A new book by Joseph Koerner is always an event. Here, as usual, he seems to have read everything and to have thought about everything connected with his chosen subject, the two early modern Netherlands painters Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, so similar in many ways and yet so different: their lives and their work; the complex history of the Netherlands and Europe in the sixteenth century; the seismic cultural shifts occurring at the time; the commissioning and afterlife of individual paintings; the way they lay on the paint and the way they intend their work to be seen and how it is seen now – the Boschs mainly in the Prado, the Bruegels mainly in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. He feels it is as important to note how visitors respond to their work in these galleries as it is to understand the iconography they are using (visitors crowd excitedly round Bosch, they smile happily to themselves as they view Bruegel).
But it is his ability to look and to find words for what he is looking at that sets him in the very front rank of art historians. Here he is looking at Bosch’s great drawing of the Tree-Man (probably, he thinks, a version of the mysterious Tree-Man in the “Garden of Earthly Delights”, made for a collector after the painting) on a sheet now in the Albertina in Vienna:
Invention demands a capacity of mind. But as the medium of drawing lays it bare, it happens in the bodily and material activity of painting. Bosch creates his lines out of bistre, a brown pigment produced by boiling the soot of wood [there is much here about the way the artist plays with his name, “forest”]. Dipping his quill into this arboreal residue, he deposits marks that variously outline an object, suggest its surface texture, and model it from dark to light. Sometimes he allows his pen line to double for the represented thing. The ship’s rigging is such a special case. From the distance the drawing takes on them, these ropes have the thickness of pen marks. At first they look like fit equipment, trimming sails and bracing masts. There are no sails, however, and instead of a mast there rises a colossus no cordage could support. On close inspection, the ropes that seem to anchor the unbalanced mass to the ship’s twin prows serve to hold up idle fishing rods. The ropes invite close inspection because, through them, Bosch “thinks” the represented thing in place, and because they patently cannot do their job. Instead of answering how such a thing can exist, this useless cordage amplifies that very question.
And here he is looking at a passage in the bottom right-hand corner of Bruegel’s “Battle Between Carnival and Lent” in the Kunsthistorisches Museum:
Marked like Dame Lent with a little ashen cross on her forehead, and dutifully rattling a wooden implement – a knocker built to produce a doleful sound – the girl and the other children do what they are supposed to do in the procession while at the same time revealing individualized attitudes towards their activity. As with youngsters in a school play, their charm derives from their habit of slipping into and out of character. When they perform, their awkward distraction makes them living tableaux of themselves as children. In school pageants this frustrates teachers and charms parents; in Bruegel it delights us who take pleasure in the real.
But it is not simply the detail Koerner seems able to inhabit and animate. It is the whole picture. His words take us on a journey with him into a world richer and more complex than we could ever have grasped for ourselves. In Bruegel’s “The Peasant and the Bird Thief” (1568), an exploration of which opens the book, a peasant strides towards us. “This is an art-historical first”, Koerner tells us. “No painting before had ever invaded our space as frontally as this.” As he advances he gestures over his shoulder and, following his arm, we see a boy in a tree stealing eggs from a bird’s nest. Our surprise on discovering this, Koerner reminds us, is as nothing to the surprise of the birds. And he notes that the thief’s falling hat “animates the catastrophe. Setting the painting’s tempo, it indicates that the ‘now’ we sluggishly grasp unfolds rapidly, as do other events that will in the next instant occur”. We note now that between us and the striding peasant is a stream, into which, busy as he is showing us the bird-thief, he is quite likely to fall. And we too, if we thought we were safely looking at a scene as in the theatre, find ourselves implicated, for there at our feet, is the stream and one false step will also land us in it.
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Bruegel, Koerner keeps reiterating, loves to set traps, traps for the unwary in his pictures, and traps for viewers who imagine they are immune. That is why attempts to distance ourselves from these paintings fail to do justice to Bruegel’s art and humanity. For these traps are there (as they are, I would add, in his contemporary Rabelais) not to get one over on us but rather to get us to expand our horizons, to see how limited is the way we normally see the world. A wonderful example is the painting actually called “Winter Landscape with Bird Trap” (1565), in Brussels. What we first see is a frozen river on which skaters are desporting themselves passing through a village the roofs of whose houses are heavy with snow, some bare trees, and a few birds, barely visible, flying overhead or perched on the trees, except for a cluster of them on the right gathered round what looks like an old barn door lying not quite flat on the snow. As we look we come to realize that this is in fact a makeshift bird-trap. It is indeed a door, like the one used as a platter in “The Peasant Wedding”, held up by a stick to which is attached a piece of string (we now see), leading to one of the houses, where no doubt a cunning villager is waiting for enough birds to take shelter underneath the door before bringing it crashing down on them. “The bird trap”, Koerner comments,
is not merely an absorbing detail drawn from everyday life. It makes a statement about everyday life. We glimpse the contraption, figure out what it is, and get a slight chill doing so. Placing us mentally inside a hidden danger, it sounds a warning bell. Just as the birds take the bait oblivious of the weight above them (indeed just as they take that weight as a protective friend rather than their enemy), we . . . pursue our curiosity, our visual hunger, heedless of any perils around us.
But the moral is not that the world is full of traps and we must turn to God; it is that everything is relative and birds have their lives as we do. And suddenly the skaters and the birds high in the sky above them come into focus. “Snow and ice cause the natives temporarily to experience their lifeworld rather than simply dwell in it. And we, the picture’s viewers, experience that little ecstasy simply of being alive.” And both the mobility of the skaters and the motion of our eyes (Bruegel is making both our eyes and our minds work) “find reflections in the flight of birds”. Bruegel’s painterly traps are designed to make us glimpse what freedom might mean, and how provisional it is.
Bosch, on the other hand, is all about enclosure. Koerner shows us not just how the paintings work as paintings but how they work as objects. The great works are all triptychs. Closed, they show one image or set of images, the pedlar striding through the world in the closed “Hay Wain” (c.1516), the universe from God’s perspective in the closed “Garden of Earthly Delights” (1490–1510). But when the shutters of the first are open
they cut through the pedlar’s body, and through the world that is his predicament, along the vital now of lived experience. And what comes into view in that widening abyss is everyday life but embedded in salvation history and beheld from the annihilating perspective of divine justice.
To the left, as the triptych opens, we see the rebel angels falling out of heaven, the creation of Eve, the serpent’s temptation and the expulsion from Paradise. In the centre is the huge hay wain being dragged and pushed along from left to right by a motley crew of people and strange hybrids; on the great mass of hay a scene of seduction takes place, flanked by an angel praying and a devil playing the pipes, while up above God looks down. On the right is hell, with more hybrid and human figures undergoing unspeakable punishments, towards which the hay wain is steadily moving.
The “Hay Wain”, now in the Prado (there is another version in the Escorial), was almost certainly made for a private patron, Diego de Guevara, a high-ranking member of the Burgundian court and majordomo to the Spanish rulers in Bosch’s home town of ’s-Hertogenbosch (the Duke’s forest) at the time as they tried to quell the Netherlands revolts.
It looks like a retable altarpiece, and it acts like one. Through its movement from closed to open, it dramatizes ostentation itself as a cosmic epiphany in which ordinary existence gives way to the true, transcendent order of things. But whereas the triptych altarpieces reveal and enshrine a center that belongs to that true order, as its underlying essence or subject this secular triptych reveals a hostile center, as if the space of truth itself had suddenly come under enemy occupation. This is because its underlying subject – everyday life – is not merely empty or illusory; it is a diabolical rebellion against divine truth. A covering illusion and a devilish trap. Bosch’s portrayal of the pedlar striding through the world thrusts us into the hole, or hell, that runs right through it.
This is as brilliant as the analyses of Bruegel, and yet it is also where I begin to part company with Koerner. I can see the force of what he says about the work looking like an altarpiece and acting like an altarpiece, yet being something completely different. But “a hostile center, as if the space of truth itself had suddenly come under enemy occupation”?
Yet this is the main theme of the Bosch chapters (and Koerner devotes more pages to Bosch than to Bruegel in this massive book) and it is what he highlights in his subtitle, and returns to again and again in his comparison of Bosch with Bruegel. Having, for example, shown how similarly the two artists paint and how close, in one sense, both are in spirit to their great Flemish predecessors, he goes on:
Despite these kinships, moving from Bosch to Bruegel feels like passing from one world to another. Where they stand closest together they seem most distinct . . . in Bruegel, the certitudes of divine law transform into the incertitude of being human . . . . In Bosch, a diabolical enemy at war with God threatens humanity always and everywhere . . . . Bosch is often regarded as the last painter of the Middle Ages, in whom the absolutes of Christian belief still hold, while Bruegel seems the new beginning, the sceptical visionary of the modern age. With one all is prejudice, superstition, and xenophobic enmity against enemies both real and imagined. With the other begins tolerance of differences and the fateful disenchantment of the world that separates magical fetishes into mere fiction and brute fact.
I have two problems with this. The first is this relentless use of the word enemy, which disfigures Koerner’s subtitle (a surprisingly clumsy locution for such a sensitive user of language) and which he seems to resort to with mind-numbing frequency. The second is his reversion to the hoary distinction between a cruel medieval world view in which a vindictive God rules over a cowed and helpless humanity and a Renaissance and Humanist world view of humane scepticism and openness to the world. This simply does not correspond to my own experience of medieval art, from the great cathedrals to the tiniest manuscript illuminations, or to medieval literature from “I sing of a mayden” to Dante’s massive poem. It is the view the Renaissance Humanists put about and the Enlightenment promulgated, and I had thought 150 years of criticism and scholarship from John Ruskin to Meyer Schapiro would have put paid to it. Koerner might respond that while this may be true of the art of the High Middle Ages, it is not true of late medieval art in Flanders. Or that while it might just about be true of Van der Weyden and Van Eyck, it is not true of the late medieval milieu of ’s-Hertogenbosch. Perhaps. But he does not really make the case. Instead, whether dealing with the great “Temptation of St Anthony” in Lisbon, the “Adoration of the Magi” or the “Garden of Earthly Delights”, both in the Prado, he harps relentlessly on this confused notion of enmity. The mysterious figure emerging from the ruined hovel in the “Adoration of the Magi”, who has so long puzzled art historians, is not just anti-Christ, as some have surmised:
His intentions, like the symbols that decorate him, are inherently secret: a conspiracy contrasted to the Magi’s public oath, a secret cult contrasted to revealed religion. He is therefore a creature of the inside – eso in Greek. Therefore he ought to remain esoteric to Christian outsiders. Absolute enemies are mutually inscrutable.
In the “Garden of Earthly Delights” (the triptych had no title originally, this is the one conventionally given to it), to which he devotes close on fifty pages, he is characteristically acute in showing how the vector of Adam’s gaze in the left-hand panel moves through Eve (who, he suggests, has already roused him as evinced by the blush in his cheeks – a detail, as so often in this book, that the quality and size of the reproductions do not allow one to check) to her double in the main panel and on to the mysterious Tree-Man in Hell, whose backward-turning face returns us all the way to Eve. He alerts us to the black hole in the strange object that rises from the pool above God, Adam and Eve, and to the owl perched inside, staring out at the scene below him. But his description of this feels both contrived and loaded:
A black hole occurs at the exact center of Bosch’s panel, aligned with God’s gaze. A diabolical eye constituted by the structure of the painting, it imports into Eden the darkness before creation – that encircling nothing pictured on the exterior of the ensemble’s shutters – and with it the night of Lucifer’s prideful fall. Creeping into the world as those monsters in Eden’s asphaltic pool, peering in as through the black hole at the panel’s center, darkness wins out in the end, when a humanised owl – the Tree-man – gazes back from the night of hell. And it is in this omnipresent background darkness, this black abysmal underlying ground on which the artist most likes to paint, that Bosch almost speaks his unspeakable theme.
This simply does not correspond to my experience of the painting. And the same goes for the Pedlar on the closed lid of the “Hay Wain”. It is true he strides forward directly under the distant crucifix, but to me the elements of the painting are laid out before us, all equally meaningful: the thieves robbing the man under the tree, the pedlar about to cross the bridge, and the musicians playing under the tree. The way this is painted and the spatial organization seem to me to play against any attempt to see everything under the shadow of the Cross. Just as the diverse elements in the “Garden of Earthly Delights”, and the glowing colours, go against Koerner’s grim description. This is where Bosch and Bruegel are closest, not furthest apart, in stark contrast to the Italian Renaissance desire to force everything into one clear story.
I suspect Koerner would accuse me of being taken in by Bosch’s “enemy” painting, and thus being already well on the way to hell. All I can say is that while he persuades and delights me with his analyses of Bruegel and with some of his observations on Bosch (he is, as I have suggested, particularly good on Bosch’s drawings), I found myself oppressed by his readings of Bosch’s great paintings, feeling that he was in the grip of just such an art-historical scheme as the art historians he so often accuses.
“The Peasant and The Bird Thief”, 1568, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder
© Imagno/Getty Images
And this scheme, that old medieval/Humanist dichotomy, even colours some of his analyses of Bruegel. He has a wonderful analysis of “The Hunters in the Snow (Winter)” (1565). As so often, he says, Bruegel accelerates our entrance into his picture by leading our eyes first to the pack of dogs and the three men emerging at bottom left. But then the glare of the snow makes us restless, causing our attention to wander.
Looking up, we soar – or fall – precipitously into one of the deepest depths in European art. But as we do so, we also carry with us the reverie of the close-up view. The paw prints in the snow and the gigantic cliffs are part of the same continuum. Bruegel structures his painting to make our launch into space unavoidable. Serving as a visual catapult, the receding row of foreground trees charts a descent to the middle ground. But then they suddenly stop at the slippery slope to the flatland, releasing us to the void . . . . Bruegel picks up the hunters’ rightward movement in the little girl in red pulled leftward on a sledge, yet the disparity in scale between her and the hunters opens a dizzying vertical distance, as if we have fallen into another world.
And once we have landed below our eye can pursue many paths, its movement guided but not controlled by natural features such as frozen rivers, snowy roads and the long sweep of the valley.
Bruegel portrays individual features (as trees, houses, mountains) as if from across, in elevation, and he shows itineraries through the landscape (along rivers, roads and valleys) as if from above, in plan.
He learned how to do this, Koerner suggests, when he produced his stunning early views of the Alps through which he had passed on his trip to Italy and then by reason of his proximity in Antwerp to the new mapmakers, such as his friend Ortelius – though Ortelius’s great World Map was not completed until 1570, the year after Bruegel’s death. Antwerp, Koerner reminds us, was then the centre of the world, a hub of Humanist endeavour, its ships sailing to far-flung places and its printing presses producing texts both ancient and modern, Catholic and Protestant.
But this is where that fateful word “from” in Koerner’s subtitle exerts its baleful influence. For what the extraordinary landscape of “The Hunters in the Snow”, with its uncanny ability to convey both panorama and close-up, surely most reminds us of is the great frescoes, now in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the first half of the fourteenth century. These have in turn reminded art historians of the art of Chinese scrolls, and some have even suggested that Lorenzetti might have seen some, since the routes of the Silk Road were open and trading through them was active in his day. Is it not likely too that Bruegel would have seen the Lorenzettis on his journey to Italy? Whatever the truth of the matter, these two artists are the most alike in the European tradition, and it is no coincidence that modern artists, both painters and poets, have been drawn to both (Koerner of course quotes W. H. Auden on Bruegel’s “Landscape with Icarus Falling”, but he might also have quoted John Berryman’s fine early poem on “The Hunters in the Snow”). What has drawn them is the sense of space Koerner describes so well, which has given modern artists an awareness of the possibilities inherent in a tradition far removed from the human-orientated and perspectival one of the Italian Renaissance and Humanist tradition that dominated Western painting from the fifteenth to the end of the nineteenth centuries. Modern art has now been with us for well over a century. It has in many ways changed the way we think of the past, including the medieval past. Joseph Leo Koerner, driven by his thesis, seems immune to this.
Despite that his book is a magnificent achievement, with something to arrest and challenge on every one of its 400-plus pages. It is one we will be returning to and arguing with for many years to come.
Looking up, we soar – or fall – precipitously into one of the deepest depths in European art. But as we do so, we also carry with us the reverie of the close-up view. The paw prints in the snow and the gigantic cliffs are part of the same continuum. Bruegel structures his painting to make our launch into space unavoidable. Serving as a visual catapult, the receding row of foreground trees charts a descent to the middle ground. But then they suddenly stop at the slippery slope to the flatland, releasing us to the void . . . . Bruegel picks up the hunters’ rightward movement in the little girl in red pulled leftward on a sledge, yet the disparity in scale between her and the hunters opens a dizzying vertical distance, as if we have fallen into another world.
And once we have landed below our eye can pursue many paths, its movement guided but not controlled by natural features such as frozen rivers, snowy roads and the long sweep of the valley.
Bruegel portrays individual features (as trees, houses, mountains) as if from across, in elevation, and he shows itineraries through the landscape (along rivers, roads and valleys) as if from above, in plan.
He learned how to do this, Koerner suggests, when he produced his stunning early views of the Alps through which he had passed on his trip to Italy and then by reason of his proximity in Antwerp to the new mapmakers, such as his friend Ortelius – though Ortelius’s great World Map was not completed until 1570, the year after Bruegel’s death. Antwerp, Koerner reminds us, was then the centre of the world, a hub of Humanist endeavour, its ships sailing to far-flung places and its printing presses producing texts both ancient and modern, Catholic and Protestant.
But this is where that fateful word “from” in Koerner’s subtitle exerts its baleful influence. For what the extraordinary landscape of “The Hunters in the Snow”, with its uncanny ability to convey both panorama and close-up, surely most reminds us of is the great frescoes, now in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the first half of the fourteenth century. These have in turn reminded art historians of the art of Chinese scrolls, and some have even suggested that Lorenzetti might have seen some, since the routes of the Silk Road were open and trading through them was active in his day. Is it not likely too that Bruegel would have seen the Lorenzettis on his journey to Italy? Whatever the truth of the matter, these two artists are the most alike in the European tradition, and it is no coincidence that modern artists, both painters and poets, have been drawn to both (Koerner of course quotes W. H. Auden on Bruegel’s “Landscape with Icarus Falling”, but he might also have quoted John Berryman’s fine early poem on “The Hunters in the Snow”). What has drawn them is the sense of space Koerner describes so well, which has given modern artists an awareness of the possibilities inherent in a tradition far removed from the human-orientated and perspectival one of the Italian Renaissance and Humanist tradition that dominated Western painting from the fifteenth to the end of the nineteenth centuries. Modern art has now been with us for well over a century. It has in many ways changed the way we think of the past, including the medieval past. Joseph Leo Koerner, driven by his thesis, seems immune to this.
Despite that his book is a magnificent achievement, with something to arrest and challenge on every one of its 400-plus pages. It is one we will be returning to and arguing with for many years to come.
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