beauty of Italian art like his brother Jan Mandyn and Pieter Aertsen, known as ‘Lange Peer’, can also be counted among those, one of whom was Bruegel, who during this time of development in Flemish art pursued a traditional Flemish style of painting more or less happily.
Too frequently, the painters of the humorous schools are exclusively cited as Bruegel’s precursors, particularly Hieronymus Bosch, who lived less than half a century before Bruegel. Yet a rapid examination of Bruegel’s work convincingly shows that he worked through direct observation; he studied the spectacles of daily life more than the paintings of his predecessors. Regarding certain comical works, he simply employed the widespread technique of appropriating the traditional caricatured style of portraying clowns, without there being a clear connection between his paintings and drawings and those of his predecessors.
Bruegel’s art is not the result of any particular school in the strict sense of the word. The best of his students, his son Pieter, known as the ‘Hell Brueghel’, simply copied him. Pieter Bruegel the Elder occupies an exceptional place in the history of Flemish painting, as much for the creative power of his genius as for his personal technique. It would be fair to consider him an extreme, a crowning achievement of the realist tendency that characterises Netherlandish painting. He applies himself to his subjects drawn from the daily lives of the Flemish people with a primary concern for sincerity before satire. It was only after completing a scene of daily life that he would attach a proverb or a certain moral sense to it. His work is so natural that he frequently does not seem to have set out with the preconceived idea of painting a particular moral lesson or proverb.
Bruegel’s precursors include Flemish painters since Melchior Broederlam, whose Flight into Egypt, is a diminutive painting of profound and ingenious realism, with its splendid portrait of Joseph raising a cup to his lips. There is also Hugues Van der Goes with his triptych The Adoration of the Sheperds, in the Uffizi in Florence, the very image of Flemish rustics whose rude features seem to be lit with the purest flame of idealism that burned in this master’s heart.
Closer to Bruegel, again, is Quentin Metsys, who, in one of the panels of his triptych in Antwerp, shows the boozy faces of the executioners stoking the fire around the cauldron where Saint John can be seen from the waist up, imploring the heavens. In Bruegel’s preferred genres, it is necessary to seek out those artists who worked in similar veins before him, artists attached to popular subjects, particularly when taken from the lives of rural dwellers: in sum, the satirists, humorists, and moralists. The work of Hieronymus Bosch, exhibits many traits in common with that of Bruegel without it being possible to confuse these two profoundly original masters.
29. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, 1559.
Oil on oak panel, 118 × 164.5 cm.
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
30. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, detail, 1559.
Oil on oak panel, 118 × 164.5 cm.
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
31. Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, triptych, ca. 1500.
Oil on wood, 200 × 195 cm (central panel); 220 × 97 cm (side panels).
Museo del Prado, Madrid.
The first artistic Renaissance that appeared at the beginning of the thirteenth century inevitably consisted of a movement towards realism, a return to nature and the living in an art that had since the end of ancient times been nothing more than a servile imitation of Byzantine models and techniques. From an unknown source, a new breath animated the paralysed limbs and almond-like mosaic eyes of the oriental Madonnas. Their forms took on weight, connecting them to reality, and painters no longer hesitated to enliven their dull eyes with the glint of a gaze, the flickering flame of a soul. This trend surely occurred in the Netherlands at the same time as Florence, Siena and Pisa, and the production of unknown Flemish artists must have corresponded to the works of the great precursors of the Italian Renaissance like Giotto or Duccio di Buoninsegna.
The inherent genius of the Flemish artists was also active, that talent for perceiving and rendering colour were too deeply ingrained in their character for them not to have realised the inanity of the conventionalism that characterised the art at that time. They must have sought to express their innate thirst for truth, perhaps gropingly and clumsily but nevertheless with power and frankness. The scholarly work of Deshaines and the admirable teachings of Courajod and Flerens-Gevaert put an end to the legend that claimed the Van Eyck brothers had sprung forth suddenly, as though prepared by Providence, to create the masterpiece of the human spirit, The Adoration of the Lamb, without recourse to guide, lesson or example.
Today we know their predecessors, works like the Broederlam hanging in Dijon, previously mentioned. His small panel in the Musée van den Bergh of Antwerp depicts the Virgin wearing an azure dress asleep on gold-speckled fabric next to the naked Christ child warmed by the breath of a cow and a donkey. Though Broederlam is the only Flemish artist whose fragmented work has survived from this period, he must have had many students and emulators given the richness of his time, its numerous fertile spirits, and generous patrons who created an atmosphere favourable to art. In the absence of paintings, surviving fragments of sculptures attest to the vigour of execution and the strength of temperament of the Flemish sculptors in the second half of the fourteenth century. By that time they had already achieved the supreme integrity, harmony and equilibrium that mark perfection.
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