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

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      A skeleton of a life: My father’s notebooks.

      And there it is. A skeleton of a life, in lists. Definitions. Formulae. Recipes. Etc. More than we have for Bruegel, by some considerable measure. For Bruegel, there is no such archival skeleton beyond those dates and signatures. We do not glimpse his book of recipes for rabbit-skin glue. His tour of the red-light district in Rome. We have only the vivid remnant flesh of the paintings and drawings and engravings.

      For all the lack of documentation, we can say that the Bruegel Object, dispersed across hemispheres, nevertheless had an originating trajectory across a troubled land, a land in which images of all kinds were suspect, tortured, executed.

      If you set up a boundary there will be a corresponding osmosis, a crossing, a new dynamic between zones. Breda is now on the Dutch side of the border, across from Antwerp, a Belgian town, but in the Spanish Netherlands, Breda was naturally a satellite of prosperous Antwerp a little to the south, not of pokey Dordrecht or Roosendaal, and still less of Amsterdam, hick town in the cold and peasant North. Antwerp was an intersection with the wide world; Holland was a puddle.

      Over the next century, there would be a sorting, Catholic South to Protestant North, vice versa, as positions, professions of faith, hardened. Bruegel himself was likely a Catholic (he was given a Catholic burial), although in 1566 he would make a painting of a hedge-preacher going about his business (The Preaching of St John the Baptist in Budapest), and the humanist circles in Antwerp with which he had been associated moved freely and enquiringly in the space marked out by the old faith and the new, Erasmian accommodations and Calvinist defiance. Bruegel the artist was a product of secular print culture. He didn’t do altarpieces.

      One year later, the project only just beginning to assume a shape, I visit Antwerp with my brother.

      My brother’s departure is delayed at the last minute by a rescheduled job interview, so I travel out on my own, and while I wait for him I visit the Museum Mayer van den Bergh.

      Like the Frick in New York, the Mayer van den Bergh is the ossified private collection of a wealthy industrialist. The floors creak, there are libraries and trinkets, furniture and paintings. On this weekday afternoon in February, I am alone with the guards, who follow me slowly from room to room. People cannot be trusted not to destroy images.

      These are the things I recall. A large triptych by Quentin Matsys, with a crucifixion and a line of citizenry returning from Golgotha to the Holy City. A room not so much of sculpture as of bits of stone – medieval, Gothic, Roman, Etruscan. A large rustic painting by a contemporary of Bruegel’s, Pieter Aertsen. Aertsen was from the North Netherlands, based in Amsterdam, and painted peasant scenes and altarpieces; most of the altarpieces were destroyed in a later iconoclasm, the Alteratie or Changeover of 1578.

      And there are a couple of Bruegels: Dulle Griet (1563) and Twaalf Spreuken or Twelve Proverbs (1558). Why else would I be here?

      In 1562, Bruegel inaugurated his new primary focus on panel painting with a series, or sequence, or family of three panels of near-identical dimensions and congruent, Boschian subjects: Dulle Griet, The Fall of the Rebel Angels and The Triumph of Death.

      Bruegel was known in his lifetime as the new Bosch. His works were marketed as such (and some of the earlier engravings – for example, Big Fish Eat Little Fish – were falsely signed Hieronymus Bos, probably at the instigation of Bruegel’s printer, Hieronymus Cock). To his contemporaries, he was not Peasant Bruegel, but Bosch-Bruegel. The earliest commentator on his work (Lodovico Guicciardini, writing in 1567) remarked on the rebirth in these latter days of the great visionary of the North (Bosch) in the person of Pieter Bruegel.

      We now clearly see that Bruegel was a very different, and considerably greater, painter than Bosch. If Bruegel was an inheritor of the Bosch style early in his painterly career, he was also a humanist painter at ease with the carnivalesque, the Rabelaisian; Bosch, who died only a few years before Bruegel was born, was a medieval painter for whom monstrosity was an index of spiritual corruption. Bosch’s monsters mutate in Bruegel into something more arch, more playful; they are curiosities escaped from a Wunderkammer, not devils slithering up through the cracks in creation, less Satanic than Linnaean.

      This is reflected in the catalogues of the two painters. Try drawing up a spreadsheet of All Bosch, a great Bosch Object, at your peril. You will never get beyond the tangle of Workshop of …, or School of …, or Follower of … The Bosch Object is all smoke and mirrors. The Bruegel Object is all meticulous documentation.

      In Dulle Griet, a supersized and deranged woman is plundering in front of a hell’s mouth, marauding on the fringes of the human and spiritual worlds; she leads an army of tiny females who are engaged hand-to-hand with Boschian creatures and armed men. A second large figure, a giant, sits on top of a building with a ship of fools across his shoulders, ladling money out of his gaping arse. The panel is a melting pot of proverbs.

      Baudelaire in the 1850s described Bruegel as a political artist. Perhaps this is the kind of thing he had in mind. The regent of the Netherlands was called Margaret, Margaret of Parma; Dulle Griet translates roughly as Mad Meg. The Netherlands are aflame and the devils are out, cities burning, society collapsing, imploding. But this is 1561 or 1562. While there are tensions, we are a few years out from the hedge-preaching and the Imagestorm, the Eighty Years’ War.