Man for All Seasons: A Bruegel Calendar

IF there is a still point in the turning seasons, it is probably about now. Astronomers put it sooner--when the sun starts north, but before Christmas. Gardeners might date it later on, when the ground begins to thaw. But since 45 B.C., most people have gone along with Julius Caesar, who with more psychological insight than astronomical accuracy placed it at the day now called January 1.

No man observed the revolving seasons more intently than the painter known to posterity as Pieter Bruegel the Elder. He died just 400 years ago in Brussels. His death was attended by due ceremony and the admiration of his peers. But few of them recognized that the world had lost its first major, and arguably the best, landscape painter in all history. Artists before him, in other centuries and other countries, came out of the countryside to paint vignettes of their memories, almost obsequiously, in the background of their portraits of princes or courtiers, martyrs or saints. Bruegel made the unprideful countryside central, something that was not merely an area for foreground drama but was itself an event.

Irreplaceable Treasures

About 40 of his paintings survive, and though the anniversary of his death was widely memorialized, no major exhibition was mounted, for the simple reason that few if any curators cared to risk the loan and shipping of such irreplaceable treasures. Among the best are a series of The Seasons, originally commissioned by a Brussels merchant. Only five survive, and these have been dispersed. As a memorial to Bruegel --and to year's end and year's beginning--TIME here presents four of these paintings. The originals are each roughly 4 ft. by 5 ft. But Bruegel's fabulous command of scale made every small part a picture in itself. In the following pages half a dozen details --chosen by Author-Critic Alexander Eliot after a long study of the paintings in Vienna and Prague --are reproduced in exactly the size they take up in the original'paintings. They are in themselves landscapes many a lesser painter would be proud to sign.

Bruegel makes one peer down through winter dusk like some half-frozen bird upon the wing. He gives the March floods room to rise, roaring about the dikes of Flanders in time of carnival and willow pruning on the dark, hard-budded land. He shows the earth veiled in blue boundlessness at haying time. Then in the fall comes the sacrifice of her apples, her grapes and human fruits as well. The herd plods home. A body dangles from a gibbet on a hill. Reality was his subject, and truth his object. Yet these paintings are not finickily meticulous, as are those of Burgundian miniaturists. Rather, they are painted with a panache and freedom that, centuries later, the Impressionists were to rediscover.

Very little is known of Bruegel the man. The only factual account of him is a lighthearted sketch by Carel van Mander ("the Vasari of the North"), published 35 years after Bruegel's death: "In a wonderful manner, Nature found and seized the man who in his turn was destined to seize her so magnificently, when in an obscure village in Brabant she chose from among the peasants, as the delineator of peasants, the witty and gifted Pieter Brueghelo." It is perhaps a measure of Van Mander's accuracy that he does not even spell the name right--the artist signed his paintings "Bruegel."

Chances are that Bruegel's "peasant" parents had some land and a little money of their own. Otherwise, how could they have apprenticed their son at an early age to the Brussels painter Pieter Coeck van Aelst? Later, in his early 20s, Bruegel sought his fortune at Antwerp, and was hired by Publisher-Tycoon Hieronymus Cock. In those days Antwerp had more artists than butchers, and the artists worked very largely for reproduction. At Cock's "Four Winds," the trade was in ideas, packaged as engraved art copies, maps, battle scenes, Bible illustrations, scientific charts and almanacs. For a start, Cock made a picture journalist of him. He was packed off for a year in Italy, under instructions to draw castles, cities, mountains, rivers, navies--everything, in fact, which might later be turned into woodcuts for armchair travelers.

On his return from Italy, Bruegel settled in for a stint of ten years or so at the Four Winds. He prepared his Italian portfolio for reproduction, and made line copies of other men's masterworks. He was fascinated by his great predecessor, Hieronymus Bosch, and went on to invent original drawings that conformed to Bosch's nightmare mode. Bruegel still did his own legwork. He strolled outside the walls to study the simple facts of the fields: things he had half forgotten, such as how to harness a farm horse. Back at the office, as it were, he produced to order pictures of monstrous fish, beasts, torments, follies, forests, high seas, Lowland games, crowds, criminals, armed men.

In those years the Lowlands were turning Protestant and started their tremendous struggle to throw off the yoke of Catholic Spain. King Philip put Margaret of Parma and the infamous Cardinal Granvelle, and later the Duke of Alba in charge of stamping out the sparks of revolt. Heretics were made to die as horribly as possible in Antwerp's cobbled squares. All intellectuals who lacked connections with church and crown came under suspicion. The great cartographer Ortelius, who had been Bruegel's comrade, fled to England. Bruegel himself retired from the Four Winds and moved to Brussels, the official capital. There, for the first time, he devoted himself fully to his own painting. In 1563, he married the daughter of his first teacher. Two boys (both painters: Jan and Pieter the Younger) came of that marriage. But a mere six years after his wedding, Bruegel died. No one knows how. He was not much past 40 at the time.

Oak--for a Start

Even in his own day, Bruegel must have been considered a superb technician, capable of representing anything. Foreground details exist down to the last bramble on a bush, while in the distance a minuscule brush stroke may distinctly show a man walking or working underneath a tree. Bruegel began with ships' timbers of seasoned oak. He set the planks edge to edge, smoothed them, and then brushed on a white gesso base. He drew his composition on the gesso in gray chalk. That done, he would start painting in egg tempera, thinly and swiftly. His first layers of color, though, often bore no overt relation to the effect in his mind. Ice, for example, might be lemon-yellow at the start. Blue oil glazes floated over it would freeze the ice to green. And after that, translucent gray watercolor touches, softly laid, would set the ice flat in its fields of snow.

Some scholars believe Bruegel had no interest in or involvement with religion and politics. What prompts them, perhaps, is an unspoken feeling that "artists should be above" such touchy matters. The visual evidence is overwhelming, though, that Bruegel did involve himself. This is not to say that he was a Protestant, or even a devout Christian. Was he a patriotic Lowlander unalterably opposed to Spanish rule? Nobody knows. Bruegel's religious and political paintings simply point to things manifestly horrible and wrong in his own age--and every age.

Bruegel's most overtly political pictures are disguised by their ostensible subjects: The Massacre of the Innocents, The Sermon of Saint John the Baptist, The Road to Calvary, and The Conversion of Saint Paul. Safe themes--but not as handled by Bruegel. He trundled the terrible urgency of the Bible, like a siege tower, straight up against contemporary walls. His Massacre, for instance, takes place in a Flemish village of his own day. Walloon redcoats butcher baby after baby on the shining snow. Mothers and fathers pray, scream, struggle and reach out in vain. Spain's notorious "Edict of Blood" is fulfilled before our eyes.

Ageless and Immediate

As a matter of fact, all Bruegel's art concerns itself with the changeless and the immediate at the same time. His Dulle Griet is nightmare, which presides, now and forever, in cellars of human sleep. He painted The Tower of Babel as an allegory of old Antwerp, but young Manhattan's towers might as well have been meant. Two Monkeys may be seen as just a humanist's sympathy for the misery of chained animals --or as a symbolist's protest against the plight of the Flemish provinces under the rule of Spain.

The same combination of the immediate and the eternal is seen in his Seasons. His calendar series shows mankind busy but small, in true proportion to the all-embracing land. In fact, these pictures seem to pull the sky around one like a canopy. One's gaze penetrates the concrete actuality, mere paint on planks, to enter space more vast than any gallery. Yet the space is not merely visual but emotional. Like T. S. Eliot, Bruegel seems to ask whether it would be worthwhile

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

To roll it towards some overwhelming question.

What means Hunters in the Snow, for example? Sigmund Freud once remarked that every dream is a kind of picture puzzle. Bruegel liked puzzles too. More so than answers. A sort of bemusement, not too hopeful, may be the best mood in which to reach for what he meant.

In the foreground, weary pikemen trudge downhill with their discouraged hounds. One man carries a dead fox, symbolically, perhaps. The rebel emblem was a foxtail. But then again, fox pelts are thickest and glossiest in winter; that is the time to take them, hunters say. In the middle distance, a house burns out. Neighbors come running with buckets and ladders, trying to help. However, the whole earth is cold, like a dead body in its winding sheet of snow. The water mill hangs stiff with icicles. The rivers wait, as if struck by some icy thought. A woman with fagots on her head hurries across a bridge (see detail, page 53). Upon the ice, the polished green crust of earth's secret blood, some skate, others spin tops, and still others play at curling, with faint cries.

Cries? But a painting is silent. Still, anyone who waits and peers about this silence long enough will hear the cries. Also the dogs whining. Such small magics are easier to come by than significance.

With The Dark Day, winter breaks up. Cold rain pelts the earth awake. A savage squall attacks the dike. The ships at their moorings, and also the ships that try to run for open sea, are wrecked. A seagull tosses on black-tipped wings against the leaden sky.

Yet near at hand is no disaster. People keep busy, and perhaps cheerful. In a sheltered corner between two carts and an inn wall, somebody is playing a fiddle. Higher up the hillside a man and a woman stoop low over the dark earth, bundling willow shoots to make baskets (see detail, pages 54-55). A child in a crescent crown carries a lamp. His mother leans like a crumbled moon above. His father dances, drunkenly perhaps, clutching what seems to be pipes of Pan. But they are waffles, baked at carnival time (see detail, page 56).

Man's hope appears to balance, blindfold and invisible, upon a shaky raft. Something of that sort, surely, is implied by the accumulation of incidents in Bruegel's Dark Day. But there is realism in it too. That foreground bank of earth, where the peasants work, somehow seems much earthier than any other in world art.

Sun Cattle

Haymaking, at Prague, continues Bruegel's calendar series into early summer. Here three foreground figures -- farm women this time -- may be simply three women on the way to the fields (see detail, page 57). But they might also be the Maid, Mother and Crone of mythology. The people carrying baskets of cherries move round and down like planets -- or automatons on a town clock. In the distance at right, a sailboat drops downriver toward the gleaming sea (see detail, pages 54-55). "The journey is not ended," a Flemish proverb says, "even after church and tower have been recognized."

As for The Return of the Herd (see detail, page 58), one hears it first of all. Not only the lowing of cattle in the last watery rays of an autumn afternoon, but also the squish of mud beneath their hoofs and the crows' jeering overhead. The cattle are coming down from their mountain pastures. Most will be slaughtered, but a lucky few may winter with their masters in out of the wind. Beyond, and below, the last of the grapes are being gathered. Dionysus, god of wine, once stole the cattle of the sun. A castle gleams like teeth in the jawbone of an immense cavern. The cold winds will be howling soon in that mountain mouth.

No one can analyze a Bruegel very far. He has arranged things differently. He does invite one to pause long; to bend and peer out at the world again in unaccustomed ways. His art asserts itself by very slow degrees. First comes sensuous enjoyment, for he veils each image in the most extraordinary counterfeits of nature. Second come observation, characterization, storytelling -- things to notice, in a word. So much so that each of his pictures takes hours to explore. The third and final stage of studying a Bruegel, though, comes when one turns away. For the painting remains in one's mind as experience. One begins to relive what he has given, and only then to recognize it as enduring truth.

"What is truth?" The painter, staring, pauses long for his reply. Pieter Bruegel, especially, waits and wonders. There is no hurry; the truth is nothing if not true tomorrow too. He lifts his narrow brush and makes a line. It is a mile-long road that rounds a bend into infinity.

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