The Brueghels. Victoria Charles

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      Of course, Bruegel was little concerned with the cruel Herod or the individual emotions suffered by the mothers of Bethlehem, whose children were being torn from their grasp, and disregarded the details of the historical setting. The subject matter, inspired by a fallacious legend, is here only a pretext, a simple label useful for classifying the canvas within the complete work of Bruegel or in a museum catalogue. This painting holds a deeper meaning. Bruegel had seen marauding bands of German, Walloon and Spanish soldiers that terrorised the countryside and unfortified towns, bursting into villages to pillage and sometimes kill. The Massacre of the Innocents represents all of the arrogance, insolence and the unbearable burden of foreign domination at the hands of these mercenaries, clustered together like a block of steel, contemptuous and invulnerable, pushing before the chests of their horses the hounded flock of unfortunates. These mothers, these peasants clasping their hands, these women collapsed in suffering, are those that Bruegel saw begging for their husbands, themselves, or even for their children to be spared. These are the unfortunate women he found weeping alongside the road, under the same December sky, and in the same atmosphere of inexpressible sadness that envelops The Massacre of the Innocents. A singular combination of the familiar and the tragic, this work moves us to our very core and surpasses the powerful masterpiece by Rubens by the same title that hangs in the Pinakothek in Munich, with its dishevelled mother, “Hairy, screaming, savage/A literal dog”, leaping with her nails bared, ready to bite the face of one of Herod’s soldiers. The sincere Bruegel remains superior to his great rival.

      It is clear that the epithet “painter of the peasantry” does not suffice to describe such a profoundly human body of work. All the same, an analysis of the extraordinary Triumph of Death in Madrid’s Prado justifies his reputation for buffoonery, and does justice to his nickname ‘the Droll’.

      It has already been mentioned that Bruegel visited Italy, but it is not clear if he saw the famous fresco on the subject of the Triumph of Death, in Pisa’s Campo Santo. This fresco, attributed to Orcagna, is a remarkable commentary on the work of Dante. In his writings, Vasari praises the mystical terror and earthly weakness for the voluptuous that infuses this painting. The horror of death resides less in the horrible figure of death himself, an old man with bat’s wings, than in the spectacles he gestures to with his scythe: a group of horsemen representing the grace and beauty of youth are stopped before three open coffins; in one, rotting flesh is still clinging to a skeleton, and in another a monstrous gut bloats beneath an ermine robe. On a hillside, pious hermit monks go about their work, and farther in the distance women smile, expressing their happiness to be alive and beautiful. They do not think to raise their eyes to the battalion of vampires and spectres that are rushing out of the distant sky.

      In this manner, the artist portrays the contrast between life and death. On the one hand, he illustrates the pleasantness that exists in life, the gazing upon blue skies and experiencing the world with a voluptuous shiver of excitement, but on the other he also shows the inevitable horror and pestilence that life becomes. Beneath it all, he reveals the laughter of hideous demons, as though СКАЧАТЬ