death in Bruegel’s work is not thrown into such relief. Rather, death is featured without the foil of life. His conception of death seems to have been borrowed from a little panel in the Academy of Fine Arts in Siena, a simple illustration for Petrarch’s Triumph of Death. In a snowy landscape at dusk, the figure of Death recedes into the distance, with the slow pace of the oxen that pull his wagon. His wake is littered with cadavers. Yet the work of Bruegel is far more vast, boldly executed, and teeming with movement.
23. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Christ Carrying the Cross, 1564.
Oil on wood, 124 × 170 cm.
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
In the left foreground of Bruegel’s Triumph of Death a horse of the Apocalypse draws a cart heaped with skulls, with the shovel used to collected them thrown across the top. A skeleton, ringing a bell with one hand and holding an hourglass in the other is seated on the nag, which grips the waist of a horrified and wild-eyed woman in its jaws. Before them, we see a king dressed in royal purple, a miser counting his gold and a priest seized by bony arms; a woman and her baby are nibbled by a frail greyhound. The gates of Hell open at the base of a hill, and an army of skeletons armed with scythes descends on the human race. The unfortunate are driven off with blows of lances and rods in a horrific stampede, others are snatched up head-over-heels in a net. Over the top of this fantastical free-for-all rides a particularly daring skeleton, even skinnier than the others, wielding a scythe in one hand, his horse stretching its neck, vertebrae protruding. Similar scenes can be seen in the background; in a little cemetery, the dead rise up and welcome a funeral procession with fierce rejoicing. Elsewhere, bodies are hanged and decapitated, gallows and executioner’s wheels are thrown up against a sky blackened by the smoke of fires and stakes, while ships sink on the distant sea that stretches to the horizon.
This is not a nightmare, but the lucid vision of a man capable of descending into the abyss with a clear head, the literal translation of a rare philosophy that probes the depths of emptiness, the secret aspiration of a soul astonished to discover its taste for ashes. One thinks of the executioner’s stakes lit across the Netherlands by Charles V, of the atmosphere to which the lovely Flanders awoke, the occasional foetid whiff of a distant mass grave, and the great shadow which darkened the sunny countryside, the dark queen that took to the air. Bruegel was familiar with its presence and rendered it palpable in his work, nailing it up by its wings like some rural-dwellers still nail bats above the doors of their houses. Though a Trappist monk digging his own grave must sometimes have the same thoughts as a gardener spading his garden, one cannot get used to Bruegel’s canvas, which places a particular emphasis on “brother, one must die”.
Orcagna’s fresco in Pisa conveys the sentiment of the perishable; Bruegel’s painting throws us into death’s arms. The fresco provides a sense of regret, but a consolation as well. The smile of the young woman, in spite of the painter’s intentions, is stronger than the rictus of the rejoicing Death. Bruegel’s work is more brutal, leaving only the physical sensation of profound coldness and the sudden betrayal of our vital forces, as though on the brink of crossing the supreme divide between life and death. The painter of The Triumph of Death, who would not be rivalled by the other Bruegels that followed him, was Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
What was Bruegel’s position in relation to the other painters of his time? In 1525, a few years before his probable date of birth, Jan Gossaert, known as Mabuse or Maubeuge, returned from his stay in Italy. He was the first Flemish painter to admire the masterpieces accumulated for over two centuries in the churches and palaces of Rome and Florence. This was the era of Michaelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci, who represented the most blinding brilliance of the blazing light of the Italian Renaissance. Yet, less than fifty years before, the Italians had borrowed aspects of the Flemish method of painting from nature, and the taut and powerful technique used by Jan de Bruges (as they called the elder Van Eyck), Hugues Van der Goes and Rogier Van der Weyden. These borrowed techniques enabled the blossoming of Florentine art under Masolino da Panicale, Masaccio and Andrea del Verrocchio, who were the direct precursors of the great Italian masters of the first half of the sixteenth century.
24. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Christ Carrying the Cross, detail, 1564.
Oil on wood panel, 124 × 170 cm.
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
25. Hieronymus Bosch, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, triptych, 1505–1506.
Oil on wood, 131.5 × 119 cm (central panel); 131.5 × 53 cm (side panels).
Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon.
26. Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Christ Carrying the Cross, 1603.
Oil on wood, 116 × 162 cm.
Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp.
During this period, there were no Flemish artists who could distract from the great dawn of art in the south. Not even Quentin Metsys was able to counteract this taste for the exotic. The time had come for Flemish artists to seek their principles elsewhere, principles, which after a period of bastardisation, revived their art, with Rubens finally showing what the Flemish were capable of. The Romanist paintings of Mabuse were immensely popular, and certain of his works demonstrate the contemporary craze for powerful and fleshy nudes, heads of Madonnas whose perfection did not distract from the power of the total composition, vivid colours, golden lacquers, emerald greens, indigo blues, in sum, brilliant examples of an art previously unknown in the Netherlands. Between the original and profound Quentin Metsys, who possessed a great gift for illustrating pathos inherited from the great Rogier Van der Weyden, and the brilliant but superficial Mabuse, a constellation of painters would choose the Italian model, entering this dead end of exoticism.
The preference of the powerful and the general public lay with these Romanists, as they were called. The mediocre Bernard Van Orley, whose work seems to attest to the sense of poverty he must have felt in the presence of his teacher Raphael, was named the official court painter of Margaret of Austria, where he was overwhelmed with commissions and honours. The more nervous talent of Frank Floris, admired by Vasari, deserved his nickname, ‘The Flemish Raphael’. Worthy of this remark, Floris was equally ready to construct the victory arches of Philip II as he was to copy the work of Italians. The rich bourgeoisie and proud nobility that was connected to the Netherlands’ Spanish rulers must have preferred the flourishing of a foreign school. A gulf formed between the popular and the upper classes of the country. Although it would seem that art cannot flourish without encouragement from the powerful, the Flemish people had such an intense need to express themselves through original works that they never lacked their own painters.
27. Jan Brueghel the Elder, Christ Carrying the Cross, ca. 1606.
Oil on copper, 13 × 18 cm.
Gift of Betty and David M. Koetser, Kunsthaus, Zurich.
28. Hieronymus Bosch, Christ Carrying the Cross, 1510–1535.
Oil on wood, 76.7 × 83.5 cm.
Palacio Real, Madrid.
Firstly, there was Joachim Patinir, who Dürer praised as “a good landscape painter” when he passed through Antwerp in 1520. Patinir’s habit of decorating his paintings with the little figures of men stooped over their fields attests to his humble origins, a habit that annoyed Van den Branden. Josse
