Graphic Worlds of Peter Bruegel the Elder

Pieter Bruegel, H. Arthur Klein

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780486795416
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Monographies d'artistes

Renowned for his effervescent and rollicking paintings of Flemish life, Peter Bruegel the Elder also holds a place among the world's finest engraving designers. This collection contains 64 of his engravings plus a woodcut, arranged in two parts. The first depicts the outer world of nature and man, including landscapes, ships and the sea, and memorable portraits of sixteenth-century Flanders citizens, from aristocrats and burghers to villagers and peasants. The second part envisions the inner worlds of imagination, morality, and religion with scenes from the Gospels and Apocrypha.
In addition, the book offers cogent and stimulating commentaries by H. Arthur Klein that provide details of Bruegel's life and influences as well as his techniques. Many of these prints served as models for subsequent Bruegel canvases, and each image is accompanied by an essay that places it within its historical context. A unique survey of the best and most magical work of one of history's greatest printmakers, this volume offers a prized addition to the collections of all connoisseurs, especially those interested in the art of engraving.

II.

Inner Worlds—Imagination, Morality, and Religion

The World of Drolleries, Didactics, and Allegories

Part One was devoted to Bruegel’s “outer” worlds—to nature (landscapes, the sea and ships) and to men and women (his countrymen and contemporaries). Now, in Part Two, we enter his “inner” worlds, the realms of imagination. The fanciful takes precedence over the actual; the fantastic submerges the realistic; the symbol transforms the report.

All formal arrangements and selections from a great artist’s work are likely to be misleading—including this one. Life and art do not lend themselves neatly to arbitrary outlines. (And strictly chronological presentations are often the most misleading of all, even when définitive dates can be established throughout.) The arrangement of prints in this book, however, does permit a certain pausing from time to time to survey what we have seen and what yet awaits.

Thus we find that in the three sections immediately following, the artist is concerned with human conduct. His aim, overt or covert, is normative. His graphic comments—caustic, comical, ribald, or grave—imply the need to alter what is, and “remold it nearer to the heart’s desire.” The posture of the approach may be a sneer, a shrug, or a loud laugh. Sometimes a cry of despair seems to re-echo distantly.

The three-way division of the title of this section (Drolleries, Didactics, and Allegories) should not be taken too seriously. The compartmentalization cannot be watertight. This is no Teutonic super-systematization behind a façade of “scholarship.” Bruegel’s art is as intolerant of categorical fences as is that of Shakespeare. And the Bruegel of the following engravings, one can imagine, might have relished the parody of subdivisions like those Shakespeare put into the mouth of his pundit, Polonius: “The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral. . . .”

Among the following prints, “The Peddler Pillaged by Apes” is more or less unmitigated drollery; hence “comical.” “The Triumph of Time” is almost all allegorical. The others intermingle in varying proportions all three aspects. A Polonius of art history would have to set them down therefore as “allegorical-didactical-comical.”

How essential is the comical?

“Authorities” during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when they devoted attention to Bruegel the Elder at all, did so usually in terms which implied that his dominant quality was a peasant-like drollery, a heavy-handed rustic comedy, coarse and racy, unfit for sensitive souls.

This distortion persisted well into the current century. Thus, one reads in Buxton and Poynton’s German, Flemish and Dutch Painting (London, 1905) concerning “Peasant” Bruegel: “There is a coarse humor about his pictures which, if vulgar, is better than the insipid. ...” Etc., etc. However, according to the same source, the following generation did better, for that elegant and elaborate but rather empty technician, Jan (“Velvet”) Breughel is rated as “decidedly superior to his father.”

The Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th edition (1929), illustrated a similar cultural lag. This is part of the short entry headed “Breughel or Brueghel”: “The subjects of his pictures are chiefly humorous figures like those of D. Teniers; and if he lacks the delicate touch and silvery clearness of that master, he has abundant spirit and comic power.”

This was all a long-lasting rehash of the generalization, written about a generation after Bruegel’s death, by Carel van Mander: “You cannot but laugh at the droll figures that he painted.” Mander, as we know now, was far from complete and not always entirely accurate in what he had to tell about Bruegel the Elder.

With regard to the “droll figures,” Adriaan Barnouw writes: “I, for one, find it difficult to laugh at his drolleries ... all the human wreckage of a time that was out of joint were rendered by him with poignant realism. The pain and the pity that stirred within him . . . found expression in the beauty of their portrayal.”

“Didactic,” too, deserves comment. The term is applicable here in the same sense as that in which the aim of didactic poetry is said to be “less to excite the hearer by passion or move him by pathos than to instruct his mind and improve his morals.”

The “instruction” aspect is not important; Bruegel did not seek to impart information as such. He was aiming at improvement of human understanding, attitude, outlook. And these improvements are moral.

Bruegel’s art held up a mirror to a topsy-turvy world. He portrayed crazy and perverse situations. See, as one instance, “The Witch of Malleghem.” In the extreme view of Tolnay, Bruegel believed the world of men to be, in fact, hopeless, incapable of betterment. Things were as they had to be, because men were what they were and would always be. How, then, could he accomplish a didactic end? Where improvement is out of the question, how can there be effective moral teaching?

A more balanced and adequate interpretation of Bruegel’s personal attitude is suggested in the comments which follow—especially those for the engravings in the series of Sins and Virtues. That interpretation is, it seems to this writer, closer to Barnouw than to Tolnay.

Our chronology of Bruegel’s creative life, previously given in this book, shows that when the artist made his “abrupt” addition of satirical and moralistic subjects to his landscapes, he started not with the semi-theological series of Sins but with the folksy and proverbial drolleries of “Big Fish Eat Little Fish” and “The Ass at School.” These two, as well as other engravings later in this section, are essential to the pictorial message which Bruegel penned to his audience of fellow countrymen, his contemporaries in trying times.

29. BIG FISH EAT LITTLE FISH (Les gros poissons mangent les petits, B.139, M.128)

The engraver for this striking and increasingly famous print was van der Heyden, in 1557. The original, a pen drawing in gray ink, in the Albertina Museum, Vienna, is dated 1556 and signed “brueghel.”

The engraving bears, at lower left, just above the oar blade, the signature “Hieronymus Bos. inventor.” This poses a problem not completely solved even now, though scholars generally agree that this is a forgery or misrepresentation, at least in the sense that the immediate model followed by the engraver was Bruegel’s drawing to which the engraving conforms completely.

Jerome Cock was the publisher, as indicated by the credit at lower right “Cock excu. 1557.” Opinion is divided chiefly as to whether (a) Cock put the name of Bosch on the engraving hoping thus to increase its sales—the earlier artist presumably being more sought after than the contemporary—or (b) whether Bruegel’s drawing was, in fact, a recasting or “restoration” of an earlier drawing by Bosch, who was thus in a sense being given his just due. In either case, this engraving is authentically “after Bruegel.”

The Latin word “Ecce,” meaning “Behold!” or “See there!,” seen just above the rowboat, is not part of the original drawing. The engraving is, of course, a mirror image of the drawing.

The engraving was published with the motto it illustrates printed below in both Latin and Flemish. The basic proverb is “Big fish eat small.” The Flemish version is given somewhat more elaborately. In terms of a modern comic strip it would be seen as a “balloon” coming from the mouth of the older man who points at the object lesson. He says, freely rendered: “See, my son, I have known this for a very long time—that the large gobble up the small.”

The spectacle on the shore illustrates abundantly this maxim of worldly wisdom. A peculiarly Bruegelian figure, all helmet and body, cuts open the belly of the beached monster. Out pours a tangled flood of fish, mussels, and eels, still whole, many themselves in the act of swallowing others. The same violent and cynical situation is repeated at the creature’s mouth where a dozen or more fish can be distinguished.

Another faceless hat-man, atop a ladder, is about to plunge his trident into the monster’s back.

The huge notch-bladed knife wielded by the helmeted figure has on its blade what seems to be a maker’s trade-mark, but actually is the symbol for the world—the wicked, foolish, dog-eat-dog and fish-eat-fish world. The helmeted figure has been nicely termed a “storm trooper” by Adriaan Barnouw.

In the water to the right of the boat, a giant mussel gets a grip on a large fish which is swallowing a smaller. Higher and to the right, in the three-way play, fish No. 1 swallows No. 2, who is swallowing No. 3.

Above, on the bank, sits the fool of the world who dangles one fish to catch another. Beyond, in the water, a typical fishing vessel pulls its nets.

On a distant island is stranded a huge fish or whale wedged between rocks. A crowd of men approach, probably to kill, cut, and devour. Atop the towering rock rests a peculiar structure, possibly the wreck of a boat, more likely an ornament, but definitely reminiscent of certain cryptic, elaborately “Oriental” constructions pictured in paintings by Bosch, as well as in the later Sins prints of Bruegel.

In the far background, at the horizon, lies one of Bruegel’s typical towns with harbor. Five or six galleys (oars plus sails) are anchored there. “Normal” birds fly in the sky—two nearer, and over a dozen more distant. The dominant creat...