passage is the origin of the Flemish marine.