Headlong

by Michael Frayn

  So perhaps Bruegel was also concealing himself in some way – not just his feelings but his whole character and identity.

  There are two more allusions to come, though, that seem at first sight to sit oddly with the idea of concealment:

  Eunapius, in his Iamblichus, said that painters who paint people made beautiful by the bloom of youth, and who want to add some allurement and charm of their own to the painting, debase the whole portrait they produce, and depart equally from the model placed before them and from true beauty. Our Bruegel is free from this weakness.

  Eunapius, I discover, was a historian, and he was chiefly famous for being an obstinate opponent of Christianity, and for trying to establish the great Neoplatonist philosophers as alternatives to the Christian saints. One of these philosophers was Iamblichus, and Eunapius wasn’t praising him for his powers of concealment, but quite the contrary, rebuking him for failing to tell the unadorned truth.

  Whereas our Bruegel did. So he was a good portrait painter? Not literally, because he never painted portraits at all, any more than he did thunderstorms. What Ortelius is saying in his epitaph, then, as I understand it, is that a truth of some sort lies concealed but unadorned in Bruegel’s work – much as it does in this epitaph – a truth about the painter himself, perhaps; and that this truth is as startling and ominous as thunder.

  He’s saying, I guess, that Bruegel didn’t merely know about the heterodox ideas shared by Ortelius and his circle in Antwerp, didn’t merely sympathize with them – but that he found some way of expressing them in his pictures.

  How, though? Where? In which pictures?

  In my picture, perhaps?

  I should move on to the V & A and look up Giordano – I don’t think there’s any more meaning to be squeezed out of the Ortelius. But instead I sit gazing out of the windows of the Reading Room at the tops of the trees in St James’s Square, where the spring’s advancing by the minute in the April sunshine, just as it is in the Merrymakers, and I think.

  What I’m thinking is this: why should one of those six pictures in Jongelinck’s house have gone missing?

  It’s not very surprising at first sight, perhaps. A lot of Bruegel’s pictures have gone missing. But this particular one should have been well cared for.

  Let’s follow its trail as far as we can. In 1592 the Duke of Parma, the current Governor of the Netherlands, dies (just before the King can stab him in the back, as he did most of his other loyal henchmen), and in the following year his successor arrives. The Archduke Ernst, the new incumbent, is from the Austrian branch of the Habsburgs. According to Motley he is ‘very indolent, enormously fat, very chaste, very expensive, fond of fine liveries and fine clothes, so solemn and stately as never to be known to laugh, but utterly without capacity either as a statesman or a soldier.’ Nevertheless, the city of Antwerp welcomes him with the traditional ceremony of the Joyous Entry, one of the grandest ever accorded, in the course of which they present him with a number of paintings. They include Jongelinck’s cycle of the year, which they’ve acquired either by foreclosing on the pictures when de Bruyne failed to repay his debt, or by buying them, as the account book kept by the Archduke’s secretary suggests, from an art dealer, Hane van Wijk. They seem to be intended as a kind of thank-offering to Ernst from Antwerp to show its gratitude to Spain for having sacked the city twice through the good offices of Ernst’s predecessors, the Duke of Parma and the Duke of Alva. According to the account book, there are six of them. They’re shifted by barge to Brussels, to the Governor’s official residence. The following year the Archduke dies, having accomplished nothing, says Motley, and passing out of history like a shadow. But leaving behind him the pictures. Six of them still, listed once again in the post-mortem inventory of the Archduke’s collection made on 17 July 1595.

  Then, for half a century, like the Archduke himself, they pass out of history.

  From 1646 to 1656 the Governor of the Netherlands is the Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, and the curator of his collection in the Royal Palace is the artist David Teniers. Teniers does a number of paintings of the collection, but in none of them is there any sign of the Bruegels, which suggests that they’d been shipped off to Vienna after Ernst’s death together with the rest of his collection. From Vienna they seem to have been passed on to the Emperor himself, Rudolf II, in Prague. But by 1659 they’re back in Vienna, listed in the inventory of Leopold Wilhelm’s collection after his return from the Netherlands, and in 1660 Teniers publishes a letter from an unnamed friend in Vienna which describes seeing the series in the archducal gallery in the Stallburg. Teniers’ correspondent says there were six pictures on display, but the sixth must have been an odd one, put in to make up the total (as happened again in the nineteenth century, when the series included two substitutes) because in the Archduke’s inventory there are by this time only five.

  So the first picture in the series – my picture – has disappeared somewhere between Brussels, Prague and Vienna, at some time between 1595 and 1659. ‘The loss can well be put down to the account of transportation,’ says the Kun-sthistorisches catalogue nonchalantly.

  I wonder. Does a picture on its way between branches of the most powerful dynasty in Europe simply fall off the back of a lorry in transit? Unremarked? One of a set? The first of a set?

  Or was it removed from the collection by its curators, for some good reason?

  I have a feeling that one day some official looked a little more closely at this innocent series of pastorals hanging on the walls of the Royal Palace in Brussels, or awaiting shipment to Vienna. Someone with a fresh eye, perhaps. A prelate, one of Granvelle’s successors, being shown over the collection for the first time, or for the last before it was crated up. And suddenly he sees in one of the pictures something that no one had seen before.

  A number of Bruegel’s pictures have been censored at various times. The prominent erections of some of the peasants in The Wedding Dance were painted over, and only recently revealed. In the seventeenth century the children’s bodies in The Massacre of the Innocents were repainted to turn them into sacks of grain, and conceal the real horror of what’s happening. Now the curious prelate bends to look at some detail in one of the pictures of this charming series of the year – in the first picture, to be precise, the one that establishes the mode of the whole set … and is transfixed. Within hours it’s being lifted down from the wall, or removed from the shipment, and carried down to the palace cellars before further scandal can be caused.

  What was it that my keen-eyed and public-spirited cleric might have seen? What might I see, if I looked at it now with an informed eye?

  Had Bruegel in this one picture lifted Agamemnon’s mantle from his face, and for a moment shown some terrible truth beneath? Had he emerged in person from behind the canvas? Painted the thunder? Expressed what can only be implied?

  Well, I must look! I must go back to Upwood. Ask to see the Giordano, perhaps, to check one or two points that my Belgian has raised, and then, as soon as I’m alone …

  The Giordano, yes. Before I do anything else I have to get back to the V & A for the prices.

  Bruegel shows his face quite literally in three of his pictures. Or so some scholars believe. I’m sitting in the library at the V & A, distracted from my quest for the Giordano prices by these three rare materializations. In his drawing of The Painter and the Connoisseur he works away, grim-faced and wild-haired, while a bespectacled patron watches over his shoulder with a vacant grin and a hand already in his purse, too stupid to be able to see or understand what he’s about to pay for. In The Peasant Wedding he sits at the edge of the picture, listening expressionlessly to the expostulations of a Franciscan friar. In The Sermon of St John the Baptist he lurks very small and inscrutable among the preacher’s congregation.

  I can’t help noticing that in the first picture his beard seems to be grey, in the second brown, in the third black. The only evidence adduced for believing that any of them is a self-portrait is the similarity
that various scholars have been able to discern to his appearance in the two copper engravings of him done by Dominicus Lampsonius and Aegidius Sadeler, in both of which he’s clearly identified by name.

  It’s easy to find the Lampsonius – it’s reproduced over and over again in the biographies. It shows Bruegel in a crude and simple profile, his face half-hidden by his long beard, his expression and character unreadable. The Sadeler I eventually track down in Hollstein’s Dutch & Flemish Etchings, and in this one he looks out at us from above the beard, now elegantly trimmed, with sad and serious eyes, and for a moment … yes, he seems real and human.

  But then Sadeler didn’t do the portrait until 1606, thirty-seven years after Bruegel died – which was a year before Sadeler was even born. The portrait’s framed in an allegorical surround by Bartholomeus Spranger, who worked with Sadeler in Prague at the court of Rudolf II; and the most scrupulous scholarship, by Bedaux and van Gool, on the unbelievably arcane images and even more arcane Latin text that Spranger has written – both in the most esoteric Rudolfine tradition – suggests that it was a mystical attempt to portray both the Elder and the Younger Bruegel as a single entity, since they were reputed to look alike, and using the son, whom Sadeler may have met, as the model. In plain language, then, it’s not a portrait of Pieter Bruegel the Elder at all.

  I turn back to the Lampsonius. Lampsonius was a contemporary of Bruegel’s, but there’s no evidence that they ever met. For most of Bruegel’s working life Lampsonius was in England as secretary to Cardinal Pole, Bloody Mary’s Granvelle, who had formally received England back into the bosom of Rome, and when he returned to the Netherlands in the year before Bruegel’s death he went not to Brussels but to Liège, where he was kept fully occupied as secretary to the Bishop. The portrait comes from a series he did of famous Netherlandish painters, and it’s in much the same style as the ones of van Eyck and Hieronymus Bosch, who died long before Lampsonius was born. The chances that Lampsonius’s picture is in any real sense a portrait are vanishingly small.

  And if neither the Sadeler nor the Lampsonius is a likeness of him, then there’s no reason for thinking that any of his three supposed self-portraits are, either.

  Every time you think you catch a glimpse of Bruegel, he slips away like this as soon as you look closer. The mantle comes down; there’s no one looking out from behind the canvas. So, the Giordano prices, then back to Upwood. But as I pull out the first volume of sale-room records, I have a stroke of luck. I make one of those almost random discoveries that sometimes happen after hours of patient, systematic effort. I realize that I’m standing next to one of the computer terminals which list current research, and that for once no one’s using it. I push the sale-room volume back.

  It takes only a moment to tap in ‘Bruegel’… and then the system takes over. It’s so swift and seductive – so unlike hunting back and forth through the broad fields of the microfiche reader, or stooping like a potato harvester over the dog-eared cards in the filing cabinets. No sooner has that merest hint of a wish been formulated than up come 114 different ways of satisfying it.

  They’re mostly contributions to scholarly journals, none of them, so far as I can see, of any imaginable relevance to me – until I get to the eighty-seventh item on the list: the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, February 1986, with a contribution on Pieter Bruegel peintre hérétique.

  A heretic? This is way beyond what even Tolnay claims. The author is Pastor H. Stein-Schneider, I discover when the item arrives on my desk. He’s evidently a French Protestant clergyman, and he describes himself as a heresiologist and a historian of the sixteenth century. He makes no bones about his claim. Bruegel, he says, was ‘a manifest heretic, and his paintings Manichaean and neo-Cathar charades.’

  Wow, as Laura Churt might say. Manichaeanism, a strand of thought that keeps recurring in Christianity, however often it’s suppressed, insists on the reality of darkness and evil as fundamental constituents of the world. Once upon a time good and evil, light and darkness, were clearly separated, and in the last days they will be again. Our present state, though, it sees as a mixture or balance of the two, half day and half night. The Cathars, or Albigensians, were brutally suppressed by the Inquisition in the thirteenth century. If this is what Bruegel was painting, then he was certainly playing with thunder and lightning.

  Stein-Schneider, like me, has been struck by the cryptic hints in the Ortelius epitaph. The key to the epitaph, he says, is a letter written by Ortelius that came to light in 1888. It was found in a drawer in an old printing house in Antwerp owned in the sixteenth century by the publisher Christophe Plantin, and it establishes that both Ortelius and Plantin were members of a sect founded by Hendrik Niclaes called the Family of Love, which is presumably the schola caritatis referred to by Tolnay. Between 1550 and 1562, while Bruegel was living in Antwerp, Plantin had printed many works relating to the sect. He’d done it clandestinely – and for good reason. Stein-Schneider takes a very different view of the Family of Love from Tolnay. To a heresiologist, a reading of Familist documents entirely confounds Tolnay’s view that the sect was faithful to the Roman church. The Familists’ doctrines of irenicism and ethic soteriology … I run to the shelf where the dictionaries are kept – their doctrines of pacifism and salvation through goodness … together with their sexual asceticism, identify them as a Manichaean movement in the Cathar tradition.

  A heretic, yes. I think of that little figure in the background of so many of Bruegel’s pictures, the ordinary-looking man no one’s paying any attention to, the Icarus, the Saul, the condemned Christ, the one whose view of the world is different, whose fate is against the grain of the everyday world around him, and whose unremarked presence changes everything. The unobserved observer with dissent hidden in his heart.

  ‘One volume in particular of this Familist collection,’ says Stein-Schneider, ‘entitled Terra pacis (‘Land of Peace’), printed by Plantin at Antwerp between 1555 and 1562, is not only completely clear, but seems to contain the description of a certain number of Bruegel’s paintings. It even contains the enumeration and explication of forty heretical symbols that Bruegel seems to have used in his Familist charades …’

  If I can lay my hands on a copy of Terra pacis, all my problems may just possibly be over. Where would I find one? The British Library, of course. I’m on the Piccadilly Line before I remember why I was in the V & A in the first place.

  I gently open the ancient cover of the little volume. Terra pacis. A true testification of the spirituall Land of Peace; which is the spirituall Land of Promyse, and the holy Citee of Peace or the heauenly Ierusalem; and of the Holy and spirituall People that dwell therin: as also of the Walking in the Spirit, which leadeth therunto. Set-foorth by HN: and by Him newly perused and more-playnly declared. Translated out of Base-almayne.

  The British Library’s English edition is undated, but from the style it must have been published not too long after Plantin’s ‘Low German’ original. I slowly turn over the packed, irregular pages. It’s a kind of novel – the story of the pilgrim’s painful journey out of this sinful world, which it identifies as ‘the North Country’, or ‘the Country of Ignorance’, to the New Jerusalem, the promised land of the soul’s peace. The journey is entirely on foot, and the laboriousness of the travel is brought out by the archaic spelling of the word.

  For as long as one is in the Journey, he must account of him self as a Pilgrim or Walker in strainge Landes … This great unpathed Lande that he travaileth thorow is named Many-maner-of-walkings because the Travaillers do travaille and passe from all Quarters thorow the same Lande to that one good Lande of Rest …

  The Travailler crosses a landscape of topographical allegory assembled from biblical sources, all scrupulously cited in the margins. There are fayre Hills, that seeme to be somwhat delytfull, but the Travailler must beware of them, because they are nothing but Deceit, Vanitee and Seduceing. He must pass a daungerous Ryver wherin many Travaillers be drowned and choaked, named A-delyte-in
-the-pleasurs-of-the-flesh. His life is threatened by divers Natures of Beastes that are mynded to Devouring, the which also do pursue the Travaillers very stoutly, and a crafty Murderer lurking in the thickets, whose name is Unbeleefe.

  I look at my photocopy of Stein-Schneider. A number of his forty heretical symbols enumerated and explained by Terra pacis occur in the cycle of the year. The North Country, he says, is shown in The Gloomy Day, and its cold and hunger in The Hunters in the Snow. The deceptive hills are represented in the Hay Harvest, while the treasure that is to be found in the field (see Matthew 13, v 44) is described in The Corn Harvest.

  The cycle can’t exactly be a record of the great hike, I realize, because if The Gloomy Day is the last of the series, the wretched travailler would be ending up back in the North Country where he started. It might, though, be intended to show not the consecutive stages of the journey, but various views in Many-maner-of-walkings at different times of the year. So what we’re looking at is a kind of illustrated almanac of the North Country and the ‘wildernessed Landes,’ where the snowy crags remind us that ‘God wil now bring-downe all high Hills, and make the high Stony-rocks and the Vallyes playne that Israel may walke and dwell free without Fear; to the Honour of his God.’ In each of the pictures is one of the Castels thorow the middest of the which the Travailler must passe, and half-seen, or just out of sight, at the end of all these valleys is a town – the Citee of Peace that he finally hopes to reach.

  ‘But in all the same Lande named Many-maner-of-walkings there is not one playne pathed Waye.’ And in the whole of Bruegel’s cycle, apart from the village streets in The Hunters in the Snow, there’s not a single path or road. ‘The most-part of the Lands are besett with greevous Laboure, and with much Trouble …’ And so they are – the traditional labours of each season.