XII. Four pictures, closely

The Netherlandish Proverbs, 1559 (Berlin). Begin at the lower left, where a man bites a pillar — the hypocrite — and a woman carries fire in one hand and water in the other. Move right along the bottom edge: the man banging his head against the wall; the man 'armed to the teeth' belling the cat; the woman tying a devil to a cushion; the man filling the well after the calf has drowned. Now the centre: the blue cloak the woman hangs on her husband — the cuckold's cloak — the composition's pivot and its old title. Then the roof of tarts, the man shooting one arrow after another, the two fools under one hood, the man who 'cannot reach from one loaf to the next'. The sea at the upper right has a ship sailing with the wind and a man 'pissing at the moon'. There are between 112 and 126 identified proverbs, depending on the counter, and the point of the count is that it has no end. The picture has no hierarchy — the Christ figure at the upper left, to whom a monk ties a false beard, is no larger than anyone else — and this flatness of attention is its moral: the world is folly all the way through, and the painter looks at it all with the same steady eye. Technically it is a marvel of distribution: count the reds and you will find them placed at intervals that carry the eye in a loose spiral; the village's roofs and the sea's horizon make the only stable lines.

The Tower of Babel, 1563 (Vienna). Nimrod and his masons in the foreground at left are the key to the scale: the tower is about as high as it is wide, and as wide as a city. Its spiral ramp carries the eye round and up through seven tiers of Roman arcades — the Colosseum, which Bruegel had drawn in 1553, multiplied — and on every tier the building is at a different stage: the lower ones are finished and occupied, with houses built into the arches and washing hanging out; the middle ones are rising, with cranes, treadwheels, hoists, scaffolds, mortar-mixers, each a technically exact picture of sixteenth-century construction; the upper ones are bare rock, barely begun, sliced through so that we see the ramp cutting into the mountain the tower is built around. And the tower is already falling: the lean is visible, the foundations are sinking into the port, and a cloud cuts off the summit. The harbour is Antwerp's — the cranes, the ships, the quays — and the landscape is Brabant's. Whether the picture is about Babel's pride, the Church's, Antwerp's commercial hubris, the Habsburg empire's, or simply about the splendour and futility of effort, it has been argued since 1563; what is certain is that it is the most complete picture of human work ever painted.

The Hunters in the Snow, 1565 (Vienna). The composition is a diagonal: the hunters and the bare trees on the left descend toward the right and the valley, and the valley rises toward the right and the mountains, so the whole picture tilts like a slope. The near part is painted in brown, black and white — the hunters' backs, the dogs' ribs, the inn sign hanging askew, the fire being built under the pig in the yard at the left — and the far part in white and a blue-green so cold it seems to make the room colder. The ponds are full of people: skaters, curlers, a girl being pulled on a sledge, a man fallen, children spinning tops, a family crossing the ice with a load; and the tiny figures are painted with the same exactitude as the hunters, with one or two strokes each. A bird flies across the valley in the middle of the sky; a chimney burns at the far right where a fire has started. The picture is about nothing but January, and it has become the winter of the European imagination because it refuses to be about anything else.

The Blind Leading the Blind, 1568 (Naples). The six blind men descend a slope from left to right in a line that accelerates — walking, then stumbling, then falling — with the leader already on his back in the ditch. Each face is a separate case history: a man with empty sockets, one with leucoma, one with cataract, one whose eyes have been removed, one with a pemphigus, one with atrophy; the distinctions were first noted by physicians in the nineteenth century, and they are exact. Behind them is a church — identified as the church of Sint-Anna-Pede, outside Brussels, which still stands — and a meadow in a light of extraordinary gentleness. The painting is on linen, in glue-size, and its colours are the muted greys, browns and pinks of that technique; the thinness of the paint makes the men look as if they were about to dissolve. The parable is Matthew's: 'if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch'. The picture is the last large thing Bruegel made, and it has always been read as his testament — the crowd of all the earlier pictures reduced to a chain, the landscape at its most beautiful behind them, the church indifferent.

XIII. How to look at a Bruegel

Give it time. The single most important fact about these pictures is that they were made to be looked at for a long time, by people who stood close, in a room, and talked. A minute in front of the Proverbs gives you a crowd; ten minutes gives you a hundred stories; an hour gives you the structure.

Start far, then go near, then go far again. From across the room, see the colour plan — the distribution of reds and whites, the big diagonal of the Months, the wedge of the Calvary's crowd. Then go within two feet and watch how little paint makes a figure: a dab for a face, a stroke for a sleeve, a dark line round the whole. Then step back and see the crowd resolve again into actions.

Find the edge. Bruegel's foregrounds are full of things that are cut off by the frame — a sheaf, a fence, a bagpipe, a half-figure — which push the picture's space out toward you; and his backgrounds fall away to the edges of the known world. Look for where the painter has placed you: above the Proverbs, on the hill of the Hunters, inside the barn of the Wedding, on the path just behind the Blind.

Look for the small event that contradicts the large one. The man relieving himself behind the inn in the Hunters; the child with the plate at the Wedding; the peasant in the Calvary who has his back to Christ and is looking at us; the couple kissing in the bushes behind the Magpie. These are not jokes dropped into serious pictures; they are the pictures' way of saying that the world does not stop for its own meaning.

Read the sky. The weather is the subject of the Months and the mood of everything after them. Bruegel's skies are not backgrounds; they are the largest and most carefully painted things in the pictures, and the 1565 skies — raw and broken in February, a white haze in August, leaden in November — are the most accurate meteorology in sixteenth-century painting.

And do not decide what it means. The picture will outlast the reading. Ortelius's sentence is the rule: more is understood than is depicted, and what is understood is not one thing.

Coda

The most telling fact about Bruegel may be the one Ortelius recorded without comment: that he painted things that cannot be painted. The seasons cannot be painted; only moments can. A hundred proverbs cannot be painted; only one scene at a time. The whole of a people's folly cannot be painted, nor a building that is at once being built and falling, nor the way a crowd on a hillside is made of five hundred people each of whom is somewhere else in their mind. Bruegel painted them, and did it in forty-odd panels in about fifteen years, with a brush that never laboured, on oak the size of a tabletop. He left no theory, no letters, no school except his sons, and no portrait we can trust. What he left is a way of seeing — from above and close, encyclopaedic and exact, unsparing and without contempt — that nobody had before him and that everyone has had since. The catalogue that follows goes through the work picture by picture, in the order he made it, which is the only order in which it can be read. It begins with a print designer's drawings of mountains and ends with six blind men in a meadow; between them are the forty panels on which a merchant city, a court, a countryside and a crisis were set down by a man whose friends thought him wise and whose biographer thought him droll, and who was, on the evidence of the pictures, both.