Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Aside from the evidence of the signed and frequently dated prints, drawings and paintings, few things are certainly known about the life and personality of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Almost all of these, such as they are, occur in a brief passage concerning him, written about thirty years after his death, in “The Book of the Painters” by Carel Van Mander. Herein is no mention of the date of Bruegel’s birth; even the place of it, despite a seeming definiteness, remains in some obscurity. His biographer says that the painter was born “not far from Breda, in a village called Breughel,[1] by which name he called himself and left it to his descendants.” The village of that name nearest to Breda is twenty-five miles away; and as distances went in the sixteenth century, this seems hardly to be bridged by Van Mander’s easy phrase. As for the year, the guesses of the scholars range all the way from 1510 to 1530, the most widely accepted one being 1525. Any closer determination of it is a matter of comparative unimportance in its possible effect on the period of actual productiveness, since this is very satisfactorily covered by trustworthy dates.

And whatever the exact year may have been, it had not been long before when for Europeans the geographical world had been suddenly enlarged as a sort of materialization of the immediately preceding enlargement of mind. The succession of discoveries—of America; of India and the true Indies; of Sumatra, Java and Borneo; and, two hundred and fifty years after Marco Polo, of China—were only the working on another plane of the essentially exploring spirit which had been previously manifested by the scholars, scientists and artists of the Early Renaissance. National unity on a fresh basis had been realized in Spain through the expulsion of the Moors, and in both France and England under absolute monarchies which were headed, at the time of Bruegel’s birth, by Francis I and Henry VIII. About that time, also, Magellan was circumnavigating the globe and Cortez was conquering Mexico; Leonardo and Raphael were dying, and shortly after them went Carpaccio, Leo X and Signorelli. Martin Luther, preaching the Reformation in Germany, was thus initiating a movement of ruinous significance for Bruegel’s homeland; for there the cause of religious liberty, gradually coalescing with that of political independence, was to meet with the terrible repressions begun by the newly elected Emperor, Charles Quint, who was already by inheritance lord of the Low Countries.

During all this period of ferment and reorientation for the European mind, Antwerp, where Bruegel was to spend most of his life, was one of the most important of all ports. Situated in what was then the most densely populated region of Europe, it had in its own houses a hundred thousand persons; and of these more than a tenth were foreigners—German merchants, Italian scholars, Portuguese Jews, French Huguenots, English sailors and the soldiers of Spain. Far-journeyed vessels brought to it the spices and rich stuffs, the metal-work and strange animals of distant lands; and their seamen had tales to tell of things far off towards the expanding horizons of the world. In this comfortable and prosperous city, where the sharp demarcations between classes prevalent in other countries were blurred almost into a real democracy of the bourgeois, every fresh discovery and important event had its repercussion in the general consciousness.

Antwerp was thus a natural center of activity for the religious propaganda and disputation which formed so large and so tragic an element in the life of the sixteenth century; creeds of all sorts readily found adherents among its varied and impressionable populace. Lutheranism was so strongly advocated by the convent of Augustinian monks that its inmates were dispersed, after the execution of two among them, and its buildings razed. Though the terrorism of the Inquisitor Van der Hulst and his priestly successors imposed silence on many, there were open preachings as well as clandestine meetings, and riots in which religion-frenzied women were among the boldest; and with all the burnings of the books, with all the imprisonments and the brandings, the full penalties of the imperial edicts could hardly be enforced by those who were conscious that such enforcement would destroy the principal source of the Emperor’s precarious revenue. Even the anarchy of Anabaptism, persecuted by Catholic and Protestant alike, made headway through the martyrdom of its believers; and from 1544, almost the very year when the young Pieter Bruegel commenced his apprenticeship, the new sectarianism of Calvin entered the city and grew rapidly in strength.

While he was growing up, the English and the French were subduing the North American continent and in the Andes Pizarro was rifling the wealth of Peru; Rome was being pillaged by the Germans; Henry VIII was finally repudiating Catholicism and Ignatius of Loyola was in a way belatedly replying to Luther by organizing the Society of Jesuits; Hampton Court Palace, the French chateaux and the palaces of Venice were being built; Erasmus, Dürer, Machiavelli, Luini, Ariosto, Correggio died. As yet unconscious of such events and such personages, perhaps ignorant of the nearer deaths of Quentin Matsys and Lucas van Leyden, the youth of nameless family was living a peasant among peasants—and a genius in the making—sharing to full their laborious, roistering life. Hard drinkers and heavy eaters, they were much given to feasts and fairs; marriages, baptisms, even deaths were for them occasions for celebrations as excessive as the labor from which they thus escaped. Their animal frankness and coarse gaiety blew like a gale of rude health over all their activities. From life itself, from the small events in a remote village of the Campine, Bruegel absorbed the great sane grossness which now seems buried in the books of his day. Bringing with him the peasant vitality which was to develop into a lofty philosophic humaneness, he came to Antwerp and, a youth approaching his twentieth year, became an apprentice to the celebrated Pieter Coeck. Paracelsus, Copernicus and Holbein had just died; Bruegel had hardly learned to grind his colors when French Francis and English Henry followed them, even as their sometime enemy, sometime ally, Charles, was bloodily but only temporarily settling religious questions at Mühlberg.

From his first master Bruegel must have received somewhat more than a merely technical training, good as that probably was. Coeck had been for four years the pupil of Bernard van Orley and had later studied in Rome; in his own work afterwards he relied to such an extent upon the formulas then worked out that all of it now seems borrowed; but the precepts that he would pass on to an apprentice could not dull or conventionalize so forceful a nature as Bruegel’s. Of more significance in the development of such a nature must have been the stories of far countries that were told, adding to his knowledge and stimulating his imagination; for Coeck had spent the year of 1533 in the Constantinople of Suleiman the Magnificent and had been one of the entourage of Charles on his expedition to Tunis in 1538. Painter to the Emperor and Dean of the Guild of Saint Luke, Pieter Coeck died in 1550. Then or before Bruegel passed over to the work-shop of Jerome Cock, who was not so much a painter as a dealer in pictures and a publisher of popular prints. His establishment “was certainly the rendezvous of all the artists and all the amateurs of Antwerp and even from abroad. Rendered in engraving, the greater number of existing masterpieces would pass under the eyes of the attentive Bruegel.” (Bernard: p. 58.) The very shop-name, “At the Sign of the Four Winds,” symbolized the range of influences that played over him, the sights and tales that passed into his consciousness; and for Bruegel these things could be only so many more incitements to journey into the world and see it all for himself.

Therefore it is not surprising that, after he had completed his apprenticeship and been received into the painter’s guild, in 1551, he should set out upon his travels. Such a trip in those days was no light undertaking. All frontiers were insecure since the wars between Charles and Francis for continental domination; for little or nothing soldiers turned into robbers. Van Mander mentions neither routes nor places, writing only that Bruegel “went into France and from there into Italy.” Even the drawings now preserved afford no positive information as to the way he went—a circumstance which might be interpreted to mean that already he was interested less in telling what a specific place looked like than in rendering the emotional effect of nature upon himself. But two designs now preserved as etchings are signed and dated at Rome in 1553, and there is a drawing of the Ripa Grande which appears to have been done on the spot. The print of a naval battle engraved by Huys and published by Cock after Bruegel’s return to Antwerp indicates that he went as far south as Messina.

When he passed through France, François Clouet and Germain Pilon were practising their art of tepid grace; when he reached Rome, the Sistine Chapel paintings had been completed, but not the church of Saint Peter. At the height of their working powers were Michelangelo, Titian, Palestrina, Palladio; and Benvenuto Cellini was doubling in the roles of artist and bandit. There is no proof that Bruegel had any contact with these men; that he even saw their works is recorded neither in words nor in the paintings by which he lives today in their company. It is certainly reasonable, however, to suppose that the fame of his contemporaries had not only reached him but actually played a part in persuading him to his long wayfaring. Though still in his twenties, he even then had sufficiently a mind of his own to avoid the mistake of his predecessors, who had gone south specifically to copy and imitate the styles of the Italian painters. In their journeying they were following a fashion, doing something because others were doing it; Bruegel’s urge was both deeper and broader, as his genius was.

Yes, the artistic, the professional, motive must have had much to do with sending him to Italy, but the only way of expressing the sum total of the desires that undoubtedly animated him is to say that he must have craved more life.

no motive less comprehensive than this could have moved him. He was a great artist in the making, but he was even more a man than an artist; for him the art of other men could be only a part, and not the most important part, of the all-inclusive experience of which he was in search. Only such a conception of his personality can account for the failure of the Italian masterpieces to influence him then or thereafter and his own immediate and life-long preoccupation with the entire range of nature and of human life. Moreover, so much can be inferred from Van Mander’s only other reference to this momentous trip, a reference which takes the form of reporting somebody else’s remark that “... in the Alps he swallowed all the rocks and mountains, to return home and vomit them out on painting-board and canvas....”

2.

Towards the end of 1553, not long after the deaths of Rabelais and Lucas Cranach, Bruegel was back in Antwerp. He again became affiliated with the shop of Jerome Cock, but now as a sort of collaborator, making drawings for many plates to be engraved by others and published by the shop. As a successful business man with an eye to the market, Cock’s specialties were landscapes of all types and grotesqueries in the manner of Jerome Bosch, dead thirty-five years before, whose works were a mine of motives for exploitation. The former apprentice proved to be an even greater source of revenue and popularity for “The Four Winds”; he shared completely in the contemporary taste served by the shop and for several years devoted himself entirely to new and increasingly inventive compositions in each genre.

The pure landscapes of this period fall into two very distinct divisions—the small, intimate ones and the large, composite ones. Among the first sort those of such obviously picturesque things as ruins are less interesting, seem less realized, than those depicting the homely commonplaces characteristic of the Low Countries. An indefinite and puddled village street, a church set among trees, the hybrid ruralness where town and country meet—the buildings and small figures rendered in a clean, unwavering line and the massed multitude of leaves given without a superfluous or unmeaning scribble—these things, conveyed with such immediacy by the free and sensitive pen-work, become sharp-edged and lose their bloom through the interposition of the engraver’s hand. Though his return gave him to see all the littlenesses about him with the freshness of a first encounter, it did not make him forget the mountains which had struck so deeply into his mind; and he composed a whole series of large, Latin-titled designs in which the far and low horizons of home were fabulously combined with Alpine steeps. In these plates, deeper than the romanticism of their composite character, is an immense and sober poetry which transpires even through the hardness of the engraving.

One print, dated the very year of his return, a composition of many people skating just outside a city wall, is obviously based on direct observation and is Bruegel’s first essay in the realistic rendering of the life of crowds which was later to play so large a part in his painting; but yet awhile the greater part of his labor went into a long succession of drolleries and diabolisms.

It is in connection with this part, and this part only, of his life-work that there arises any necessity of discussing the influence of another painter on Bruegel. Van Mander treats the matter thus: “He practised much in the manner of Jerome Bosch and used to make many such goblin pictures and drolleries, for which he was called by many Pieter the Droll.” The biographer here recorded the general contemporary estimate which, though it is now seen to fall far short of the truth, was surely natural enough, since in his own day Bruegel was popularly known by the widely circulated prints rather than by the unreproduced paintings. The Big and Little Fish of 1556 is directly from Bosch, and that his spirit and his manner did have an influence upon Bruegel is not to be denied. But such influence as Bosch did exert upon the man who had returned from Italy uninfluenced was possible only because they shared in a racial streak which can be traced back of them into the Middle Ages. The quality that allowed Bruegel to be influenced by Bosch at all would have manifested itself in Bruegel’s art even if Bosch had never lived. Moreover, Bosch’s art was limited almost to this one type of subject-matter, whereas Bruegel’s art soon developed other and far more important characteristics which overshadowed without obliterating this element of grotesquerie.

For the time being, however, it had free rein in a series of Vices and numerous separate plates such as The Ass at School, The Sorcerer, The Merchant Robbed by Monkeys. In these prints there are, in addition, a mastery of design, an inventiveness of detail and a convincingness of outlandish imagination that far surpass Bosch’s most ambitious efforts. A little of these qualities is to be discerned in the two drawings of The Last Judgment and Christ in Limbo; and they also display Bruegel’s entire lack of any mystical fervor, which would have imparted some sort of impressiveness to his Christs. This negative trait in Bruegel, which is the exact obverse of the sort of humaneness which made him great, is further shown in the series of Virtues, also of this period; although these occasionally exhibit a high degree of skill in handling complex groupings, they are what professionalized virtues are apt to be—tedious.

Midway in this prosperous and fertile time of development the Emperor Charles, taken with the notion of enjoying all the benefits of being dead while yet alive, partitioned the empire between his brother and his son, and himself retired in state to a monastery in Spain. From this haven, free of governmental responsibilities, he was able, through his dutiful son Philip, to instigate increasingly severe measures of religious and political repression for the people of the northern lowlands. Yet such things did not affect the personal liberty of Bruegel, who was maintaining an irregular establishment described by Van Mander in the following anecdote: “As long as he lived in Antwerp, he kept house with a servant-girl, whom he might have married had it not misfortuned him that she was always telling lies, a thing repugnant to his love of truth. He made an agreement or contract with her that he should mark all her lies on a stick—and he took a pretty long one—and when the stick should be full of marks the marriage should be off; which then happened before much time had passed.”

More important is what Van Mander tells us of a friendship: “He worked much for a merchant named Hans Frankert, an admirable and excellent man, who found pleasure in knowing Bruegel and was with him whole days at a time. With this man Frankert, Bruegel often went among the peasants, to fairs and marriages, both dressed like peasants; and they took presents like the others, just as if they belonged to the family or acquaintance of the bride or the bridegroom. Here Bruegel found his pleasure in observing the manners of the peasants in eating, drinking, dancing, jumping, loving and other fun-making; which things he then very skilfully and carefully rendered again in colors, in water-color as well as in oil, in both which mediums he was extraordinarily talented.” Then Van Mander proceeds to stress the faithfulness and accuracy of Bruegel’s peasant pictures in the details of costumes and movements. In short, Bruegel had begun to paint.

The earliest dated painting, Twelve Flemish Proverbs, is interesting only because of its connection with Bruegel; its relative clumsiness of execution and utterly unpictorial conception as a whole render it very likely the first of his attempts in a new medium. However, this picture and the others that must be grouped immediately with it mark the definite emergence of what was thenceforward to be his predominant interest—the life of the peasants, between whom and himself there existed the unbreakable bonds of a common origin and a common destiny. Thus he began at once to paint in accordance with the dictates of his essentially realistic genius, but the first works of capital importance still retain a large admixture of the fantastic spirit which had been running riot in his recent designs for the engravings. These two pictures are the Carnival and Lent and the Flemish Proverbs in Berlin, both of the year 1559; in both fantasy is made convincing through realistic treatment, just as the Van Eycks and Roger Van der Weyden had made convincing their religious idealism, Bruegel’s difference from them being simply a difference of subject-matter and a still greater reliance upon realistic skill for its own sake. In the Children’s Games of the next year there occurs the first complete union on a great scale of realism in both matter and manner; and two years later, with the Fall of the Rebel Angels, a recurrence in greatly intensified form of the combination between fantastic idea and realistic treatment. This last painting, credited to Jerome Bosch himself until the discovery of Bruegel’s signature, is infinitely superior in conception and execution to anything by the earlier man, and would alone rank its creator as a great painter; yet the greatness it confers upon its maker is not the kind that is most truly Bruegel’s. Through all these paintings of the Antwerp period there runs a rapidly increasing technical skill—in drawing, color and design—until the last picture that could possibly have been done before his removal to Brussels, the Israelites and Philistines, is for minute workmanship a world’s wonder. On a small panel about thirteen by twenty-two inches Bruegel has put several hundred human beings, the largest of whom is less than two and one-half inches, in a landscape setting of great beauty, all done in such detail that one can count the spots on the giraffes far away across the river—and all seen with so careful a regard for values and design that it is a satisfactory picture from whatever distance it is regarded, its details merging into the larger relations as one views it from further off. Craftsmanship of this type in painting can go no farther.

3.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.