Short Life in a Strange World: Birth to Death in 42 Panels. Toby Ferris

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СКАЧАТЬ the map of all Bruegel remains at this point mostly featureless, speculative, a land of hearsay. I know that there are plenty in Vienna; others are in Madrid, Paris, London, New York. I have looked at the Bruegel page on Wikipedia, and have promised myself a book on Bruegel. But which one? Another unknown landscape stretches out before me, of Bruegel scholarship.

      It will be by no means my first project. I have spent half a lifetime working up projects: Robinson Crusoe canoes, antique flying machines that never fly. All useless devices, but each informed by the same creative spurt, each one a new, futile form of flight, of escape. Just like that tower on the plain, on the edge of the sea, fugitive city making for the skies.

      In the early 1950s my father and a friend of his called Bill (surname unrecorded) booked themselves on to a coach tour of the Low Countries: Bruges, Ghent, Brussels, Antwerp, Amsterdam. But the authority of their guide, the tyranny of the schedule, the sluggishness of the coach immediately chafed, and they abandoned the tour and took themselves off on a mad jaunt of their own devising: church, bar, red-light district. My father still talked of it half a century later (although he glossed over the red-light districts; I learnt about these after he died, from a notebook he kept). The trip was, for the rest of his life, a reminder of the exultations to be had from torching the programme and careening off the map.

      I have known similar moments of minor exultation. For example, I have walked out of more jobs than most people have had jobs.

      Things change, one moment to the next. One moment you are employed, seemingly reliable, a plodder; the next you are enjoying some sort of giddy breakdown.

      The last time I walked out of a job, my first son was not yet one year old. This is not responsible behaviour. After a few months, I ended up on my feet, again, just, but this had to be the last time. I have tried revolution. The knucklebones are just knucklebones, in the end, and the patterns are always familiar. Perhaps I did not burn deep enough, early enough; perhaps I should also have salted the black fields of my existence. But the suspicion remains: there might be other ways to model your life.

      On our return from Amsterdam, my brother and I run into difficulties. We have chosen to take the train so that we can stop for a few hours in the Brussels museum and refresh ourselves with Bruegel, but the train lines are down at some key junction. We wait for an hour on a cold platform with Styrofoam coffees, then take a train to the next stop down the line – The Hague. We have to get off. No one knows what is happening. We are told to get on a certain train, which takes us to the next stop – Rotterdam. And we have to get off again. Thus it continues, all day: we work our way from Amsterdam to Brussels one stop at a time.

      Bruegel did not live in a world of timetables. Deadlines? Highly doubtful, although I can at least imagine a time-is-money Hieronymus Cock goading on his young artist, clapping his hands together in a show of energy, dividing up the labour, watching his costs. I can also imagine his young artist, possessed of a peasant’s appreciation of his own value, resisting, taking his time, not so much doing as getting around to.

      We live otherwise. We must get back to England today. At each stop, when it seems we have finally run out of luck, my brother and I furiously google alternative planes, buses, but then before we can act a train turns up and there is a frantic cramming to get aboard. Dordrecht. Roosendaal. Antwerp. It grows late. Dark. We miss our connection in Brussels. And we miss the Bruegels. In the thick press of quantified time, all spears of purpose are, sooner or later, shivered.

      I have a superstition about travel: it has a prevailing wind. If you make a there-and-back-again journey, you will be swept along easily in one direction, and have to beat back painfully in the other. But this is more than an ordinary squall or countervailing trades: it is clear to me now that we have offended the Netherland Poseidon. We have treated his realm as one entity, a large flat land with a common language, dotted with emblematic Bruegels. But it is not. It is fractured: by language, by politics, by religion, by river and sea, by the repelling magnetic North–South grain. And so we are smashed this way and that.

      *

      In 1566, called by contemporaries the Wonderyear, the Netherlands, North and South, were host to a spate of image-breaking. Churches were sacked, statues and paintings smashed, pulled down and burned, and the consecrated host, which renegade hedge-preachers called ‘the baked god’, was generally humiliated.

      Some of the hedge-preachers – so-called because they preached outside the town and beyond the reach of civic jurisdictions – were Calvinist ministers who had returned after the suspension of the Inquisition in the Netherlands by the regent Margaret of Parma in April of that year; others were disgruntled ex-monks jumping the walls. They preached reform, and they preached iconoclasm, and in August, starting on the 10th in the town of Steenvoorde in the industrialized Westerkwartier of Flanders, some made good on their preaching by leading a mob to the chapel and sacking its images.

      The violence spread, reaching Ypres on the 15th, Antwerp on the 20th, Ghent on the 22nd, Tournai on the 23rd and Valenciennes on the 24th. In Antwerp, the Feast of the Assumption on the 15th passed off peacefully with a parade of a statue of the Virgin, but on the 19th a group of youths entered the church where it was housed and mocked it. They were dispersed, but returned on the 20th accompanied by half the town. After some psalm singing, the church was sacked, with the rioters parading in the vestments, drinking the holy wine, and bathing their feet in the holy oil. In Ghent, the image-breaking extended to mutilation, mock-torture and mock-execution of statues and paintings. The great Van Eyck altarpiece Het Lam Gods was only saved by being hastily disassembled and concealed in a locked tower of the church under guard, while the iconoclasts went about their business below.

      For the most part, and in contrast to the iconoclasms elsewhere in Europe (France, Switzerland, England), the procedure was genial, carnivalesque and often very orderly, a holiday from incense and mummery. Through August and September, the hedge-preachers moved in to some of the now cleansed churches, cities were barricaded against the often complicit local authorities, independence declared. But the Spanish clamped down. Early in 1567 the Duke of Alba arrived from over the Alps with armies and siege trains, and the uncoordinated fires of rebellions were extinguished one by one.

      By 1566, Bruegel had left Antwerp for Brussels, a distance of 30 miles, exchanging the commercial capital of the Spanish Netherlands for the political.

      His birthplace is usually given as Breda (c.1525) or environs, but he seems to have grown to artistic maturity in Antwerp. It is supposed that he settled there after his return from Italy in 1554, although there is no documentary evidence. However, his early artistic endeavours were all drawings for engravings for Antwerp print houses (notably, the Sign of the Four Winds, run by Hieronymus Cock). His first surviving painting, which hangs in San Diego, dates from 1557, but only a handful of paintings were made before 1561. It was from 1562 that painting really took over. By 1563 he had settled in Brussels and married Mayken Coecke, daughter of his master, Pieter Coecke van Aelst, and the miniaturist Mayken Verhulst; Van Mander has Mayken Verhulst persuading Bruegel to settle in Antwerp in order to distance himself from a previous amour, a serving girl he wanted to marry but found to be a serial liar. In Brussels, Bruegel ran a small workshop (where, according to Van Mander, he delighted in spooking his assistants and pupils with ghostly noises), although there is little if any evidence of workshop hands in his painting (some have taken the sky in the Census, for example, that lurid sun and the flattened treetop through which it shines, to be by assistants). From 1562 Bruegel painted an average of five (surviving) panels or canvases per year, until 1568, the year before he died, implying that he must have died early in 1569.

      And so there he is, Bruegel the Elder: a creature of paint and prints, of signatures and hearsay. Nothing more now.

      The documentary evidence for my father’s life is similarly scant, if methodical. I have, for instance, a small stack of his notebooks, maintained over seventy СКАЧАТЬ