The Best Artists

The Adoration of the Magi in the Snow by Pieter Brueghel in the Reinhart Collection, Winterthur, Switzerland

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The Three Kings have arrived on a snowy day in old Belgium. No fanfare, no angels, no haloes, no star. The Virgin and Child are almost out of the picture, in that nearly roofless ruin on the left. A fine place to sit and receive a visit.

Everyone is fighting the cold, the wind, and the snow. How they do that seems to be the real subject of the picture. Soldiers have started a fire in a ruin next to the manger. Other soldiers are headed for the shelter of that big farmhouse (or inn). Peasants are scavenging firewood and cutting branches off a fallen tree. Men and women are fetching water from a hole in the ice of a pond. Only the little girl on the sled is enjoying herself and her mother tells her not to.

On the right of the picture, balancing off the manger, is a makeshift toilet and some of the Kings’ soldiers seem to be hurrying there while their lords go adoring to the left.

That’s Brueghel.

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The Adoration of the Magi by Pieter Brueghel, in the National Gallery of London

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Brueghel is always a surprise and a mystery.
Who else would put such ugly humanity into a picture of this great event?
What a congregation of mean, stupid people! The rude soldiers look as though they have collected for an arrest or a Crucifixion and are disappointed. Except for the crossbowman with a bolt in his hat (the way a carpenter keeps his pencil): he has gone soft on seeing the Infant and Mother.

The two men on the right are just curious bystanders. God only knows what they will go home and tell their wives.
Hearty St. Joseph loves a good meal. What is that servant whispering to him? Presumably it isn’t bad news, such as that the owner of the stable would like him and his family to leave.

Why did Brueghel make the Kings ugly too, except for the beautiful black Balthassar, who holds one of the most original gold ships there ever was? It is worthy of Benvenuto Cellini.

They say Brueghel took the Virgin’s pose from Michelangelo’s Bruges Madonna. And so he probably did, though unless they point out the similarity you won’t think of it.

Michelangelo’s Bruges Madonna

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Pieter Brueghel’s Return of the Hunters

Nobody puts a world in a picture like Pieter Brueghel. Look at this winter scene. You are alive in 1565. You lived in old Flanders on a sad day when the sun never shone. You saw the day close and the tired hunters come trudging home through the snow. Even their dogs were pooped.

The wind blows right through you. You were a child and you shivered by the fire your mother had started for supper. Those damn magpies glide so easily down to the the plain. They never mind the cold.

Or you were a kid skating on the pond, all bundled up in wool, or a guy collecting firewood or peeing in a corner by the frozen mill.

Remember what the old houses looked like? That’s them. And the roads and the trees. You saw them, you knew them. Brueghel’s winter has been everyone’s WINTER for four hundred and fifty years. The hell with art talk.

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The Triumph of Death by Pieter Brueghel

Two paintings in the Prado Museum of Madrid save the weary tourist from absolute depression. The Triumph of Death by Brueghel and The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch.
The little room where they are exhibited is forever crowded and people show a really lively and honest interest in them, pushing to get closer to the paintings and see more clearly the details. What details?

A hundred little men and women being done in. Cloaked skeletons beating poor little humans and dragging them away from this awful world. Fire and death everywhere, the more you look. Kings as well as peasants; rich as well as poor; good people as well as sinners.

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The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch

The fascinating sinners are in the Bosch. There are dozens of things to see, little oddities and surprises to reward an aimless eye. “You can look for hours,” you hear a jolly old globetrotter say, exaggerating. He means minutes. But it’s true: he was relieved from the boredom of that stuffy museum and he is thankful.

“All right, Mr. Wiseguy,” says a reader who doesn’t like this irony: “You make fun of the globetrotter for getting something out of the Bosch and the Brueghel. But what can he get out of the other pictures? We’ve all seen saints and Virgins and put on a pious face and tried to work up some religious awareness plenty of times. My idea of fun isn’t spending the morning among big holy-cards. And as for those portraits of kings and dukes and things, well, I can’t tell one from the other, they all look the same to me! Why don’t you square with us. I’m being sincere. Tell us what anyone is supposed to get out of those paintings. I’m willing to listen.”