IX. What the pictures mean: four centuries of reading Bruegel

No painter's criticism tells a cleaner story of how taste changes, because almost every generation has had to reinvent him.

The humanists. The first readers were his friends, and they were learned men. Ortelius's epitaph of 1574 praises Bruegel in the terms of Pliny's praise of antique painting: he painted 'many things that cannot be painted', he was naturae rather than artis — a painter of nature rather than of art — and 'in all his works more is understood than is depicted'. Lampsonius's verses for Cock's 1572 portrait-series call him the 'new Hieronymus Bosch', who imitates the master's 'ingenious dreams' with brush and style so well that he sometimes surpasses him. These are not the words of men who saw a peasant. They saw a witty, inventive, learned painter whose pictures had a surplus of meaning that it was the viewer's pleasure to retrieve — and in Ortelius's insistence on nature, they saw the thing that made him unlike the Italianate painters around him.

Van Mander (1604) set the tone for two and a half centuries. His Bruegel is 'Pier den Drol', 'Pieter the Droll', a painter 'at whose pictures few can look without laughing'; his Life is a string of comic anecdotes — the Alps, the peasant weddings, the notched stick, the ghost-pranks on his apprentices; his art is a form of comedy, valuable and admired but low. Yet Van Mander also says something else: that Bruegel 'did much work for Cock', that his Adulteress was 'subtle', that his Magpie was a statement, and — crucially — that his pictures had been 'gathered up by the Emperor', an index of their value that no drollery could explain.

The collectors. Rudolf II at Prague collected Bruegel with a passion that has no parallel — the Months (acquired from the City of Antwerp, which had bought them from Jonghelinck's debts, as a gift to the Archduke Ernst in 1594), the Tower of Babel, Carnival and Lent, Children's Games, the Calvary, the Peasant Wedding — and it is to Habsburg hoarding that Vienna owes the largest Bruegel collection in the world. The Habsburg taste was for Bruegel as a wonder, a curiosum to be kept with the Kunstkammer's rhinoceros horns and Arcimboldos. Meanwhile the sons, and especially Pieter the Younger's workshop, made the father a brand — dozens of Bird Traps, Censuses, Proverbs, Carnivals, sold across Europe for a century to a market that wanted Bruegel by the yard. The result is the attribution problem the catalogue inherits: for most compositions, the question is not whether it is by Bruegel but which of twenty versions is the original.

The long eclipse. From the late seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century Bruegel nearly vanished. Academic theory had no place for him; the Dutch and French critics of the eighteenth century, when they noticed him at all, called him a coarse painter of low subjects, a Boschian grotesque; the Months hung in Vienna unremarked; the Blind was in a storeroom in Naples. He was, for a hundred and fifty years, a name in the biographies and a subject for copyists.

The rediscovery. The recovery came in three waves. The first was Belgian and nationalist: after 1830 the new kingdom wanted a past, and Bruegel, with Rubens, was it — Brussels and Antwerp began buying, the Census and the Rebel Angels came to the Brussels museum, and the painter became a Flemish hero. The second was the pre-war Vienna school: Max Dvořák's lectures of the 1920s and Charles de Tolnay's monograph of 1935 transformed Bruegel into a philosopher — a reader of Erasmus, Sebastian Franck and the stoics, whose pictures see humanity sub specie aeternitatis, from a height that is at once spatial and moral. Gustav Glück's catalogue (1932) and the great Vienna display gave him a modern œuvre. The third was the arrival of iconology: Carl Gustav Stridbeck's Bruegelstudien (1956) read every picture as an emblem, with a text behind it, and for twenty years the discipline played the game of decoding.

The modern quarrel. Since the 1970s, the reading of Bruegel has been a running argument between three camps. The iconologists continued to find texts — Erasmus, the Rederijker plays, the proverb books, the sermons on the Sins. The social historians and 'ethnographers' (Alpers's 1972 essay on the peasant pictures as comic festive mode rather than moral judgement; Margaret Sullivan's Bruegel's Peasants (1994) on the humanist audience; Walter Gibson's work on the 'Peasant Bruegel' tradition) shifted attention from what the pictures mean to who they were for and how they were used. And the formalists and painters — beginning with Dvořák and continuing in the essays of, among others, Joseph Leo Koerner (Bosch and Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life, 2016) — have argued that the seeing is the meaning: that Bruegel's great subject is the everyday made visible, and that the moral reading, however learned, mistakes the caption for the picture. The 2018 Vienna exhibition, the first to bring together nearly three-quarters of the paintings, left the argument where it stands, but with a new, technically grounded confidence about what he painted and how.

X. The politics question, the religion question

Two questions sit under all of this, and honesty requires that they be stated with their evidence.

Was Bruegel a partisan of the revolt? The evidence for: the soldiers in the Massacre in Habsburg-allied costume; the eagle on the Census inn; the Magpie on the Gallows and the deathbed burning of drawings; the Sermon of St John in the summer of the hedge-preaching; the Blind and the Misanthrope as images of a lost world. The evidence against: the early dating of the Massacre; the patronage of Granvelle and Jonghelinck; the fact that a painter living a few hundred yards from Alba's tribunal who painted overtly seditious pictures would not have died in bed. The honest answer is that the late pictures register a mood — fear, pity, a disgust at crowds and informers — rather than a programme, and that the Netherlands of 1566–69 was a place in which that mood needed no party.

Was he a heretic? The 'Family of Love', the secret spiritualist sect of Hendrik Niclaes to which Ortelius and Plantin may have belonged, has been proposed as Bruegel's circle since the 1950s; Sebastian Franck's Paradoxa and Erasmus's Praise of Folly have been found behind the Proverbs and the Carnival; the absence of cult images and the smallness of Christ in the religious pictures have been read as Reformed. Against this: he painted Adorations, a Virgin's death, a Calvary, all for Catholic owners; his sons were brought up Catholic; Van Mander records nothing. The Familist hypothesis is suggestive and unproven. What can be said is that Bruegel's religious pictures belong to a humanist, Erasmian mode in which the sacred event is set in the midst of a heedless present — the Calvary is the locus classicus — and that this mode was compatible with many confessional positions in 1565 and with fewer after.

XI. Afterlife: the dynasty, the copies, the modern Bruegel

The name lasted because the family lasted. Pieter the Younger (1564–1638) ran a large Antwerp workshop that produced, over forty years, hundreds of copies and variants of his father's compositions — the 1998 Essen-Vienna exhibition counted some forty-five versions of the Bird Trap alone — and invented a 'Bruegel' manner of his own, coarser and brighter, for the village-kermis market. Jan the Elder (1568–1625), 'Velvet Brueghel', took the other path: flower pieces, paradise landscapes, the collaborations with Rubens, the court of the archdukes; his son Jan the Younger, and the Van Kessels, carried the dynasty to 1700. Through Pieter the Younger the compositions of lost originals — the Kermis of St George, the Visit to the Farmhouse, The Wedding Procession — survive; through him, too, every attribution to the father has to be made against a sea of workshop versions, which is why dendrochronology and reflectography matter so much in this catalogue.

The modern Bruegel belongs to the twentieth century's poets as much as to its scholars. Auden's 'Musée des Beaux Arts' (1938), written in Brussels in front of the Fall of Icarus — a picture the Brussels museum's own technical study now considers a copy after a lost original, which does not diminish the poem — made Bruegel the painter of how 'suffering takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window'. William Carlos Williams's Pictures from Brueghel (1962) walked through the œuvre panel by panel. Tarkovsky quotes the Hunters in the Snow in Solaris and Mirror; Lech Majewski's The Mill and the Cross (2011) rebuilt the Calvary as a film. The Tower of Babel is, by any measure, the most reproduced image of a building ever painted. And the Months have become what the book of hours was for the fifteenth century: the image of the year that a civilisation carries in its head.