Pieter Bruegel the Elder: A study of his paintings

Aside from the evidence of the signed and frequently dated prints, drawings and paintings, few things are certainly known about the life and personality of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Almost all of these, such as they are, occur in a brief passage concerning him, written about thirty years after his death, in “The Book of the Painters” by Carel Van Mander. Herein is no mention of the date of Bruegel’s birth; even the place of it, despite a seeming definiteness, remains in some obscurity. His biographer says that the painter was born “not far from Breda, in a village called Breughel,[1] by which name he called himself and left it to his descendants.” The village of that name nearest to Breda is twenty-five miles away; and as distances went in the sixteenth century, this seems hardly to be bridged by Van Mander’s easy phrase. As for the year, the guesses of the scholars range all the way from 1510 to 1530, the most widely accepted one being 1525. Any closer determination of it is a matter of comparative unimportance in its possible effect on the period of actual productiveness, since this is very satisfactorily covered by trustworthy dates.

[1] There are several different ways of spelling this name, each having some degree of authority; but so far as concerns the painter himself, the deciding fact is that the signatures now visible on the paintings (about twenty in number) consistently adhere to BRVEGEL.

And whatever the exact year may have been, it had not been long before when for Europeans the geographical world had been suddenly enlarged as a sort of materialization of the immediately preceding enlargement of mind. The succession of discoveries—of America; of India and the true Indies; of Sumatra, Java and Borneo; and, two hundred and fifty years after Marco Polo, of China—were only the working on another plane of the essentially exploring spirit which had been previously manifested by the scholars, scientists and artists of the Early Renaissance. National unity on a fresh basis had been realized in Spain through the expulsion of the Moors, and in both France and England under absolute monarchies which were headed, at the time of Bruegel’s birth, by Francis I and Henry VIII. About that time, also, Magellan was circumnavigating the globe and Cortez was conquering Mexico; Leonardo and Raphael were dying, and shortly after them went Carpaccio, Leo X and Signorelli. Martin Luther, preaching the Reformation in Germany, was thus initiating a movement of ruinous significance for Bruegel’s homeland; for there the cause of religious liberty, gradually coalescing with that of political independence, was to meet with the terrible repressions begun by the newly elected Emperor, Charles Quint, who was already by inheritance lord of the Low Countries.

During all this period of ferment and reorientation for the European mind, Antwerp, where Bruegel was to spend most of his life, was one of the most important of all ports. Situated in what was then the most densely populated region of Europe, it had in its own houses a hundred thousand persons; and of these more than a tenth were foreigners—German merchants, Italian scholars, Portuguese Jews, French Huguenots, English sailors and the soldiers of Spain. Far-journeyed vessels brought to it the spices and rich stuffs, the metal-work and strange animals of distant lands; and their seamen had tales to tell of things far off towards the expanding horizons of the world. In this comfortable and prosperous city, where the sharp demarcations between classes prevalent in other countries were blurred almost into a real democracy of the bourgeois, every fresh discovery and important event had its repercussion in the general consciousness.

Antwerp was thus a natural center of activity for the religious propaganda and disputation which formed so large and so tragic an element in the life of the sixteenth century; creeds of all sorts readily found adherents among its varied and impressionable populace. Lutheranism was so strongly advocated by the convent of Augustinian monks that its inmates were dispersed, after the execution of two among them, and its buildings razed. Though the terrorism of the Inquisitor Van der Hulst and his priestly successors imposed silence on many, there were open preachings as well as clandestine meetings, and riots in which religion-frenzied women were among the boldest; and with all the burnings of the books, with all the imprisonments and the brandings, the full penalties of the imperial edicts could hardly be enforced by those who were conscious that such enforcement would destroy the principal source of the Emperor’s precarious revenue. Even the anarchy of Anabaptism, persecuted by Catholic and Protestant alike, made headway through the martyrdom of its believers; and from 1544, almost the very year when the young Pieter Bruegel commenced his apprenticeship, the new sectarianism of Calvin entered the city and grew rapidly in strength.

While he was growing up, the English and the French were subduing the North American continent and in the Andes Pizarro was rifling the wealth of Peru; Rome was being pillaged by the Germans; Henry VIII was finally repudiating Catholicism and Ignatius of Loyola was in a way belatedly replying to Luther by organizing the Society of Jesuits; Hampton Court Palace, the French chateaux and the palaces of Venice were being built; Erasmus, Dürer, Machiavelli, Luini, Ariosto, Correggio died. As yet unconscious of such events and such personages, perhaps ignorant of the nearer deaths of Quentin Matsys and Lucas van Leyden, the youth of nameless family was living a peasant among peasants—and a genius in the making—sharing to full their laborious, roistering life. Hard drinkers and heavy eaters, they were much given to feasts and fairs; marriages, baptisms, even deaths were for them occasions for celebrations as excessive as the labor from which they thus escaped. Their animal frankness and coarse gaiety blew like a gale of rude health over all their activities. From life itself, from the small events in a remote village of the Campine, Bruegel absorbed the great sane grossness which now seems buried in the books of his day. Bringing with him the peasant vitality which was to develop into a lofty philosophic humaneness, he came to Antwerp and, a youth approaching his twentieth year, became an apprentice to the celebrated Pieter Coeck. Paracelsus, Copernicus and Holbein had just died; Bruegel had hardly learned to grind his colors when French Francis and English Henry followed them, even as their sometime enemy, sometime ally, Charles, was bloodily but only temporarily settling religious questions at Mühlberg.

From his first master Bruegel must have received somewhat more than a merely technical training, good as that probably was. Coeck had been for four years the pupil of Bernard van Orley and had later studied in Rome; in his own work afterwards he relied to such an extent upon the formulas then worked out that all of it now seems borrowed; but the precepts that he would pass on to an apprentice could not dull or conventionalize so forceful a nature as Bruegel’s. Of more significance in the development of such a nature must have been the stories of far countries that were told, adding to his knowledge and stimulating his imagination; for Coeck had spent the year of 1533 in the Constantinople of Suleiman the Magnificent and had been one of the entourage of Charles on his expedition to Tunis in 1538. Painter to the Emperor and Dean of the Guild of Saint Luke, Pieter Coeck died in 1550. Then or before Bruegel passed over to the work-shop of Jerome Cock, who was not so much a painter as a dealer in pictures and a publisher of popular prints. His establishment “was certainly the rendezvous of all the artists and all the amateurs of Antwerp and even from abroad. Rendered in engraving, the greater number of existing masterpieces would pass under the eyes of the attentive Bruegel.” (Bernard: p. 58.) The very shop-name, “At the Sign of the Four Winds,” symbolized the range of influences that played over him, the sights and tales that passed into his consciousness; and for Bruegel these things could be only so many more incitements to journey into the world and see it all for himself.

Therefore it is not surprising that, after he had completed his apprenticeship and been received into the painter’s guild, in 1551, he should set out upon his travels. Such a trip in those days was no light undertaking. All frontiers were insecure since the wars between Charles and Francis for continental domination; for little or nothing soldiers turned into robbers. Van Mander mentions neither routes nor places, writing only that Bruegel “went into France and from there into Italy.” Even the drawings now preserved afford no positive information as to the way he went—a circumstance which might be interpreted to mean that already he was interested less in telling what a specific place looked like than in rendering the emotional effect of nature upon himself. But two designs now preserved as etchings are signed and dated at Rome in 1553, and there is a drawing of the Ripa Grande which appears to have been done on the spot. The print of a naval battle engraved by Huys and published by Cock after Bruegel’s return to Antwerp indicates that he went as far south as Messina.

When he passed through France, François Clouet and Germain Pilon were practising their art of tepid grace; when he reached Rome, the Sistine Chapel paintings had been completed, but not the church of Saint Peter. At the height of their working powers were Michelangelo, Titian, Palestrina, Palladio; and Benvenuto Cellini was doubling in the roles of artist and bandit. There is no proof that Bruegel had any contact with these men; that he even saw their works is recorded neither in words nor in the paintings by which he lives today in their company. It is certainly reasonable, however, to suppose that the fame of his contemporaries had not only reached him but actually played a part in persuading him to his long wayfaring. Though still in his twenties, he even then had sufficiently a mind of his own to avoid the mistake of his predecessors, who had gone south specifically to copy and imitate the styles of the Italian painters. In their journeying they were following a fashion, doing something because others were doing it; Bruegel’s urge was both deeper and broader, as his genius was.

Yes, the artistic, the professional, motive must have had much to do with sending him to Italy, but the only way of expressing the sum total of the desires that undoubtedly animated him is to say that he must have craved more life.

“For to admire an’ for to see, For to be’old this world so wide”—

no motive less comprehensive than this could have moved him. He was a great artist in the making, but he was even more a man than an artist; for him the art of other men could be only a part, and not the most important part, of the all-inclusive experience of which he was in search. Only such a conception of his personality can account for the failure of the Italian masterpieces to influence him then or thereafter and his own immediate and life-long preoccupation with the entire range of nature and of human life. Moreover, so much can be inferred from Van Mander’s only other reference to this momentous trip, a reference which takes the form of reporting somebody else’s remark that “... in the Alps he swallowed all the rocks and mountains, to return home and vomit them out on painting-board and canvas....”