Bruegel in the time of corona

06/30/20

By Brandon Sward

I have spent a lot of time looking at Bruegel lately. Not that I didn’t look at him before. On the contrary, he’s one of the first I seek out in whatever museum I go to. I think what first drew me in is how weird his images look. Crowded and flat like paper cutouts, overshadowed by the masters of linear perspective to the south in Italy. Though reminiscent of Bosch, Bruegel is far less fantastical. His subjects were not gods or kings but peasants, rendered in the costly medium of oil. He even began his career as a printer, creating multiples designed to circulate far further than a painting ever could.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Netherlandish Proverbs (1559).

Oil on panel, 46 × 64 in. Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

Bruegel also lived during a time of great political change. While the Low Countries were largely loyal to Charles V, who’d inherited them in 1506, the Seventeen Provinces of what today are the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg resented the Pragmatic Sanction of 1549, which collapsed them into a single indivisible territory. Although Bruegel wouldn’t live to see the birth of the first independent Dutch Republic in 1581, it’s difficult to ignore his incipient “Dutchness.” Consider Bruegel’s Netherlandish Proverbs from 1559. While some of the eponymous proverbs depicted will be familiar to speakers of English (“swimming against the tide”; “armed to the teeth”), others are stranger (“having a roof tiled with tarts,” meaning to be rich). As hardened scraps of wisdom that come from everywhere and nowhere at once, the proverb is an ideal purveyor of that frustratingly diffuse “spirit of a people.”

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Children’s Games (1560).

Oil on panel, 46 × 63 in. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Completed just a year later, Children’s Games has a similar feel. The gaze here is almost encyclopedic, a self-conscious anthropological account, even as the havoc and satire of these works frustrate our ability to read them as objective documentation. Bruegel doesn’t distinguish between the affairs of adults and children and has even given the latter free rein over the official-looking stone building given pride of place in the top center. Netherlandish Proverbs contains several defecating figures, and no shortage of unflattering idioms; “barely able to reach from one loaf to the other” (to be profligate), “to kiss the ring of the door” (to be obsequious), “where the carcass is, there fly the crows” (everyone goes where’s gain to be had). Nevertheless, the compositions have a sense of balance; they’re more, or at least other, than the sum of their parts. We could mentally subtract one or two subjects with little consequences, but remove a third, fourth, and fifth, and eventually the picture ceases to function. Imagine a final figure who glances up from their juvenile game, startled to find the streets and buildings deserted, emptied as they stared oh so intently into their lap. Any individual peasant might be unimpressive, but together, they’re a something else: a community.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Wedding Dance (1566)

Oil on panel, 47 × 62 in. Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit

Bruegel views the peasantry with a mix of disapproval and envy. A silver lining of their low status was that peasants had certain liberties such as dancing, which would otherwise be a social evil. The raucous Wedding Dance comes toward the end of Bruegel’s career, and gone are the isolated monads of his earlier tableaux. The wedding guests enjoy each other’s company, even at the cost of sin. Bruegel’s point of view has sunk over the years; his once bird’s-eye view has lowered, and implicitly invites the spectator into the action. The bodies of the peasants are now large enough to approach us as equals, but Bruegel refuses to center any one in particular.

Regardless of their differences, all of these scenes aren’t ones we could see now, and not just because most no longer wear codpieces or play bagpipes. Like Bruegel, I also feel a mix of disapproval and envy when the news shows me the crowded beaches and theme parks, full of those desperate for contact after weeks of quarantine. We are deeply social creatures, which is why solitary confinement is torture. Many of those protesting the stay-at-home orders cite such venerable “American” values as liberty and freedom. Of course, there’s nothing unique about these concepts; they are the fruit of liberalism and can be found the world over. But in their current instantiation in the US, there’s no liberty or freedom except that of the individual (with the notable exception of corporations, which were emancipated by the Citizens United decision). What’s good for me is good for everyone; when each rationally pursues their own interest, we’re organized as if by an invisible hand.

The Founding Fathers, however, saw that the federal government as a whole had needs distinct from its constituent states. Indeed, the inability of the Framers of the Constitution to recognize this is what led to the failure of the Articles of Confederation and the calling of the Constitutional Convention in 1787. One important influence during this period was the Dutch Republic, from which the framers borrowed the ideas of a “sovereign union of sovereign states,” multiple administrative levels, and compromise for the common good. In a recent poll, 90% of Dutch respondents said they were “willing to give up some of their individual freedoms to keep the coronavirus from spreading,” perhaps unsurprising in a country half of which has been reclaimed from the sea in some of the largest engineering feats in human history. Compare this to the Homestead Acts, whereby free land was parceled out west of the Mississippi to most anyone who could cultivate it. On the one hand, the massive existential threat of floods that only a community can circumvent. On the other, the heroic individual who coaxes crop from soil with sinewy muscle and clenched teeth.

A pro-opening protester, as seen on Twitter.

The truth, though, is that the “yeoman farmer” of Jefferson’s dreams never existed as such. Individuals are only able to pursue rational self-interest in a social context that allows them to do so. In this way, society is prior to any one of its members, even if it cannot exist without them. It is precisely at this moment that the liberty argument stings itself, insofar as that which is embraced is also that which such an embrace jeopardizes: one another. This is what Bruegel demonstrates. We know none of the figures he portrays in these paintings, but we understand them all the same. For we too have our proverbs, our games, and our dances. They existed before us and will hopefully outlast us. Despite his ambivalence, Bruegel knows all we have is each other. When we myopically focus on ourselves and our lives, we endanger that which makes any sort of self or life possible; we erode the foundation upon which we stand (at times for the shallowest reasons imaginable, as the above photo makes clear). Yes, there is unemployment, and yes, there is the economy. Our world is a messy one; so was Bruegel’s. If Bruegel has anything to teach us in this moment, perhaps it’s that what appears to be disorder from one perspective is coherent at a higher level. If we lose a few of us, we can go on, but each death hits harder than the one before.