by Will Durant
Note how the painting craft in the Netherlands ran in families. Joos van Cleve handed down some of his skill to his son Cornelis, who painted some fine portraits before going mad. Jan Massys, inheriting the studio of his father Quentin, painted by preference nudes like Judith and Suzanna and the Elders; his son Quentin Massys II carried on the trade, while his brother Cornells took his art to England and painted Henry VIII in old age, bloated and hideous. Pieter Pourbus and his son Frans painted portraits and pieties at Bruges, and Frans’s son Frans Pourbus II painted portraits at Paris and Mantua. And there were Pieter “Droll” Brueghel, his painter wife, his painter mother-in-law, his sons Pieter “Hell” Brueghel and Jan “Velvet” Brueghel, his painter grandsons, his painter great-grandsons.....
Pieter Brueghel the Elder, whose fame is among the inescapable fashions of our time, may have derived his name from either of two villages named Brueghel in Brabant; one of them was near Hertogenbosch, where Hieronymus Bosch had been born, and in whose churches Pieter might have seen several paintings of the man who influenced his work only less than nature itself. At twenty-five (c. 1545) he migrated to Antwerp, and was apprenticed to Pieter Coecke, whose landscape woodcuts may have helped to form the young painter’s interest in fields, woods, waters, and sky. This lesser Pieter had begotten a daughter, Maria, whom Brueghel toddled in his arms as a child, and whom he later made his wife. In 1552 he followed the current custom of his craft and went to study painting in Italy. He returned to Antwerp with a sketchbook thick with Italian landscapes, but with no visible Italian influence on his technique; to the end he practically ignored the subtle modeling, chiaroscuro, and coloratura of the southern masters. Back in Antwerp, he lived with a housekeeper-concubine, whom he promised to marry when she stopped lying; he recorded her lies with notches cut into a stick; and having no stick for his own sins, he renounced her when the notches overflowed. In his middle forties (1563) he married Maria Coecke, now seventeen, and obeyed her summons to move to Brussels. He had only six years of life left to him.
Though his paintings led to his being dubbed “Peasant Brueghel,” he was a man of culture, who read Homer, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Rabelais, probably Erasmus.13 Karel Mander, the Dutch Vasari, described him as “tranquil and orderly, speaking little, yet amusing in company, delighting to horrify people .... with tales of ghosts and banshees”;14 hence, perhaps, his other sobriquet, “Droll Brueghel.” His sense of humor leaned to satire, but he tempered this with sympathy. A contemporary engraving shows him heavily bearded, with a face bearing lines of serious thought.15 At times he followed Bosch in seeing life as a heedless hurrying of most souls to hell. In the Dulle Griet he pictured hell as hideously and confusedly as Bosch himself; and in The Triumph of Death he visioned death not as a natural sleep of exhausted forms, but as a ghastly cutting off of limbs and life—skeletons attacking kings, cardinals, knights, and peasants with arrows, hatchets, stones, and scythes—criminals beheaded or hanged or bound to a wheel—skulls and corpses riding in a cart; here is one more variant of that: “Dance of Death” which flits through the art of this somber age.
Brueghel’s religious pictures carry on the serious mood. They have neither the grandeur nor the light grace of Italian pictures; they merely reinterpret the Biblical story in terms of Flemish climate, physiognomy, and dress. They rarely reveal religious feeling; most of them are excuses for painting crowds. Even the faces in them carry no feeling; the people who jostle one another to see Christ carry His cross seem heedless of His suffering, but only anxious to get a good view. Some of the pictures are Biblical parables, like The Sower; some others, following Bosch, take proverbs for their themes. The Blind Leading the Blind shows a succession of dull-eyed peasants, cruelly ugly, following one another into a ditch; and Netherlandish Proverbs illustrates, in one teeming picture, nearly a hundred old saws, including some of Rabelaisian fragrance.
Brueghel’s major interest was in peasant crowds, and landscapes covering with their indifferent beneficence or maleficence the futile, forgivable activities of men. Perhaps he thought there was safety in crowds; there he need not individualize the faces or model the flesh. He refused to picture a person posing for art or history; he preferred to show men, women, and children walking, running, jumping, dancing, playing games, in all the varied animation and naturalness of life. He harked back to the scenes of his childhood, and delighted to contemplate, to join, the fun and feasting, music and mating, of the peasantry. He and a friend, on several occasions, disguised themselves as farmers, attended village fairs and weddings, and—pretending to be relatives—brought presents to bridegroom and bride.16 Doubtless on these outings Pieter took his sketchbook, for among his extant drawings are many of rustic figures and events. He had no taste for, nor commissions from, the aristocrats that Mor and Titian found it so profitable to portray; he painted only simple people, and even his dogs were mongrel curs that could be found in any city alley or rural hut. He knew the bitter side of peasant life, and sometimes visioned it as a multitudinous confusion of fools. But he loved to paint the games of country children, the dances of their elders, the riot of their weddings. In The Land of Cockayne peasants exhausted with toil or love or drink sprawl out on the grass dreaming of Utopia. It is the peasant, Brueghel seems to say, who knows how to play and sleep as well as how to work and mate and die.
Against death he saw but one consolation—that it is an integral part of that Nature which he accepted in all its forms of beauty and terror, growth and decay and renewal. The landscape redeems the man; the absurdity of the part is pardoned in the majesty of the whole. Heretofore—excepting Altdorfer—landscapes had been painted as backgrounds and appendages to human figures and events: Brueghel made the landscape itself the picture, the men in it mere incidents. In The Fall of Icarus the sky, the ocean, the mountains, and the sun have absorbed the attention of the painter, and of the participants; Icarus is two unnoticed legs ridiculously sinking into the sea; and in The Storm man is hardly visible, lost and helpless in the war and power of the elements.
The art and philosophy of Brueghel culminate in the five paintings that remain of a series planned to illustrate the moods of the year. The Wheat Harvest schematically pictures the cutting and stacking of the sheaves, the workers lunching or napping beneath the visible heat and stillness of the summer air. In The Hay Harvest girls and boys bear the autumn fruit of the fields in baskets on their heads, a farmer sharpens his scythe, sturdy women rake the hay, men pitch it to the top of the wagon load, the horses champ their meal in a resting interval. The Return of the Herd heralds winter—the skies darkling, the cattle guided back to their stalls. Finest of the series is The Hunters in the Snow: roofs and ground are white; dwellings range in an amazing perspective along the plains and hills; men skate, play hockey, fall on the ice; hunters and their dogs start out to capture food; the trees are bare, but birds in the branches promise spring. The Gloomy Day is winter scowling its farewell. In these paintings Brueghel reached his peak, and set a precedent for the snowy landscapes of future Lowland art.
Only a painter or a connoisseur can judge these pictures in their artistic quality and technique. Brueghel seems content to give his figures two dimensions, does not bother to mingle shadow with their substance; he lets our imagination, if it must, add a third dimension to his two. He is too interested in crowds to care about individuals; he makes nearly all his peasants alike, ungainly lumps of flesh. He does not pretend to be a realist, except in gross. He puts so many people or episodes into one painting that unity seems sacrificed; but he catches the unconscious unity of a village, a crowd, a wave of life.
What does he mean to say? Is he merely jesting, laughing at man as a grotesque “forked radish,” and at life as a silly strutting to decay? He enjoyed the lusty swing of the peasants’ dance, sympathized with their toil, and looked with indulgent humor on their drunken sleep. But he never recovered from Bosch. Like that unsaintly Jerome, he took sardonic pleasure in depicting the bitter side of the human comed
y—the cripples and criminals, the defeated or obscene, the inexorable victory of death. He seems to have searched for ugly peasants; he caricatures them, never lets them smile or laugh; if he gives their crude faces any expression it is one of dull indifference, of sensitivity beaten out by the blows of life.17 He was impressed and hurt by the apathy with which the fortunate bear the misery of the unfortunate, the haste and relief with which the living forget the dead. He was oppressed by the vast perspective of nature—that immensity of sky under which all human events seem drowned in insignificance, and virtue and vice, growth and decay, nobility and ignominy alike seem lost in a vast and indiscriminate futility, and man is swallowed up in the landscape of the world.
We do not know if this was Brueghel’s real philosophy, or merely the playfulness of his art. Nor do we know why he gave up the battle so soon, dying at forty-nine (1569); perhaps more years would have softened his wrath. He bequeathed to his wife an ambiguous picture, The Merry Way to the Gallows, a masterly composition in fresh greens and distant blues, peasants dancing near the village gibbet, and, perched on this, a magpie, emblem of a chattering tongue.
IV. CRANACH AND THE GERMANS
German ecclesiastical architecture went in hiding during the Reformation. No new churches were raised to art as well as piety; many churches were left unfinished; many were pulled down, and princely castles were put together with their stones. Protestant churches dedicated themselves to a stern simplicity; Catholic churches, as if in defiance, ran to excessive ornament while the Renaissance moved into the baroque.
Civic and palace architecture replaced cathedrals as dukes replaced bishops and the state enveloped the Church. Some picturesque civic structures of this period were casualties of the second World War: the Althaus in Brunswick, the House of the Butchers’ Guild at Hildesheim, the Renaissance-style Rathaus or Town Hall of Nymegen. The most pretentious architecture of this and the next age took the form of immense castles for the territorial princes: Dresden Castle, which cost the people 100,000 florins ($2,500,000?); the palace of Duke Christopher at Stuttgart, so lavish in fixtures and furniture that the city magistrates warned the Duke that the luxury of his court was scandalously in contrast with the poverty of his people; and the vast Heidelberg Castle, begun in the thirteenth century, rebuilt in Renaissance fashion in 1556–63, and partly destroyed in the second World War.
The art crafts retained their excellence in the service of princes, nobles, merchants, and financiers. Cabinetmakers, woodcutters, ivory-cutters, engravers, miniaturists, textile workers, ironworkers, potters, goldsmiths, armorers, jewelers—all had the old medieval skills, though they tended to sacrifice taste and form to complexity of ornament. Many painters drew designs for woodcuts as carefully as if they were making portraits of kings; and woodcutters like Hans Lützeburger of Basel labored with the devotion of a Dürer. The goldsmiths of Nuremberg, Munich, and Vienna were at the top of their line; Wenzel Jamnitzer might have challenged Cellini. About 1547 German artists began to paint glass with enamel colors; in this way vessels and windows took on crude but rich designs, and the prosperous bourgeois could have his likeness fused into the windowpanes of his home.
German sculptors kept their preference for metal statuary and reliefs. The sons of Peter Vise her carried on his craft: Peter the Younger cast a bronze plaque of Orpheus and Eurydice; Hans designed a handsome Apollo Fountain for the court of the Nuremberg town hall; Paul is usually credited with a pretty figure in wood, known as The Nuremberg Madonna. Peter Flötner of Nuremberg cast excellent reliefs of Envy, Justice, Saturn, and the Muse of Dance. One of the most delightful objects in the Louvre is a bust, by Joachim Deschler, of Otto Heinrich, Count Palatine, six and a half inches high, and nearly as wide in its corpulence, with a face formed by years of bon appétit; this is German humor at its broadest.
The glory of German art continued to be in painting. Holbein equaled Dürer, Cranach followed on their heels, and Baldung Grien, Altdorfer, and Amberger formed a creditable second line. Hans Baldung Grien made his fame with an altarpiece for the cathedral of Freiburg-im-Breisgau; but more attractive is The Madonna with the Parrot—a buxom Teuton with golden hair, and a parrot pecking at her cheeks. Christopher Amberger painted some elegant portraits; the Lille Museum has his Charles V, sincere, intelligent, incipiently fanatical; the Chicago Art Institute’s Portrait of a Man is a finely chiseled, gentle face. Albrecht Altdorfer stands out in this minor group by the richness of his landscapes. In his St. George the knight and the dragon are almost unseen in an entourage of crowding trees; even The Battle of Arbela loses the warring hosts in an abundance of towers, mountains, waters, clouds, and sun. These, and the Rest on the Flight to Egypt, are among the first true landscapes in modern painting.
Lucas Cranach the Elder took his name from his native town, Kronach, in Upper Franconia. We know almost nothing further of him till his appointment, at the age of thirty-two, as court painter to Elector Frederick the Wise at Wittenberg (1504). He kept his position at the Saxon court, there or a Weimar, for nearly fifty years. He met Luther, liked him, pictured him again and again, and illustrated some of the Reformer’s writings with caricatures of the popes; however, he made portraits also of Catholic notables like the Duke of Alva and Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz. He had a good business head, turned his studio into a factory of portraits and religious paintings, sold books and drugs on the side, became burgomaster of Wittenberg in 1565, and died full of money and years.
The Italian influence had by this time reached Wittenberg. It appears in the grace of Cranach’s religious pictures, more visibly in his mythologies, most in his nudes. Now, as in Italy, the pagan pantheon competes with Mary, Christ, and the saints, but German humor enlivens the traditional by making fun of safely dead gods. In Cranach’s Judgment of Paris the Trojan seducer goes to sleep while the shivering beauties wait for him to wake and judge. In Venus and Cupid the goddess of love is shown in her usual nudity, except for an enormous hat—as if Cranach were slyly suggesting that desire is so formed by custom that it can be stilled by an unwonted accessory. Nevertheless Venus proved popular, and Cranach, with help, issued her in a dozen forms to shine in Frankfurt, Leningrad, the Borghese Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art.... In Frankfurt she hides her charms revealingly behind a dozen gossamer threads; these serve again for the Lucretia in Berlin, who cheerfully prepares to redeem her honor with a bare bodkin. The same lady posed for The Nymph of the Spring (New York), lying on a bed of green leaves beside a pool. In the Geneva Museum she becomes Judith, no longer nude, but dressed to kill, holding her sword over Holofernes’ severed head, which winks humorously at its mischance. Finally the lady, re-bared, becomes Eve in Das Paradies at Vienna, in Adam and Eve at Dresden, in Eve and the Serpent in Chicago, where a handsome stag joins and names her party. Nearly all these nudes have some quality that saves them from eroticism—an impish humor, a warmth of color, an Italian finesse of line, or an unpatriotic slenderness in the female figures; here was a brave attempt to reduce the Frau.
The portraits that poured from Cranach’s hand or aides are more interesting than his stereotyped nudes, and some rival Holbein’s. Anna Cuspinian is realism tempered with delicacy, gorgeous robes, and a balloon hat; the husband, Johannes Cuspinian, sat for a still finer portrait—all the idealism of a young humanist reflected in the meditative eyes and symbolized in the book fondly clasped. A hundred dignitaries were preserved in paint or chalk in this popular atelier, but none so well deserves survival as the child Prince of Saxony (Washington), all innocence and gentleness and golden curls. At the other side of life is the portrait of Dr. Johannes Schöner, terrible in features, noble in artistry. And here and there, in Cranach’s work, are magnificent animals, all pedigreed, and stags so natural that—claimed a friend—“dogs barked when they saw them.”18
Cranach might have been greater had he not succeeded so soon and well. The multiplication of his patrons divided his genius; he had no time to give all of it to any one task. Inevitably, as his
eighty-one years rolled by, he tired and slacked down; the drawing, once as fine as Dürer’s, became careless, details were shirked, the same faces, nudes, and trees were repeated to lifelessness. In the end we have to agree with the judgment passed on the early Cranach by the aging Dürer—that Lucas could depict the features but not the soul.19
In 1550, when he was seventy-eight, he painted his own portrait: a stout councilor and merchant rather than painter and engraver, with powerful square head, stately white beard, expansive nose, eyes full of pride and character. Three years later he surrendered his flesh to time. He left behind him three sons, all artists: John Lucas, Hans, and Lucas the Younger, whose Sleeping Hercules transmitted a theme from Rabelais to Swift by showing the giant peacefully ignoring the darts with which the pigmies around him barely pierce his ectoderm. Perhaps Lucas the Elder ignored as serenely the pricks of those who condemned him for bourgeois ideals and unconscientious haste; and under the tombstone that bears the ambiguous compliment Celerrimus pictor—fastest painter—he sleeps well.
With him the great age of German painting passed. The basic cause of the decline was more probably the intensity of religious dispute than the Protestant repudiation of religious imagery. Possibly a moral letdown coarsened German painting after 1520; nudes began to play a leading role; and even in Biblical pictures painters ran to themes like Suzanna and the Elders, Potiphar’s wife tempting Joseph, or Bathsheba in her bath. For two centuries after the death of Cranach German art receded in the backwash of theology and war.
