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And there are a couple of Bruegels: Dulle Griet (1563) and Twaalf Spreuken or Twelve Proverbs (1558). Why else would I be here?

In 1562, Bruegel inaugurated his new primary focus on panel painting with a series, or sequence, or family of three panels of near-identical dimensions and congruent, Boschian subjects: Dulle Griet, The Fall of the Rebel Angels and The Triumph of Death.

Bruegel was known in his lifetime as the new Bosch. His works were marketed as such (and some of the earlier engravings – for example, Big Fish Eat Little Fish – were falsely signed Hieronymus Bos, probably at the instigation of Bruegel’s printer, Hieronymus Cock). To his contemporaries, he was not Peasant Bruegel, but Bosch-Bruegel. The earliest commentator on his work (Lodovico Guicciardini, writing in 1567) remarked on the rebirth in these latter days of the great visionary of the North (Bosch) in the person of Pieter Bruegel.

We now clearly see that Bruegel was a very different, and considerably greater, painter than Bosch. If Bruegel was an inheritor of the Bosch style early in his painterly career, he was also a humanist painter at ease with the carnivalesque, the Rabelaisian; Bosch, who died only a few years before Bruegel was born, was a medieval painter for whom monstrosity was an index of spiritual corruption. Bosch’s monsters mutate in Bruegel into something more arch, more playful; they are curiosities escaped from a Wunderkammer, not devils slithering up through the cracks in creation, less Satanic than Linnaean.

This is reflected in the catalogues of the two painters. Try drawing up a spreadsheet of All Bosch, a great Bosch Object, at your peril. You will never get beyond the tangle of Workshop of …, or School of …, or Follower of … The Bosch Object is all smoke and mirrors. The Bruegel Object is all meticulous documentation.

In Dulle Griet, a supersized and deranged woman is plundering in front of a hell’s mouth, marauding on the fringes of the human and spiritual worlds; she leads an army of tiny females who are engaged hand-to-hand with Boschian creatures and armed men. A second large figure, a giant, sits on top of a building with a ship of fools across his shoulders, ladling money out of his gaping arse. The panel is a melting pot of proverbs.

Baudelaire in the 1850s described Bruegel as a political artist. Perhaps this is the kind of thing he had in mind. The regent of the Netherlands was called Margaret, Margaret of Parma; Dulle Griet translates roughly as Mad Meg. The Netherlands are aflame and the devils are out, cities burning, society collapsing, imploding. But this is 1561 or 1562. While there are tensions, we are a few years out from the hedge-preaching and the Imagestorm, the Eighty Years’ War.

Perhaps it is a battle of the sexes, a reactionary taming of the (untameable) shrew, a world-turned-upside-down where women wield manic power, an uproarious crisis of authority. Or perhaps we should look at Bruegel’s drawings for the engravings of the seven deadly sins – there are parallels between Griet and the figure of Iracunda, or Wrath.

On the train on the way over I read an exhaustive and interesting essay by Margaret Sullivan in which she traces the iconography of the stock figures of Madness and Folly and links them to Meg and the giant respectively, but I find I can’t remember much about it as I stand here. I content myself instead with trying to work out the architectural division of the space, the logic of the towers and the curtain walls, and enjoying the ruddy sky.

‘Some pages [of Alexander Wied’s very good book on Bruegel] read like a parody of the frenzied activity of modern scholars – most strikingly the bewildering pages on Dulle Griet, who nonetheless remains triumphantly unexplained.’

Review by Helen Langdon of Alexander Wied’s Bruegel in the Burlington Magazine, January 1982

Do you formulate or access a reading or readings as you stand in front of a painting? Readings are always present – the art historian Michael Baxandall says that we do not discuss paintings but descriptions of paintings – but readings, or descriptions, are distinct from the process of observation. A reading, or a description, is grounded on a logical sorting, a winnowing of detail; observation is messier, more repetitive, obsessive, returning again and again to the same objects. Whatever readings or descriptions you arrive with, you can be sure the painting will cock a snook at them.

I suppose a professional might notice the way his or her attention drifts around the panel, recording shifts of attention as flickers of data. I am not a professional. I make, nonetheless, the following notes in my notebook: the experience of standing in front of Dulle Griet, I record, is one of dissipation. My attention fragments over the detail. I look closely, not broadly. It is an experience of noticing, in between bouts of inattention and mind-wandering: of looking with the eyes alone. It is not an experience of understanding. The things you thought you would see are not the things you see. Who knows what you now think? Who cares, really?

I do notice one thing above everything else. The sky is ruddier than I thought. I have never seen a sky remotely as ruddy as this in any reproduction. That sky really is burning. I stare at it. It is a colour field. You have a little psychological wobble if you stand in front of it long enough. Had Bruegel met Rothko or Van Gogh, they would have agreed on this at least: saturated colour impinges on you.

How? Emotionally? Viscerally? Not viscerally – whatever is happening is definitely happening in my head, somewhere behind my eyes. I feel, on this occasion, no emotion. Is it evocative? It does not evoke memory, or association. It is just an overriding perceptual stimulus. We have a less fully-worked-out network of descriptors for percepts than we do, say, for emotions, hence our difficulty discussing aesthetics. Percepts are just more or less noteworthy.

Yes, there it is: to stand in front of Dulle Griet is to experience a noteworthy percept, of ruddiness.

Perhaps painters in the sixteenth century – who had been apprenticed to other painters from a young age, grinding and mixing paints, staring at bowls and pastes and palettes of saturated colour morning to night, lost dreamy adolescents there in the workshop reeking of glues and sizes, while outside the world was passing through a duller, less superficial age, an age of few images and no industrial dyes – perhaps sixteenth-century painters, in short, were more sensitive to the allure of pure pigment.

The ruddy sky is all the ruddier for the silhouetted city, the rigging and towers and cavorting creatures picked out in front of it. The charred blackness brings out the red.

In particular there is a tower with a rigged flagpole: frogs, or frog-like entities, are climbing the rigging; a monkey watches from the tower. And one of the frogs is dancing a victory jig as the horizon burns. He is waving a spear. Elsewhere, more frog entities are dancing a round-dance on a tiered structure.

A burning city was not the most unusual sight in the sixteenth century: it was something to which the imagination, if not the eye, would have been accustomed.

In 1534, Bruegel’s putative hometown of Breda burned to the ground. Of 3,000 buildings, only 150 remained.

Such was the periodic fate of medieval cities, wooden towns. Like the forests renewed by wildfire, so too cities were regularly reduced by fire escaped from hearth or furnace or set (in the popular imagination) by conspiratorial arsonists communicating by means of secret signs placed on buildings. Come running with a bucket if you must, but this is how cities clear their undergrowth.

This ruddiness was the colour to fear in the sixteenth century.

‘The burning of forest began settlement,’ says Stephen J. Pyne in his history of European fire regimes, Vestal Fire: ‘the burning of cities ended it.’

On 14th May 1940, following a breakdown of communication (signal flares lost in the smoke of battle while the Dutch negotiated surrender), the Luftwaffe bombed Rotterdam. Some planes turned back, but a remnant fleet of fifty-seven low-flying Heinkel He 111s dropped 1,150 110lb and 158 550lb bombs on the Dutch forces holding the north bank of the Nieuwe Maas River. The wooden city burned for two days, the fires fuelled not only by the buildings but by tanks of vegetable oil located near the old port. An estimated 850 people died, and 85,000 were rendered homeless; 24,978 homes, 24 churches, 2,320 stores, 775 warehouses and 62 schools were destroyed.

On the day following the raid, British Bomber Command was instructed to alter its directives on so-called strategic bombing, and begin targeting cities of the Ruhr, including their civilian populations. The era of firestorms – Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo – had begun.

Rotterdam would be bombed again, multiple times, over the next four years, by Allied forces. The city was no longer as combustible as it had been on 14th May 1940, but other forms of destruction were available.

*

‘When the invasion of Holland took place, I was recalled from leave and went on my first operation on 15th May 1940 against mainland Germany. Our target was Dortmund and on the way back we were routed via Rotterdam. The German Air Force had bombed Rotterdam the day before and it was still in flames. I realized then only too well that the phoney war was over and that this was for real. By that time the fire services had extinguished a number of fires, but they were still dotted around the whole city. This was the first time I’d ever seen devastation by fires on this scale. We went right over the southern outskirts of Rotterdam at about 6,000 or 7,000 feet, and you could actually smell the smoke from the fires burning on the ground. I was shocked seeing a city in flames like that. Devastation on a scale I had never experienced.’

Air Commodore Wilf Burnett, DSO

*

To make a painting is to hope that it will last. But none lasts for ever. Any singular object is a hostage to looting, theft, earthquake, fire, flood, bombing, and other local versions of the apocalypse. The post-war map of Europe, as of much of the globe, was excoriated, flattened, pounded to ashes; millions died and much was destroyed.

The Bruegel Object, so far as we know, was untouched. The paintings were smuggled underground, into mines and tunnels; when they re-emerged, they were unwrapped and dusted down and rehung, icons of resurrection. The yawning gaps in civilization crusted over, and on we went.

But it is only a matter of time and accident. When will the last Bruegel painting disappear? They are fragile. Which one will it be? And what about records of his paintings, his existence? Will his name vanish along with the last painting, or will he, some Apelles of a forgotten history, a forgotten Europe, persist as myth, the JPEGs flickering out on servers one by one, corrupt unreadable binary representations of long-forgotten cult objects?

One week before our Antwerp visit I get word that Anna Keen’s Amsterdam studio and home has burned to the ground. The shed next to hers, the one with the yachts or speedboats, caught fire around breakfast time; both it and Anna’s shed were flammable subsystems, wood and canvas and paper and gallons of volatile chemicals, boats and easels, sailcloth and packets of economy food. The whole lot went up in a plume of blue smoke so high it made the local TV news.

Anna got out in her pyjamas but lost everything else. Her studio was a workshop and a home for much of her life. In Rome, she would pick through skips for furniture, curiosities, would sketch endlessly with thick black soft charcoals and snub-nosed pencils and sometimes in pen and wash.

And now it was all gone. All her paints and painting equipment, unsold paintings and work in progress, rolls of canvas, stretchers, a lifetime’s sketchbooks, her library, her computer, her clothes, her documents, her electrostats (as she called them) and amplifier. Everything except her pyjamas, her bicycle and a small wooden dinghy she had bought in Venice. Nothing was insured. She had pressing debts, no income, and was several months pregnant with the child of a man who might or might not intend to stay around.

The next morning, she was out in the biblical wreckage of her life, sketching the twisted forms, picking over corners of vanished books, documenting the carnage. What else can you do? Habit will see you through.

I speak to Anna on the phone and suggest she come down to Antwerp, or meet us in Bruges or Brussels. Or we could come up to Amsterdam. But she has appointments to replace her passport and deal with legal problems of rent and deposits.

So I am in Antwerp, alone, waiting for my brother. Next to Dulle Griet hangs Twelve Proverbs, an early work, essentially twelve separate representations of proverbs in roundels, set within one frame on which the relevant proverbs (My endeavours are in vain; I piss at the moon – Ill-tempered and surly am I, I bang my head against the wall – I hide under a blue cloak, the more I conceal the more I reveal – He whose work is for nothing casts pearls before swine) are inscribed. There is a marbled decorative element and the backgrounds to the figures are a uniform red. The handwriting of the inscriptions dates the assembly to between 1560 and 1580.

It is, in fact, a set of apotheosized placemats. It was a popular format. Teljoorschilders, or plate-painters, were recognized as distinct craftsmen in the Antwerp painters’ guild between 1570 and 1610. Their plate-format paintings were usually set off against red backgrounds and had diameters of roughly 20 centimetres. They came in sets of six or twelve or twenty-four. Proverbs were an appropriate adornment, connected as they were with domestic wisdom.

A search for Bruegel proverb-placemats on Google throws up nothing. A missed opportunity, for someone.

What do you do in front of such an object (assuming you are not eating your dinner off it) if not read each proverb in turn, moving from the wall-plaque to the painting and back again?

Bruegel thought in proverbs. The proverb had pedigree as a rational device, formalized in Erasmus’s collection of adages, first published in 1500 and added to, revised, expanded for the next three decades. By the end of his life, Erasmus had collected 4,151 proverbs and adages and dicta, a list parodied by Rabelais’s parallel version in Gargantua of (mostly scatological) proverbs and mirrored by countless other collections through the sixteenth century.

We like to think we have left proverbs behind. We demonstrate our intelligence by sharply differentiating ourselves, picking out the anomalous, the noteworthy, the untoward in the world around us; we hunt out the discrepancy on the untidy fringes of knowledge because it is here that we will locate the telling detail, pull at the loose thread, which will in turn explode the commonplace that threatens to engulf us. ‘Insignificance is the locus of true significance,’ said Roland Barthes; ‘this should never be forgotten.’

But for Bruegel it was all proverbs. For him, those strange edges of experience were merely a long way from a relevant proverb. And this answers to common experience. It is how we read our lives, how Roland Barthes, like it or not, read his. We may flatter ourselves that we generate the proverbs by which we understand our lives from our own experience, but they are proverbs just the same.

Dan falling from the sky, Anna drawing in the ruins after the fire, my father running off the rails in Belgium: these are just some of my proverbs – I who piss at the moon.

On the return from the Antwerp trip, my brother and I manage to make it to the Musées des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. While my brother marvels at the Census, I spend a little time with the painting known as The Fall of the Rebel Angels, or sometimes as The Archangel Michael Slaying the Apocalyptic Dragon, sister painting to Dulle Griet and The Triumph of Death.

The panel is a tangle of Boschian creatures, cast down in a great flood from the illumination of heaven in the top centre, petering away in the bottom left into a silhouetted sinkhole of brown washes. Running through the whole are the coils of the Apocalyptic Dragon. The devils are composites – insectoids with fish parts, humanoids with bird parts, mechanoids with crustacean parts – but out of the great press of them, one or two perfectly recognizable creatures are squeezed: a dragonfly, a mangy dog, a bear. Devilry, in the world, is ever-present. It would not take much for this world to bubble up around us, mutate, reveal itself; if we push hard enough, the frogs will rise up with spears, and hell, when we go there, will be peopled by recognizable forms, all the more horrific for being close to the known.

And there, at the mid-point of the painting, is St Michael, studious Daedalic creature, neither more nor less fantastical than the bestiary he pursues: coiffured, winged, delicate, mechanical.

Michael and his angelic cohort are bringing order. They slay, thrust down into darkness, tag, assign. They work calmly to God’s blueprint, his spreadsheet. The unregulated life of the devils is a non-project, we learn. God has a project, and a project entails not building only, but winnowing. And so, as with all Last Judgements, we are witness to a resolution of ambiguity, the restless harmonic language of life moved suddenly and irrevocably to a cadence.

What are we looking at, in fact? The beginning or the end of this great narrative that God and his antithetical Devil have set in train? Fall of Rebel Angels or Slaying of Apocalyptic Dragon? Both, clearly, the one with its tail in the mouth of the other. Beginning and end are one. End and beginning. One eternal struggle, one never-ending battle.

To make something meaningful, we must be prepared to render much of the world meaningless. This was on the mind of the gloomy Calvinist poet Fulke Greville, 1st Lord Brooke, friend and biographer of Sir Philip Sidney, who was born around the time Bruegel was returning from Italy in 1554. Fulke Greville had his London house somewhere in the nest of streets – Leather Lane, Hatton Garden, Saffron Hill – lying between Clerkenwell Road and High Holborn where my father grew up; hence also Greville Street, and Brooke Street. He died in 1628, in agony, when, having been stabbed by a disgruntled servant, his wounds were dressed with congealed pig fat, presumably to stop the bleeding; the pig fat went rancid, infected the wounds, and caused the poet much suffering for the several weeks which preceded his death.

In his posthumously published sonnet sequence, Caelica, Fulke Greville wrote that ‘the fire up ascends and planets feedeth’; fires cool, in other words, matter condenses, the original spark is lost in dull matter. What you are left with, when you are done sacking your city, is a fragile charred object: timber frames, human bones, all blackened, etherealized to lightness. Planets, maybe, but planets of pumice.

So too the project: in accomplishing something, it reduces. In imagination, a project is a structural object that formalizes our desires, makes our spiritual growth available to analytics. But in fact you do not build teeming worlds: you calcify the teeming worlds of the imagination to a sequence of dried husks, objects in the world: sacked cities, spreadsheets and itineraries (in Amsterdam we made a tour of the red-light district); a sheaf of drawings of a fire-ravaged life, somewhere in a notebook.

Coiffured, winged, delicate, mechanical: The Fall of the Rebel Angels, detail.

IV Massacre

Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace (3.52%)

‘As a lone ant from a broken ant-hill from the wreckage of Europe, ego scriptor.’

Ezra Pound, Cantos, LXXVI 128–9

Spot the difference, again.

The Massacre of the Innocents hangs in the Royal Collection. It is a panel roughly the same size as The Census at Bethlehem, painted at around the same time (1566), also depicting a snowy village.

The painting was bought after the Restoration for the Royal Collection from the Breda art dealer William Frizzell. By 1666 it was hanging in the King’s Privy Gallery, described in an inventory as follows:

Brugle. Souldiers fyring of housess and plundering. A Winter peice.

A winter piece indeed. Soldiers maraud through a village just like that in The Census at Bethlehem or The Adoration of the Magi in the Snow. They kick in doors and raid houses. They are obediently looking for, and slaughtering, children.

Or they are in the copies. There are around twenty copies of the painting, many (fourteen?) by Pieter Brueghel the Younger. There is a smallish one in Upton House near Oxford, and a good copy in Vienna, taken for a long time to be the original, until dendrochronological analysis showed that the wood of the panel on which it was painted cannot have been felled before 1569, the year of Bruegel’s death.

The original, by contrast, has been bowdlerized, painted over to conceal details of the slaughter. The bundle or package on the lap of the woman in red in the original used to be, we know from the copies, a dead naked baby. To her right, the goose dangled by the neck and about to be stabbed by the armed man was once a child, dangled by the arm. Between the woman in red and the armed man lies a dead child, again translated to a nondescript bundle. Behind the woman in red there is a flock of birds (swaddled infants) being butchered with spears. A man with a cap over his eyes in the foreground is about to stab a calf (child) with a dagger. On it goes.

Children generally are pulled and yanked by soldiers and hysterical parents in both original and copies. Where a child is not actually slaughtered, the redaction leaves that child intact, as though children-as-plunder were an acceptable conceit.

Either way, there is no escape. At the far end of the street a figure tiptoes out across the ice holding a small child in its arms, watched by the mother – it may be a soldier taking care not to slip on the ice (he carries a sword), or it may be a father trying to make off quietly. But behind him on the bridge, near enough at the vanishing point of the painting, an armoured man sits astride a horse, watching. Everything is blocked off, closed down: by the yellowish snow, by the soldiers, by the arrival of bureaucratically ordained death in a Renaissance village.

The painting was probably redacted before it came into the collection of Charles II, not out of a delicate sensibility, but because, sold into the collection of the Habsburg emperor Rudolf II, it might have been politically embarrassing. The figure directing the massacre was also altered, from a black-robed and bearded man to one distinguished only by the colour of his armour, most likely because the bearded figure was too readily identifiable as the Duke of Alba. These are as much Habsburg as Herodian atrocities, a massacre from the dawn of modern Europe.

Unlike Bruegel, whoever carried out the editing was working to a short-term remit and in places, where the slaughtered innocents have been painted over and rationalized, the new paint is wearing thin. We see the legs and arms of the slaughtered children starting to emerge, like bodies from a mass grave. Bury the truth if you must; one day someone will dig it up again.

On it goes: The Massacre of the Innocents, detail – copy (left) and bowdlerized original (right).

I remember as a teenager watching the final episode of M.A.S.H. (Goodbye, Farewell and Amen) in which Alan Alda’s character, ‘Hawkeye’ Pierce, in order to prevent detection by North Korean soldiers of a bus on which he and a number of refugees are hiding, desperately instructs a Korean woman to keep her chicken quiet, and so she kills the chicken. He is appalled by this, can’t seem to get it off his mind until in therapy he recalls, finally, that which he had repressed: the woman had not killed her squawking chicken, she had smothered her crying child.

This seemed improbable to me – not that the woman would smother her child but that Hawkeye would forget. But we do it all the time, culturally and personally. We rationalize our massacres, our crimes, our injustices. We smear other, more palatable objects over them. The things we remember are often just diversions. But the paint fades, and memory persists, one way or another.

What Bruegel chose to show, others hurried to conceal. X-ray photography undertaken by the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna has revealed other attempts to sanitize the paintings, notably in The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, where a corpse in the cart pulled by the old woman has been hidden beneath a layer of brown paint, and a skeletal body lying in the right foreground next to the sick child is obscured beneath a white shroud.

Perhaps underlying all of Bruegel there is a psychological hardness which is alien to us. His was a world in which children died (60 per cent before the age of sixteen), and soldiers routinely pillaged, sacked cities, burned farms, cannibalized their slaughtered enemy on the battlefield; a world in which beggars were leprous, deformed, irredeemable. We look at his panels now and we see an artist of great sensibility, one who moved real, small people and their suffering and concerns centre stage and displaced in the process the central figures of history: Christ or Alba didn’t signify so much. But it could be that we mistake his clear-sightedness for compassion.

At the start of my project, Britain was still party to a post-war European settlement which had sought to enshrine certain liberal sensibilities at its heart, personified by the great European totems: Bruegel, Shakespeare, Beethoven and the rest. But I only saw the Massacre at the very end, in early 2018, when it was hanging in an exhibition in the Queen’s Gallery in Buckingham Palace. Now, Europe had broken like an egg, and we, Boschian monsters, had hatched out: menacing, dull-eyed. The Europe I crossed and crossed again in my hunt for Bruegel, that great fellow European, had been fragmenting under my feet. ‘So much beauty and pathos of old things passing away,’ wrote D. H. Lawrence in 1916, ‘and no new things coming: my God, it breaks my soul.’ Before I went to Budapest in early 2017 someone told me to be careful: she had heard from a friend that the station was awash with Syrian refugees (and in fact, there had been just such a crisis, with trains to ‘the West’ cancelled and riot police at work, in 2015). I saw no refugees at all, which was alarming in a different way, or should have been. This was the Hungary of Viktor Orbán’s ‘illiberal state’, one which would shortly write indefinite detention of asylum seekers in containment camps into its legal codes, in cheerful breach of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Bruegel’s world was on the brink of collapse. In the last months of his life the Netherlands would embark on its decades-long war of independence with Spain, a war destined to bleed into the Europe-wide conflagration of the Thirty Years’ War.

I grew up into a world which had done with all that. The Second World War was closer to the Thirty Years’ War than it was to me, even if my father had taken part in it. Europe was healed, and history done. But underlying it all, at its roots, there had always been these bodies, this massacre. Everything I had grown up valuing had in fact been layers of other people’s atonement, daubed over the continent like thick paint. Paint that was now peeling away, as the generations passed.