III. At the Four Winds: Bruegel as print designer

Hieronymus Cock had opened his print shop, In de Vier Winden — 'At the Four Winds' — in 1548, and by the mid-1550s it was the most important publishing house for images in Europe, issuing engravings after Raphael, Bronzino and Frans Floris alongside maps, architectural plates and the Roman ruins Cock had drawn himself. Cock was a businessman of genius. He saw that the public that bought Bosch — or bought anything that could be called Bosch, for the dead master of 's-Hertogenbosch had become, forty years after his death, a brand — would buy a living designer who could do the same thing, and he found one. Bruegel's Big Fish Eat Little Fish was engraved by Pieter van der Heyden and published in 1557 with the inscription Hieronymus Bos inuentor. The drawing, in the Albertina, is signed by Bruegel and dated 1556. The publisher had sold the young man's invention under the old man's name, and this was not fraud so much as marketing: the buyer was being told what kind of thing he was getting.

For the next eight years Bruegel was, for most of Europe, a print designer. The sequence is the backbone of his early work and it is well represented here: Big Fish Eat Little Fish (1556); the Seven Deadly Sins (drawings 1556–57, engraved 1558), seven compositions in which the Boschian apparatus of hybrid demons, burning cities and grotesque machines is deployed with a ferocious inventiveness that in fact surpasses its model in density; the Last Judgment (1558); The Alchemist, The Ass at School, Everyman, The Witch of Mallegem (1559); the Seven Virtues (drawings 1559–60), in which the tone changes — the demons withdraw, and the virtues are illustrated by panoramas of ordinary human activity: Justice by the full grim repertory of sixteenth-century punishment, Prudence by a village securing its winter, Temperance by the liberal arts at their labours, Hope by a shipwreck. Then The Fair at Hoboken (1559), Skating before St George's Gate (1558), The Kermis of St George, the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, and after his move to Brussels, a slackening of the flow — The Rabbit Hunt (1560), his only etching by his own hand; the series of sailing ships; The Beekeepers — until the end.

Three things about this work should be said plainly. First, the moralising inscriptions under the prints — the Latin and Flemish couplets that tell the buyer what the Sins and Virtues mean — were the publisher's, not the designer's, and the modern habit of reading every Bruegel painting as though it carried one such caption is a habit learned from Cock's press. Second, the prints taught Bruegel his method: the high viewpoint; the field scattered with dozens of independent small actions, each a complete vignette, all held together by a ground plane tilted toward the viewer; the economy of the figure, reduced to a few strokes of outline and a shape of light. Third, they made his name. When he began to paint large panels for collectors around 1559, he already had an international reputation, and it was as 'Bosch's successor' — a reputation he would spend the 1560s both exploiting and outgrowing.

III bis. The Antwerp mind: humanists, rhetoricians and the print-buying public

It is worth pausing on the audience, because Bruegel's pictures presuppose one. Antwerp in the 1550s was not only a port; it was a press. Christophe Plantin set up his printing house there in 1555, the year Bruegel began with Cock, and by the 1570s it was the largest in Europe. Ortelius, whose Theatrum Orbis Terrarum of 1570 was the first atlas in the modern sense, was a map-colourer and dealer who attended the Frankfurt fairs with Bruegel's publisher. The Rederijkers, the chambers of rhetoric — the Violieren, attached to the painters' guild; the Goudbloem; the Olijftak — staged moral plays and allegorical competitions in the market squares, and their Landjuweel of 1561, a festival of nineteen chambers with processions and tableaux vivants, was the theatrical event of the decade. Proverb-collections, emblem-books, costume-books, books of the sins and the virtues, the Praise of Folly, the Ship of Fools, the 'world upside down' broadsheets: this was a culture that thought in inventories and allegories, that loved the encyclopaedic form, and that prized wit — the quick, learned, multiple meaning — above everything. Bruegel's merchant patrons were of this world. Jonghelinck's brother was a humanist sculptor; Franckert, the friend of the peasant weddings, was a German merchant and a member of the Violieren; Ortelius's friends included Plantin, Mercator, Lipsius and the English antiquary Camden.

The point of the roll-call is that it settles the old question of whether Bruegel's peasants were painted by one. They were not. They were painted for men who read Erasmus, for rooms in which the allegory on the wall was expected to be argued over at dinner, and by a painter whose friends wrote his epitaph in Latin. The 'Peasant Bruegel' of Van Mander's anecdotes was a literary convention — the artist as the thing he paints — and the prints at Aux Quatre Vents, with their learned captions in two languages, are the proof of what the public actually bought from him: invention, in the humanist sense, by the yard.

IV. Antwerp, 1559–1563: the encyclopaedic panels

The first dated painting to survive with certainty is the Netherlandish Proverbs of 1559, in Berlin, and it is astonishing that an artist should arrive in oil at full scale in such command. The panel measures 117 by 163 centimetres — a format Bruegel would use for nearly all his large panels, the 'standard' size of the Antwerp oak-panel makers — and it contains something over a hundred proverbs, each a small painted enactment: a man banging his head against a brick wall, another carrying daylight out in a basket, a woman hanging a blue cloak on her husband, a roof tiled with tarts, a man shearing a pig while his neighbour shears a sheep. The village stands at the edge of a sea; the colour is distributed through it in the reds and blues of the peasants' clothes like a scatter of berries; and the whole is constructed so that the eye can travel through it for an hour and find no hierarchy, no centre, no principal action — only the world, going wrong in a hundred small ways. Its contemporary title was probably The Blue Cloak, after the central adultery, and its first readers would have recognised the genre: the proverb collection was a humanist fashion — Erasmus's Adagia had gone through edition after edition — and the 'world upside down' was a theme of prints and plays. Bruegel's originality was to make it a place rather than a list.

The Fight Between Carnival and Lent (1559) and Children's Games (1560), both in Vienna and both of the same format, complete a trilogy that was very probably conceived as such. Each takes a single spatial device — the town square seen from a high window — and fills it with a census: the customs of the carnival season and of Lent, the fat man on his barrel jousting with the thin woman on her chair, the church and the inn facing each other across the square; then some eighty games, each played by a group of children with the absorbed, blank, slightly sinister faces Bruegel gave to children, who in his pictures are never charming. Historians have spent a century arguing what these pictures are for. Were they, as the older iconological tradition held, satires on human folly, the children standing for the futility of adult pursuits? Were they, as the ethnographic reading has it, records of customs — visual collections parallel to the proverb books and the costume books that the Antwerp presses poured out? The most persuasive modern view is that they were both, and were meant to be discussed: pictures made for the dining rooms of educated Antwerp merchants, where guests would look and point and argue, and where the encyclopaedic form was itself the pleasure.

The years 1561–63 see the Boschian manner reach its summit in paint and then fall away. Dull Gret (1563, Antwerp) sends a giant housewife in armour, ladle and sword in hand, charging the mouth of hell at the head of a rabble of looting women, in a landscape that burns; The Fall of the Rebel Angels (1562, Brussels) releases an entire zoology of invented creatures — fish with legs, butterflies with human heads, armoured insects — tumbling out of a golden heaven under Michael's sword, in a painting whose colour is more brilliant than anything in Bosch; The Triumph of Death (c. 1562, Madrid) marshals an army of skeletons against the whole of living humanity, king and cardinal and lovers and gamblers, on a scorched plain under a sky the colour of smoke, with the most terrible economy of any picture of its century. These are not illustrations of Bosch; they are the work of a man who had learned Bosch's vocabulary and could speak it faster and with a colder intelligence. And then he stopped. After 1562 the demons vanish from his painting. The last hybrid creatures are the small monsters that creep about the edges of the Dulle Griet; the panels of 1563 onward belong to a different world.

That same year, 1562, produced two small panels that show the new direction: The Suicide of Saul, in which an Old Testament battle is a seething landscape of pikes with the suicide tucked into a corner, and Two Chained Monkeys, in Berlin — a tiny, nearly square panel, twenty by twenty-three centimetres, in which two chained monkeys sit in a window embrasure before a hazy view of Antwerp. Nobody agrees what the monkeys mean (avarice? the bondage of sin? the Netherlands under Spain? a private joke about Antwerp's trade in exotic animals?), and the disagreement is part of the point: here, for the first time, is a picture in which the mood — the grey light, the hunched animals, the nutshells on the sill, the distant city — seems to matter more than the emblem. The painter who had made pictures to be read was beginning to make pictures to be felt.

And in 1563 he painted the Tower of Babel — the great Vienna panel, the most famous building in western art: a spiral ziggurat rising from a Flemish port, encrusted with the Colosseum's arcades, its lower storeys already crumbling while its upper ones are still being raised, a city in itself, with King Nimrod inspecting his masons in the foreground. The Tower is the hinge of the career. It is the last of the great Antwerp encyclopaedias — a picture you can read for an hour, every crane and hod and scaffold a separate invention — and it is the first of the Brussels pictures in its mood: a colossal human effort seen in an enormous landscape, without a single demon, the judgement left to the viewer. Bruegel painted it the year he married, and moved.