The Panoramic Landscape of Human Suffering

T Old Masters were never wrong about suffering, wrote W.H. Auden. They understood how it takes place, “While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along” (1). Auden was referring to the work of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, which dwelled on suffering, along with labor and merrymaking, the lot of simple folk. He painted them with such dedication it earned him the title “Peasant Bruegel.” He so delighted in the behavior of peasants, he disguised himself as one, and went out into the countryside to mingle with them during their feasts and weddings, “... brought gifts like the other guests, claiming relationship or kinship with the bride or groom.” He observed “how they ate, drank, danced, capered, or made love, all of which he was well able to reproduce cleverly and pleasantly,” wrote chronicler Karel van Mander, “... men and women of the Campine and elsewhere―naturally, as they really were” (2). So well did he represent them and through them all of humanity, that in the words of his friend the famed cartographer Abraham Ortelius, “he painted many things that cannot be painted” (3). He was held in high esteem by scholars of his day, among them poet and engraver Dierick Volckherzoon Coornhert, who once was so impressed by Bruegel’s work, he wrote, “I examined it with pleasure and admiration from top to bottom for the artistry of its drawing and the care of the engraving...methinks I heard moaning, groaning and screaming and the splashing of tears in this portrayal of sorrow” (3). What we know about the artist comes from Karel van Mander’s Painter’s Book, published in 1604, some 35 years after Bruegel’s death. He was likely born in the late 1520s in Breda (modern Netherlands); lived and worked in Antwerp and Brussels; and apprenticed with sculptor, architect, painter, designer of tapestry and stained glass Pieter Coecke van Aelst, whose daughter he later married. The apprenticeship had little infl uence on his style but did introduce him to humanist circles and the work of Maria Verhulst Bessemers, his mother-in-law, a skilled miniaturist and illuminator who experimented with tempera on linen (4). After 1559, he dropped the “h” from his name, though his sons, Jan and Pieter the Younger, retained the original Brueghel spelling. Too young at the time of his death to learn from their father, the sons studied with their grandmother and became important artists in their own right, part of a brilliant legacy of four generations in the 16th and 17th centuries. Like many northern artists, Bruegel traveled to Italy. He visited Naples and Messina and lived in Rome, where he worked with Giulio Clovio, the “prince of miniaturists”