Part 2

The cause of his leaving Antwerp was his marriage, which took place in 1563. His choice had fallen upon the daughter of his first master, Pieter Coeck. Twice during his brief notice on Bruegel, Van Mander refers to the fact that “he had, while she was still small, often carried her in his arms.” Her mother, after the father’s death, had removed to Brussels and there successfully engaged in her own profession of miniature painting; in consenting to the marriage she “stipulated that Bruegel should leave Antwerp and settle down in Brussels, in order that he might efface former love-affairs from his eyes and his mind.” In this marriage was the beginning of what has been well called the Bruegel dynasty. The two sons produced copies and variations of their father’s paintings in such abundance that it is an exceptional picture gallery in Europe which does not boast its “_Breughel le Vieux_”; and these sons in their turn fathered a dozen more painters.

[Illustration: THE TOWER OF BABEL. 1563. VIENNA, MUSEUM]

[Illustration: THE CARRYING OF THE CROSS. 1564. VIENNA, MUSEUM]

[Illustration: THE CARRYING OF THE CROSS (DETAIL)]

[Illustration: THE CARRYING OF THE CROSS (DETAIL)]

[Illustration: THE ADORATION OF THE KINGS. 1564. LONDON, NATIONAL GALLERY]

But of them all, none approached the greatness of their original, whose six years of married life were filled by the creation of masterpieces—of realistic observation in the _Wedding Feast_ and the _Peasant Dance_; of sheer imagination in the _Dulle Griet_ and the _Triumph of Death_; of narrative power in the _Massacre of the Innocents_; of the purest pictorialism in the _Conversion of Paul_; of the indescribable _Carrying of the Cross_; of realism, imagination, emotion and thought merged into the large harmonies of that great series of five paintings, the _Months_.

[Illustration: THE MISANTHROPE. 1565. NAPLES, NATIONAL MUSEUM]

While he was achieving all this ordered beauty of art, the disorders of the life around him were increasing at a fatally rapid pace. In Ghent a mob sacked the Abbey of Saint Peter and, made drunk by the wine of its cellars and the intoxication of destructiveness, ran smashingly at large through the city. In Antwerp another mob totally destroyed the rich and famous church of _Notre Dame_. Conflicts multiplied between Catholics and Protestants, between civilians and soldiers; bands of foreign mercenaries coursed through the country and open towns. The Duke of Alva’s execution fires cast lurid lights upon the ruin and decimation of what had once been the most prosperous region of Europe.

Of Bruegel’s own reactions to all this his biographer, writing at a time when it was almost a well-forgotten nightmare, makes no mention. Van Mander’s single sentence of direct characterization is this: “He was a very quiet and skilful man, who spoke little but was sociable in society, and loved to frighten his companions, often also his own pupils, with all kinds of goblin noises....” This does little to round out the portrait of Bruegel the man, for once more the emphasis is thrown upon that droll and amusing side of his nature which seems to have appealed most to his own circle and thence been transmitted to Van Mander. But that Bruegel was intensely aware of the tragedies about him is evident enough in his works. The things he saw for himself are set down in such pictures as the _Massacre of the Innocents_, yet with such an all-sufficing objectiveness that it requires an effort of mind to realize that that very convincingness comes from his having felt the tragic reality he records. But it is impossible to escape from the overwhelmingly personal quality of the thoughts set forth in the hell-mouth horrors of the _Dulle Griet_ and the apocalyptic terrors of the _Triumph of Death_. Moreover, Van Mander writes that Bruegel had made many other “inventions” which were “so satirical and mordant that on his death-bed he ordered them burnt by his wife, either from repentance or from fear that his wife would get into trouble on account of them.”

[Illustration: THE PROVERB OF THE BIRD-NESTER. 1564–65? VIENNA, MUSEUM]

Not many months before this happened the people of the Low Countries commenced their final effort of revolt which was to establish their freedom not until eleven years later. Bruegel left a world that was hardly less black than the death into which he descended with open eyes. At that very moment Montaigne was setting about to depict one entire man with a vision as veracious as that of Bruegel; Cervantes was soon to rival in words Bruegel’s power of making the fantastic real; and only forty years later Shakespeare was to accomplish a re-creation of human life that is more complete than Bruegel’s simply because the medium of literature itself permits a more comprehensive embodiment of the soul of man than is possible to the medium of paint. And the painter who more than any other kept close to life belongs in the company of these three.

[Illustration: THE TRIUMPH OF DEATH. 1565 OR 1566. MADRID, PRADO]

[Illustration: THE TRIUMPH OF DEATH (DETAIL)]

4.

The subject-matter of Bruegel’s great paintings is limited only by the world and life.[2] The whole cycle of nature is in them—the seasons as they pass over mountain, plain and moving waters; the dazzling beauty of the southern sea, the northern cold. The entire range of human life is in them; somewhere in these multitudes every emotion finds its expressive gesture. Even all the animals that are intimately a part of human life are given in their degrees of individuality. These pictures seem to set before the eye every experience possible to man.

[2] The succeeding remarks upon Bruegel’s art and mind, disregarding both the minor and the debatable works, are based specifically upon the paintings which are characteristically great.

Always a tale is being told, but always it is story-telling of a very definite kind. It is never a continuous narrative with a plot involving the same characters in different circumstances. Thus Bruegel was never obliged to arrange successive episodes of the same story within one frame, as the older painters had done. All the things that happen in his paintings could happen—do happen—just as he shows them, at the same time and in just the relationship to each other that he depicts. He always observes time unity and pulls together his wealth of episode and by-play through unity of theme.

[Illustration: THE TRIUMPH OF DEATH (DETAIL)]

But on a given theme, at first, he attempted to say everything than can be said about it. The picture in Berlin illustrates seventy proverbs; the _Children’s Games_ is said to contain every one of the one hundred and fifty-four varieties of play listed by Rabelais as the games of Gargantua; the _Tower of Babel_ has been called a builders’ handbook; the _Massacre of the Innocents_ apparently depicts every possible attitude of parental grief and frenzy. This exuberance of episode, this encyclopedic narrative utterance, had its literary counterpart in the book just mentioned; it was in full accord with the taste of the time, and Bruegel’s personal aptitude had been fostered and disciplined by his long succession of drawings for the plates published by Cock. For the paintings of this type he has thought out every possible visual aspect of his story-matter and swept them all into a unity of design not less remarkable than his unity of theme.

[Illustration: THE NUMBERING AT BETHLEHEM. 1566. BRUSSELS, MUSEUM]

[Illustration: THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS. 1566? VIENNA, MUSEUM]

The astounding thing to be noted just here is the completeness with which such an excessive amount of anecdote is arranged into a functioning organism of narrative. In the _Carrying of the Cross_ the movement of every one of the five hundred figures, the very expression of every face, is determined by a completely organized story-action. All the figures, even the minutest ones, play their parts in the whole design as such; but their momentary relations as human beings, equally complex, have been thought out and set down with equal thoroughness. Every episode is a bar, every gesture a note, in Bruegel’s orchestrated narrative.

[Illustration: THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS (DETAIL)]

But other paintings show that Bruegel realized the fundamental weakness of this—the weakness of diversity of visual motive, distraction from the pictorial whole. He exhibited a tendency towards the elimination of all side-play, towards the reduction of subject-matter to a single motive and a reliance upon emotional unity for the abiding impression. His picture-making is still story-telling in that something happens in terms of human action; but it is a single and casual event, and the main interest is shifted from events to design and color as the expression of mood. In the _Months_ he forgot all about narrative complexity for its own sake, fixed his attention on the pure pictorial beauty of people and of nature, and sought only the emotional meaning of his theme.

5.

The nature of Bruegel’s work previous to taking up painting is written at large and in detail over his early technical habits, but in these also can be traced a development corresponding to the change just noted in subject-matter.

[Illustration: THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS (DETAIL)]

[Illustration: THE FALL OF ICARUS. BRUSSELS, MUSEUM]

[Illustration: THE CONVERSION OF SAINT PAUL. 1567. VIENNA, MUSEUM]

In the earlier pictures color in general is conceived somewhat as the worker in mosaic is compelled by his material to conceive it—as a weaving-together of brilliant bits of pure color into a color design which is itself thought out independently of other technical qualities. There is harmony and richness, but there is not that melting tonality which afterwards came to be looked upon as the last word in painting. Above all else, there is an unbelievable brilliancy, especially where Bruegel made a lavish use of vermilion. The chain of soldiers woven through the multitude in the _Carrying of the Cross_ is one of the most daring things to be found in painting; but for general sumptuousness of color approaching to the fusion of later times there is, outside of the _Months_, no equal in Bruegel’s work to the _Conversion of Paul_. And always it is color used for its own sake, with great sensuous delight. Yet always, again excepting the _Months_, it is color laid on to form which has already been conceived as drawing; the color, superb in itself, follows the form superbly; but the color and the drawing exist independently of one another.

[Illustration: THE WINE OF SAINT MARTIN (FRAGMENT). VIENNA, MUSEUM]

At the beginning of his painting career it was his drawing especially which was determined by his work for the engravers. For the masculine style of engraving that prevailed in his day the preparatory drawings had to show absolute precision of outline. The edges of everything had to be clean and unmistakable in order that the engraver might know what was intended; the artist of the first instance had to make it impossible for the engraver to mistake his meaning as to this contour or that shape. Drawing in this manner for years before he began to paint, Bruegel necessarily continued to do so afterwards. This accounts for the prevailingly silhouette character of his multitudes of tiny figures. Often-times, even from the beginning, the form that meets the eye within the shape is substantially filled out without being accompanied by the feeling of all-aroundness; but a full three-dimensional quality is more and more often attained until in the _Paul_, again, it fills the picture to a degree elsewhere unequalled in Bruegel’s work.

[Illustration: THE PARABLE OF THE BLIND MEN. 1568. NAPLES, NATIONAL MUSEUM]

[Illustration: THE LAND OF COCKAIGNE. 1567. MUNICH, ALTE PINAKOTHEK]

[Illustration: THE CRIPPLES. 1568. PARIS, LOUVRE]

But another consequence of his early professional training—and a consequence which enabled him to accomplish some of his most amazing feats—was his skill in composition. His training in draftsmanship gave him the power to render exactly all details that contribute to individuality of character, and the simultaneous training in composition taught him how to arrange immense numbers of such individualized figures without loss of mass unity. Was it the Alpine mountain-sides or merely the upper window of a house on a village square that suggested to him the device of a slightly elevated viewpoint? It is this more than anything else that enables him to impose upon his multitudes that order of art by which may be expressed the disorder of life; and it is this that gives him his long perspectives of village streets or far horizons dominated by oblique lines. These last, starkly visible at first and gradually becoming more broken and concealed, constitute the characteristic mark of Bruegel the designer.

But it is in design that there is to be discerned the least amount of technical advance on Bruegel’s part; what he learned before he began to paint seems to have come nearer to sufficing him in design than in drawing or in color. His composition scheme in the set of the _Months_ is shockingly, though intentionally, repetitious; in the hands of a less vigorous artist it must quickly have become the deadest recipe. He divides his panel into two practically equal parts by a bold diagonal from one upper corner to the opposite lower one; one of these parts he fills with things and people seen close at hand, and the other with a far-spreading panorama. And he does it five times over with such freshness that doing it seven times more does not seem beyond his powers. But the design remains a pattern, conceived in the same way as the large composite landscapes done soon after his return from Rome.

[Illustration: THE MAGPIE ON THE GALLOWS. 1568. DARMSTADT, MUSEUM]

In drawing and color, on the other hand, the _Months_ show a marked departure from earlier habits in the direction of an essentially modern practice. In the drawing as such there is an increase in looseness with no loss of surety; tightness is sacrificed, but not precision. The figures are still silhouettes to a great extent, but there is an approach to the coalescence of color and drawing. In color by itself there is ever an opposition of large areas of some shade of brown and some shade of green, and a weaving of these areas together by bits of each color in the other and of other colors in both. Though there is never the full impressionistic fusing of edges in atmosphere, there is yet a decided approximation to the vision of a genuinely naturalistic landscape painter, as distinguished from the vision of a draftsman or a miniaturist.

While this is true, and must be accounted to Bruegel as a merit, an evidence of mental and technical growth, it is still in a measure unfair to the never-failing largeness and unity of vision in the earlier work. Whether the other qualities of this work be regarded as merits or defects in themselves depends, of course, upon the technical tenets or preferences of him who makes the judgment. But in Bruegel they were neither merits nor defects; they were characteristics which had to be present in his pictures if he painted at all. They were necessitated by the time in which he lived and by his professional practice previous to painting. They were as much a part of him as his fondness for telling stories; and in the fluctuations of taste stranger things have already happened than would be the return of even this latter element to professional as well as popular favor.

[Illustration: WEDDING FEAST. 1568? VIENNA, MUSEUM]

[Illustration: WEDDING FEAST (DETAIL)]

6.

In Bruegel’s time story-telling in pictures generally was still one of the principal means of communicating ideas—even, perhaps mainly, ideas that were not inherently pictorial; prints were still the nearest things to books in popular circulation. Moreover, a nation living under the necessity of never speaking out openly on either politics or religion naturally resorted to symbol, the concrete proverb or the image that said one thing and meant another. The print of the big and little fish not only meant that the great oppressed the small but carried an idea beyond the words of the proverb in showing the big fish ripped up and disgorging; and upon a people so apt at interpreting images the significance of that would not be lost. This people could not only take a hearty enjoyment of the good things of life but they could also face the whole of it without shrinking from any part of it, whether of grossness or of terror. For the latter, indeed, they even had a gusto and the former they laughed away with a saving healthiness. The distinguishing mark of their living and their thinking was a robust realism.

[Illustration: PEASANT DANCE. 1568? VIENNA, MUSEUM]

[Illustration: PEASANT DANCE (DETAIL)]

In Pieter Bruegel there emerged from among them a man of genius in complete sympathy with their realistic attitude towards life; knowing it from childhood, he gave it in his art a more complete expression than it had ever had before. The whole originality and fertility of his mind were for long expended upon feeding the popular taste not only for the familiar or exotic beauty of nature but also for a rough philosophy, unorganized but none the less genuine; and a habit so well established in him by years of labor would not vanish all at once even when more purely painter-like interests assumed for him a major importance. His predecessors in painting had been realistic in their measure; in them, however, realism was largely confined to details of execution and was more than counterbalanced by markedly idealistic conceptions. Even in the grotesqueries of Bosch the older disparity between idea and embodiment existed; the diabolism in them was only the obverse of the conventional religious idealism, and its distance from a true realism of content remained the same. When Bruegel came to painting, he both carried the manner of realism farther than his predecessors had done and informed that manner with its appropriately realistic matter, bringing about a new harmony between the body and the spirit of the art. He became the first complete realist in the history of painting.

[Illustration: MARINE. VIENNA, MUSEUM]

The _Fall of the Rebel Angels_ is the nearest thing to a rule-proving exception among Bruegel’s great works, the single one which exhibits any of the older disparity between container and content; and this picture, great as it is, could vanish without impairing in the least Bruegel’s essential greatness. To examine the Berlin _Proverbs_ in detail is to get a feeling of being among mad folks because so many of the sayings here illustrated turn upon outlandish actions; but as a picture it is a piece of masterly realistic sanity showing a whole village, in which some of the inhabitants happen to be crazy, intensely busy about its own affairs. The _Triumph of Death_, so far from being a piece of wild and gross fancy, is actually the lucid statement of an idea as true as any gesture in the picture; it is precisely the relentlessness of its realism in thought as well as in embodiment which frightens people into calling it untrue. The latter two paintings only show that if an artist is realist enough, if he penetrates sufficiently into the actual, he necessarily becomes imaginative; they only reiterate and strengthen Bruegel’s right to be considered the supreme realist in painting.

[Illustration: FLEEING SHEPHERD. 1569? PHILADELPHIA, JOHNSON COLLECTION]

Part of his realism is his refusal to depict what he did not feel. Only once did he venture upon any of the religious emotionalism that had played so large a part in the work of his predecessors, and then he found the emotion so foreign to his own feelings that he openly borrowed the imagery of it; in relation to the great panoramic realism of the _Carrying of the Cross_, the group of mourning women remains a mere formalism, dissociated in spirit and in manner from all about it. Jesus himself is simply an unfortunate creature whose approaching execution is the pretext for this holiday. What passes for the conversion of Paul might be the delusion of a man knocked in the head on falling from a shying horse; there is about the event none of the conventional supernaturalism because for Bruegel that sort of thing was not real. The religious subject as such disappears from his work; and this, coming after the ecstatic idealisms of his predecessors, amounts to the expression of an idea concerning the significance—or lack of it—inherent in the churchly religion. He will have nothing to do with what is not human; not even nature enters into the great paintings except as a setting that enhances, by sympathy or contrast, the emotional life of human beings. To these, whom he knows and loves, Bruegel gives himself wholly, to share in their sorrows and their joys. His religion is that of the great humanists in all ages, and his faith is given only to life itself.

[Illustration: DARK DAY (JANUARY?). VIENNA, MUSEUM]

[Illustration: DARK DAY (DETAIL)]

Part of his realism is the robust laughter which is the only solution for the fix in which human beings find themselves. It is the spirit that animated Rabelais in describing the birth of his hero and Shakespeare in creating Falstaff. To come closer home to Bruegel, perhaps, it is the spirit of _Till Eulenspiegel_, whose gross pleasanteries were probably relished by the painter along with the rest of his generation. Bruegel’s passion for completeness in his realism abolishes privacy, and the state of affairs brought to pass by this slicing away of all walls is saved only by humor. Humor is the safety-valve for a spirit resolute to probe life to its last refuge—to probe life, but not to break through by main force, as attempted by later realists so-called.

[Illustration: HUNTERS IN THE SNOW (FEBRUARY?). VIENNA, MUSEUM]

Another element in Bruegel’s realism is the objectivity of his work. Van Mander’s anecdote already quoted shows that Bruegel went among the peasants, not as a professional artist in search of material, but as a participator in their life; and the great pictures themselves strikingly bear this out. This is not to say that Bruegel never worked directly from life, for there are many drawings which could not have been done otherwise—a team of horses resting, soldiers standing in the way, old market-women squatting beside their wares. But when he came to paint the great pictures, Bruegel worked from a memory stocked with the gestures and actions of people who are unconscious of being watched. Bruegel’s mind was centered upon their life and he was concerned with technic hardly beyond the point where it would enable him to crowd all their life into his given space and shape. His concentration upon the story he was telling, from the encyclopedic narrative of the early works to the simple and straightforward emotionalism of the _Months_, put him on the crest of a wave of energy which carried him through many an undertaking that would have been impossible for a more self-conscious man. We who see the pictures now are unconscious of the painter because he was himself lost in his subject; and because of this, also, we are unconscious of ourselves. “No glance ever strays across the footlights to the audience,” wrote Meier-Graefe of Hogarth’s scenes. In Bruegel’s work there are no actors, no footlights and no audience. There is only life and participation in life by painter and by us.