I’ve failed. I promised Kate – promised myself – that I shouldn’t risk any of our money unless I could demonstrate to her beyond all reasonable doubt that the picture was what I think it is. And I can’t. All my researches have led nowhere; all my great conjectural Tower of Babel has collapsed. The little walker in the atlas is merely a decorative doodle. The only other little walker to be found is me, plodding slowly to a Land of Peace that seems to lie as far off as ever.
I haven’t even been able to convince myself. Perhaps I’m wrong about the picture … I am wrong. I know it. Once again. That half-witted customer looking over the artist’s shoulder in The Artist and the Connoisseur, too stupid to be able to see or understand what he’s about to pay for, is me.
Kate looks up. I realize I’ve been absently gazing at her. She smiles, and blows a little kiss. I suppose she can see the dismay written all over me. I smile, and blow a little kiss back. She returns to her books. I return to mine.
And now I remember what Laura said about how Tony acquired these four pictures. From his mother, when she was dying. He went to see her when she couldn’t even speak, and came back with them. How did he know that she wanted him to have them? He didn’t know. He simply took them. Stole them, in plain English. So if I buy them, I shall be receiving stolen property. Property stolen by my accomplice from his own mother, in front of her eyes as she lay dying.
I admit total defeat. I’ll ring in the morning and say that I’m withdrawing.
Kate looks up once more, and frowns. ‘What?’ she says. I suppose I was gazing at her again.
Multa pinxit, I find myself thinking, quae pingi non possunt … He painted many things which cannot be painted. In all his works, more is always understood than is painted …
So what was it he was painting that couldn’t be painted, if it wasn’t the theology of the Family of Love? And, yes, more is always understood than is painted. In all his pictures; in my picture. There is, there is! I can feel it, as palpable as the uneasiness in the air between Kate and me. I just can’t put my finger on it.
I suppose now I never will. Kate’s still looking at me. I put my copies of Stein-Schneider and Terra pacis and all my notes away in my folder. I’ll tell her I’m giving up. Stop her worrying. Get it over with.
But I don’t. I say nothing. I open the folder again and take out the small handful of original evidence that’s survived: Van Mander’s biographical sketch; the Ortelius epitaph; and the pictures themselves.
And I start all over again.
Whatever he was painting that couldn’t be painted, whatever’s understood rather than shown, whatever indiscretions he’d committed in his past, one thing’s certain. It leaps out at me as I go through the evidence once again. I can’t think how I missed it before, except that none of the commentators I’ve read remarks upon it.
In the last years of his life Bruegel was a frightened man.
What he seems to fear is that he might be accused of something. The something’s never identified. Sometimes he seems to be suggesting indignantly that the charge is false. At other times he seems to be admitting that there might be something in it – even that there’s material evidence to be disposed of.
The entire population of the Netherlands must have been in a permanent state of fear at the time, of course. By the 1560s the province had become a police state where denunciation was not merely encouraged but required, and where, true or false, it led almost certainly to torture and death. Bruegel’s anxiety, though, seems to be not a general one but to relate to something more specific.
It’s there, for instance, in The Calumny of Apelles, the drawing he did in 1565 – the same year in which he painted the six great panels of the calmly changing seasons. Yes, Apelles again. Concealment and the art of painting thunder aren’t the only things that Bruegel learnt from him – he took over wholesale the allegorical scene depicted in Apelles’ most famous picture. It’s a curious piece. The characters in it are all labelled, as in an old-fashioned political cartoon, and their names are the Latin terms for the abstractions they embody. The central figure’s a woman identified as Calumnia. Boiling with righteous indignation, she’s approaching a king on his throne, ushered forward by Lyvor …
‘More Latin,’ I say to Kate. ‘Lyvor.’
‘Envy?’ she suggests. ‘Malice?’ She’s too tactful to give any indication of curiosity about what tangent I am off upon now.
So Calumny’s being guided by Envy or Malice, and urged on by …
‘Insidiae?’ I ask Kate. ‘Fallaciae?’
‘Plots,’ she says. ‘Tricks and stratagems.’
And she’s dragging by the hair an unidentified boy whose hands are raised above his head in supplication. What’s the boy accused of? There’s no way of telling, but since his accuser’s Calumny the charge is presumably false. This is the work that van Mander seems to be referring to under the title Truth Breaking Through, which he says Bruegel himself described as the best thing he’d ever done.
It’s not, by any stretch of the imagination, but if van Mander’s right then it clearly meant a lot to Bruegel. So presumably did another picture that he produced in the same year, a grisaille entitled Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, since he retained it in his own possession for the rest of his life. Once again the accused stands surrounded by her accusers. But this isn’t a text against false accusation – the woman, according to St John’s Gospel, was taken ‘in the very act’. Accusers and accused alike have turned to look at Christ as he stoops and writes in the dust ‘Die sonder sonde is …’ – ‘He that is without sin …’ Christ is deprecating our pretensions to accuse and condemn our fellows in any circumstances, however true the accusation, however justified the condemnation.
Two protests against accusers and accusation in one year. Bruegel returns to a similar theme with one of the last pictures he painted, in 1568, the year before he died – Landscape with the Magpie on the Gallows. This strange work was obviously important to him, too, because on his deathbed, according to van Mander, he bequeathed it to his wife. It could almost be a scene in the cycle of the year; yet another view from a high foreground looking out over yet another river winding past yet another castle; yet more crags; yet another sea. The pleasant landscape is dominated, though, by a feature very out of keeping with the mood of the cycle – a gallows. Tolnay identifies the tiny outline of a far-off gibbet in The Return of the Herd, but this one is quite different. It stands in the foreground, dominating the picture, in a nightmarishly impossible perspective that prefigures Escher, with two uprights, one foreshortened by being further away from us – and a cross-bar leading away from us that connects the uprights back to front. The gibbet is untenanted, but there is a small crowd of peasants gathering at its foot. One of them’s having a quiet crap in the bushes. Three of them, two men and a woman, are dancing together in an odd, unaccompanied, self-absorbed round dance. Are they all too wrapped up in their own concerns to bother about the ghastly structure that towers over them, or too inured to the sight of such things in the Spanish Netherlands even to notice it? Neither, I think, because one of them seems to be pointing it out to the rest of them. Is he indicating that for once no one’s being hanged? Is this what they’re celebrating? Or are they, like the cheerful crowds pouring out of town in The Procession to Calvary, assembling in holiday mood to watch an execution which is just about to occur?
The iconography suggests that happy anticipation is the mood. On the crossbar at the top of the gallows, in the dead centre of the picture, perches a magpie. The magpie’s a symbol for gossip, and by it, says van Mander, Bruegel ‘meant the gossips whom he would deliver to the gallows.’
So Calumny’s still at work, though here it’s her instead of her victim who’s to be dragged off for punishment. If van Mander is right.
But is he? Hasn’t he got the iconology back to front? The magpie’s on top of the gallows, not under it; it’s not the magpie who’s going to be hanged. Gossip is triumphant, not punished
. According to Stechow, there’s a Netherlandish expression that means gossiping someone on to the gallows. Is this what Bruegel is threatening to do? To calumniate the calumniators? To gossip the gossips to death?
Or is he saying, once again, that the gossips, the slanderers, the true or false accusers, will calumniate him into the noose, to the satisfaction of a world waiting to be entertained?
Now I’ve noticed the theme, I realize that the power of malicious rumour was already preoccupying Bruegel in 1564, the year before the great cycle. The Adoration of the Kings in the National Gallery offers what Stechow calls ‘an iconographic rarity.’ While Mary and the Kings gaze with traditional reverence at the child in Mary’s lap, Joseph’s attention is distracted. A young man standing behind him has put his hand on his shoulder and is slyly whispering in his ear, his gaze averted in the classic evasiveness of the insinuator. Joseph’s turning aside from the holy scene to listen with interest. What poison is the young man dropping in his ear? Stechow suggests that it’s doubts about the paternity of the child. But it’s no news to Joseph that he’s not the father himself, because according to the Gospels God had already told him. So if Stechow’s right, then the young man must be telling him that God’s not the father, either – it was the milkman or the lodger. In which case God was lying. God doesn’t lie, though, so the young man’s story must be false.
And here it is again, in the same year, if that’s when Bruegel painted The Slaughter of the Innocents. Why has Herod sent his cavalry to massacre all the boy children in this little Flemish village? Because he’s heard a story about a child being born who will one day usurp his throne.
And again, in the year before this, 1563, when Bruegel painted the biblical subject which is complementary to the slaughter – The Flight into Egypt, the story of Christ’s escape from death at the hands of the political power. This is even more striking, because Christ escaped by his abrupt removal from Bethlehem to Egypt – and 1563 was the year in which one of the few known events in Bruegel’s own life occurred: his abrupt removal from Antwerp to Brussels.
Bruegel had just got married, to the daughter of Pieter Koeck van Aelst, the Antwerp painter from whom he’d learnt his trade. Van Mander says he’d carried the girl in his arms when she was a baby and he was her father’s apprentice. By the time he married her, Koeck was dead, and she seems to have been living with her widowed mother in Brussels. According to van Mander, it was her mother who insisted that the couple should set up home in Brussels as well, because she wanted to make sure that Bruegel got right away from the servant girl he’d been living with in Antwerp. Bruegel, says van Mander, had been so attached to his mistress that he would have married her. The only reason he didn’t was that she was a terrible liar, and van Mander, who writes more like a raconteur than a historian, gives a characteristically breezy and anecdotal account of what must have been an awkward episode. Bruegel, he says, ‘made an agreement or contract with her to the effect that he would procure a stick and cut a notch in it for every lie she told, for which purpose he deliberately chose a fairly long one. Should the stick become covered in notches in the course of time, the marriage would be off. And indeed this came to pass in a short time.’
I wonder. A woman who tells such lies to her lover that he leaves her is presumably not fibbing about whether the cat was fed or how the milk jug got broken. Were they lies of the sort that traditionally poison relationships – attempts to cover up infidelity? If so, would Bruegel have been patient enough to tolerate a record of infidelities long enough to cover his stick? And wouldn’t van Mander have cited the infidelities, rather than the lies about them, as the real cause of Bruegel’s departure?
Van Mander’s story is the kind of thing that might have raised a laugh from his friends in the pub, but like a lot of pub stories, it doesn’t quite make sense. He doesn’t say who told him, which makes it sound more like gossip than a firsthand account, and I can’t help wondering if it hasn’t got slightly mangled in transmission. Bruegel discards his mistress – and what happens, surely, is what’s happened a million times since the world began when a couple splits up. He puts out his side of the story, she puts out hers. Each indignantly denies the other’s account of events, each blackens the other’s character. He tells everyone that she’s a liar, because she’s started claiming that …
That what? That he used to beat her? Or dress up in women’s clothes? Or something worse? Something that makes it seem prudent for him now to hastily abandon the field and get out of Antwerp?
Is she telling people that he used to have some connection with certain mysterious figures who advocated religious freedom and circulated clandestine pamphlets offering salvation by the power of love alone?
In The Calumny of Apelles, I notice, Calumny herself is a handsome woman in spite of her moral shortcomings, and she’s full of the righteous indignation of a woman wronged. She’s also carrying a blazing torch, which is odd if you take it literally, because it appears to be broad daylight, and odder still if it’s part of the iconography, since her role is to obfuscate the truth rather than illuminate it. It would make sense, though, if she were hoping to light a fire with it.
So was it heresy once again that was hidden in Bruegel’s heart, even if not in his pictures? Or at any rate the fear of its being found there?
But then at once another mystery opens up: if Antwerp was becoming too hot for Bruegel, why on earth did he think of taking refuge in Brussels, of all cities? It was the centre of the Spanish administration. He was jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire – only too literally, in all probability.
I turn back to the Calumny. I examine it again, like an investigator in a crime story who comes to think that a witness he interrogated before might have kept something back.
The story it tells is oddly detailed and circumstantial. At the front of the court, standing beside the throne for the best possible view of the case, are twin sisters with their arms fondly twined around each other, labelled Suspicio and Ignorancia. At the back of the court Penitencia waits for sentence to be passed. But there’s a hint of a surprising last-minute twist coming in the story. Penitence is turning to look at a naked man who’s sinking pleadingly to his knees beside her, unnoticed by anyone else in court. His name is Veritas. We begin to suspect that it won’t be the accused whom Penitence finally hauls out of court for punishment at the end of the case – it will be the accuser herself.
There’s something familiar, too, about the appearance of Lyvor, the figure of Malice or Envy, who’s egging Calumny on. His shock of long grey hair projects from beneath a large skullcap, so that he looks like a tonsured monk – or the painter in The Painter and the Connoisseur, the drawing that Bruegel did probably somewhere around the same time as the Calumny. He has the same skullcap perched on the same shock of long grey hair – but no beard. So, even if the painter with the connoisseur really were Bruegel himself, as some scholars believe, this one’s someone else. Another painter, by the look of it. Calumny’s being urged on by the malice and envy of one of Bruegel’s fellow artists.
It all seems too particularized to be simply an allegory of false accusation in general. Some actual story’s being told, some definite charge is being laid. What is it?
Bruegel took the subject from a picture he’d never set eyes upon – Apelles’ original vanished some time in the Dark Ages. His source was a description of it written in the second century AD by a Syrian essayist called Lucian. Which I will no doubt find in the London Library.
Kate yawns and starts to close up her books. I wonder whether to share my new line of inquiry with her; this is certainly something we could work on together. But all I say is: ‘Would you mind driving me to the station again?’ I’ve just remembered how she sank my last theory by failing to see the little walker. I think I’ll keep my new thoughts to myself. Like the little walker, I’ll plod on alone.
‘Whenever you like,’ she says, still yawning. ‘Shall we have the sausages for supper?’
She stops for a moment in mid-yawn. This is going to test our new arrangements.
‘I know,’ I say, ‘but I want to be in the library tomorrow first thing. If he’s started carting that picture round and showing it to people, then I’ve got to be ready to move just as soon as the bank’s got the money through.’
She unhurriedly finishes her yawn. Of course; she’s entirely confident now that I’m not going to meet the conditions I’ve set myself.
‘Don’t forget to look up the Giordano prices this time,’ she says mildly.
Bruegel, I discover next day, sitting with my back turned obstinately once again upon the real spring in St James’s Square, wasn’t the only artist to attempt a reconstruction of Apelles’ vanished masterpiece. The detailed description that Lucian gave was evidently so vivid that a dozen centuries later, in the Renaissance, it caught the imagination of a considerable number of artists, and the scene was illustrated by, among many others, Botticelli, Mantegna and Dürer. A French art historian, Jean-Michel Massing, has devoted a whole book to the subject. There’s something profoundly odd about Bruegel’s version, though, that Massing sets out but doesn’t comment on, and that no one else seems to have noticed at all.
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