Short Life in a Strange World: Birth to Death in 42 Panels

No one shot my father’s Swordfish full of holes. He was eighteen when he volunteered for the Fleet Air Arm. His call-up papers in 1943 instructed him to bring a tennis racquet to his basic training. An astigmatic left eye kept him from piloting, but he flew as a gunner-navigator over the grey North Atlantic from his base in Scotland. Later his squadron was located in Canada, then Northern Ireland, and he finished the war in Ceylon, preparing for an invasion of Singapore which never happened. He saw no action at all. But he returned with a repertoire of stories – of snakes in his shower, of feuds with Canadian lumberjacks, of leave taken in New York City – garnered by a boy of eighteen, nineteen, twenty who had spent his early manhood sitting at the whirring, clattering, piston-thumping centre of a machine of Daedalic absurdity, hunting an invisible, perhaps wholly absent, enemy, exhilarated beyond measure. It would get no better than this.

On the day I first took to the air in a paraglider I was asked by a ten-year-old boy, nephew to Anna and Zabdi, to describe the exhilaration. And I told him that it had not been exhilarating, exactly, but an exercise in control: there had been adrenalin, for sure, but it had been released in a glut of hyper-attention. I had been, above all, attentive to details of harness and rigging, to the mechanics and materials keeping me aloft. He seemed disappointed, and I did not know how to communicate to him that I was in fact excited about this.

It was a version of excitement known to Daedalus, and not Icarus. Wilbur and Orville Wright would have understood. For them on that first day the exhilaration would have been as much in the play of canvas and wood, in the creak of the struts and the stench of petrol, as in any sensations of buoyancy and velocity. Bruegel, a miniaturist by instinct, his nose close to the oils on the canvas or panel, must have known something similar, painting his absurd ship. A good painting, like a real ship, is a Daedalic object: not a pretty thing of spirit and billows for the painter who labours in front of it, but a straining, groaning, improvable, precarious livelihood.

The ship on Bruegel’s canvas, by contrast, is all fluttering impetuosity, out of control, ignorant of physics. Alive.

I like to think of my spreadsheet as a modern-day Daedalic object, a thing of glue and feathers and grids and spars designed to harness the airy desires of my midlife, or a parachute gradually rippling and filling as I block out the paintings I have seen, breaking my fall.

Daedalus means cunningly wrought, but I am not sure how cunning my spreadsheet is. It is a reductive object. Bruegel is broken down into a simple alphabetical list, with each painting further broken down into a location, a date, a medium (oil on oak panel; tempera on canvas), a series of dimensions. I have calculated the area of each painting, and the proportion of each painting considered as a fragment of a vast singular object, which I call the Bruegel Object.

Roughly 1,082 cells of information, as it stands.

Where the information tapers off – beyond, in other words, my 1,082 cells of data – there is an effective infinity of empty cells stretching beside and below. To be precise, according to Microsoft’s published data on Excel, there are 1.71798691 × 1010 cells, or 17 billion, give or take.

The totality of my data clings to the edge of a great sea of unknowing which represents, I suppose, everything which is not on the spreadsheet: my ignorance of Bruegel; my ignorance of the museums in which his panels hang; my ignorance of the cities which those museums grace; and my ignorance of the impulses or affinities which have brought me to the brink of this project.

Why Bruegel?, why all of it? and why now? are questions the spreadsheet is not designed to address.

Over 17 billion cells of ignorance, then. But I have my little monastic garden of 1,082 cells, my tidy simulacrum of the cosmos.

Why this mania to quantify? Bruegel himself was not immune. In all art, there is hardly a better documenter of his own work. Almost every panel is signed and dated. Logic demands that somewhere he kept a ruled notebook in which he listed each painting that he completed, its subject, its medium and materials, its size, its destination, its cost and price and sale date, perhaps a note on problems overcome, solutions supplied.

The documentation of the Bruegel Object is secure. This is, in part, its attraction. We know what, we know where, we know when. Exclusions and reassignments, among the panels if not the drawings, are minimal, almost impossible, at least since the nineteenth century when Bruegel’s panels were routinely ascribed to Bosch.

Bruegel understood. Quantified objects are easier to handle. They are a necessary simplification. Just as mathematics does not represent some underlying truth of the cosmos, but is a simplification of it, its noise and bustle and impurity reduced to clean lines, or just as a Wright Flyer or a Fairey Swordfish is a simplification of a kestrel and thus, like mathematics, a new thing of its own, so too my spreadsheet is a manageable representation of an unimaginable complexity: the Bruegel panels, their endlessly interacting content, and their filigree intersections with the world, and with me.

The labyrinth that Daedalus invented to house the Minotaur was a way of ritualizing, hence managing, monstrous and unnameable desire. And we, too, need a way either to handle or net the creatures of imagination which rear up in the recesses of the night: black certainty of failure, nebulous inadequacy, hints of diminishing power, the ghosts of age, decay and death. And conversely, we need a way to detect whatever fleet and fugitive neutrinos of joy, or curiosity, or bliss, or ecstasy, remain to us, interstitial but real. Rarely, rarely comest thou, spirit of delight, says Shelley. But the next time thou do comest, I’ll have spread my nets. I’ll be ready.

‘Language is a perpetual orphic song,

Which rules with Daedal harmony a throng

Of thoughts and forms, which else senseless and shapeless were.’

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, Act 4: 415–17

On that first viewing of the Icarus, if my notes and my memory are anything to go by, I missed the dead man. At the bottom of the field, in the bushes, barely visible, there is the top of the bald or balding head of a dead man. An old man. A corpse. Icarus may have been escaping, on a mad escapade; this dead man was never so fleet of foot.

Perhaps it is proverbial (there are old Dutch proverbs about dead men and ploughs). Perhaps it is cryptic, a trace element of something strange. Bruegel liked to encode his paintings. It takes a moment to find Icarus, for one thing, and once you have him you can read all of Ovid in the canvas, near-enough. So here is a fragment of information that might be unspooled.

A banal fragment. Death lies concealed in everything, we all know that. There is no project conceived, just as there is no human or indeed mammalian or vertebrate or eukaryotic child conceived or split off, that does not contain the miniature story of its own end. But containment works two ways: that which is contained is also isolated. Bruegel has trapped this little death demon in his painting, and can then, for a spell, walk away from it. Think of him now, the painting done (even if this is not his painting), a youngish, moderately famous man, walking around in the sunlight somewhere, in Antwerp or Brussels, greeting his neighbours, clearing the smell of oils and turpentine from his nostrils, catching some early spring, perhaps, watching the ships spread economical sail with their cargoes of pepper and worked cloth for Lübeck or Cadiz, his spirits buoyant on the soft airs. For a while yet.

I never dared much, nor aspired to dare. I never risked much. There is very little risk in these projects, certainly. There is only a long slow gliding descent through the museums of Europe and North America, safe in international space: hotel, station, airport, museum. I expect no exhilaration, and no escape to speak of, because for all that motion in air is a form of freedom, at some point you will land again, and one rocky shore is much like another.

The world has its systems and those systems are your freedom. You cannot escape them. Go where you will, do whatever you do, you can only step from one path to the next, one script to another. Not only is there nothing new under the sun: it has all been commoditized for your convenience. Icarus, at the dawn of the historical world, assumed that up there somewhere transformation would be available. His world is Ovidian, after all, and at any point he might sprout branches, scales, talons, tusks, the whole calculus of his trajectory might alter. His father knew otherwise. But his father also knew that although one rocky shore, one Aegean tyranny, is much like another, there are, even so, gradations. Fine gradations of freedom. We are not all equally free, and we are not all equally bound. Some scripts are better than others. Marginally.

I clamber about over my spreadsheet these days much as Dan clambered over his factory roof. With less jeopardy, perhaps, but you can always fall through where you least expect. We do not approach death as from a distance, down a perspective avenue: we walk about on top of it, constantly, our feet touching the feet of the unremembered traces of ourselves which will one day replace us.

As a young teenager I, like Dan – only not like Dan, never with that much gaiety and abandon – climbed over the roofs of disused factories. Growing up, I lived near a concrete works in partial desuetude. These were factories that in their heyday had spun concrete lamp posts for the municipalities of England. But a concrete lamp post was, by the 1980s, a costly item, durable, but expensive. Steel was the thing now. Aluminium. So the factory was running down to nothing. In a couple of years the site would be a housing estate; for now the old concrete posts were left lying around overgrown by brambles, or half-buried like amphorae in Rome.

My brother and I roamed pretty freely over the site. It had its dangers but this was the 1980s, the last days of the wild youth of the world, in this corner of it anyway, and no one cared. On one occasion I slithered merrily on my arse down a sloping roof of corrugated fibreglass, and down the ziggurat of water tanks and drainpipes and packing cases at the corner of the building which had served as our ladder up, and then turned to watch my brother follow me. He descended with ashen care.

My brother was less fearful than me, by and large, so when he finally got down I made him explain: he had watched me go, and had seen how the roof had bowed and sagged under my weight. It had looked certain to him, he said, that I would plummet through it, on to the disused workbenches and ironmongery and cement floor many metres below.

Perhaps the roof was not as fragile as all that. Perhaps I did not come close to death that day. Perhaps some of the other structures I climbed on – water towers, stacked concrete pontoons, assorted roofs – were more perilous. I did in fact fall once or twice, once from some pontoons, once from the high ceiling of a building I was abseiling into down a steel wire; but I always just got up and patted myself down. On I plodded, through an ordinary life, past this individual I briefly met called Dan, and on from that. Until that day I stood in a room of the Beaux-Arts in Brussels, looking at the Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.

II Census

Brussels (8.284%)

‘The more things happen to you the more you can’t Tell or remember even what they were.’

William Empson, ‘Let It Go’

Two days after my encounter with the Icarus, I am back in Brussels and back in the museum, this time with my friend Steve Barley, who has finally arrived from Rome. Now I know how to get the chronology right, ascending to the empyrean of Bruegel as though by a winding stair or a twisting thermal. Thus we eddy from Robert Campin to Van der Weyden to Bosch to Joachim Patinir to Herri met de Bles. And so on and up.

We enter the corner room and I make a rapid audit, reminding myself. The right side of the room as you enter is Elder Bruegel; the left side is Younger Brueghel. I am here for the Elder Bruegel. Elder Bruegel is the great Bruegel. I ignore the Younger and settle to the business of scrutinizing Bruegel.

However, there is a distracting oddity. On the west wall of the room hangs the Elder’s Census at Bethlehem, a large panel painted in 1566. But on the south wall, roughly 8½ yards distant and hanging at an angle of 90 degrees to it, is another, near-identical Census at Bethlehem, painted by his son Pieter Brueghel the Younger in about 1610. It is one of at least thirteen copies the Younger made of the original, all of them faithful and well executed.

I start by trying to ignore it: it is good, but it is hack work, a cynical workshop production, a pointless replica. I am here to focus. But it happens that there is a spot, situated at the apex of a triangle the base of which is formed by the two paintings, where you can take them both in. If you had bovine eyes, the whole corner would become a giant and blurry and (to your cow mind) bewildering stereoscope.

I do not have bovine eyes or a cow mind. If I want to compare Bruegel with Brueghel, Elder with Younger, I have to swivel my head. And in reality, there is not one triangle at the apex of which you stand. Either you stand in front of the Elder and glance at the Younger, far away, or you stand in front of the Younger and look over your shoulder obliquely at the Elder. There are two triangles (at least); you move in a zone between their vertices.

And in this god-like, cow-like zone, what do you see?

In both cases, a snowbound village scene dominated by children playing and scuffling in the snow and their elders scratching out a living with their fardels and pigs’ blood and snowed-under carts, their small and wintry concerns. Around the inn in the left foreground a crowd gathers, submitting their names to the census; others straggle in across the frozen river, and across the frozen pond. Mary and Joseph are unobtrusively there: Mary, riding on an ass, nine-tenths concealed in her blue robe; Joseph likewise hidden behind a large hat but waggling a two-handed saw over his shoulder.

They are both as yet unnumbered.

For Pieter Bruegel the Elder, there was only ever one Census. It was a singular object. Unlike his son, he did not run an extensive workshop, did not bang out copies. He made few paintings, each one in his own hand.

When he died in 1569 at the age of about forty-two, his eldest son was four or five years old, his youngest, Jan, just one. In terms of art history, there is no genealogical connection between father and sons, merely a tectonic overlap. Pieter the Younger inherited a series of world-famous images (if by world you are content to understand Northern and Habsburg Europe), probably in the form of what are known as cartoons, drawings used to transfer an image to a panel. His entire career down to his death in 1636 was grounded on these images, whether he was making direct copies or spinning genre pieces from them.

He most likely saw little of his father’s original work, much of it already carted away to the great imperial collections – hence the small differences which creep in, the errors in replication, the drift.

As with his name. Pieter the Elder had started out plain Pieter Brueghel of Breda, signing his name with a calligraphic flourish on the drawings he produced as a young man. When he started painting in oils towards the end of the 1550s, he dropped the ‘h’ and began signing his name Bruegel in chiselled capitals, frequently with a ligature between the v (the Roman u) and the e, usually with the date (and after 1562 the date is generally written in Roman rather than Arabic numerals, with two or three exceptions), never with a P. or Peter – in the couple of cases where a P. was placed in front of bruegel, the paintings later turned out to be rather careless modern forgeries. ‘Brueghel’ was a bit burgher, perhaps, a bit stomping peasant; ‘BRUEGEL’ is cleaner, more Roman, befitting a Stoic observer of stomping peasants.

His sons for some reason restored the ‘h’ to the family name. Brueghel. Early in his career, Pieter the Younger aped his father’s Latinizing capitals, but reverted to small-case letters for most of his copies, and he never creates a ligature between the v and the e, although he does occasionally between the h and the e. Until 1616, he always appended his initial, ‘P-Brueghel’. After 1616, he altered the spelling of his surname once again, reversing the v (or u) and e, ‘P-Breughel’. In these ways, the Younger distinguished himself not only from his father, but from his younger brother Jan, who always signed simply ‘Brueghel’. Subsequent generations, notably Jan Brueghel’s son, Jan Breughel the Younger, retained the order of e and the u: ‘Breughel’.

Father and sons and grandsons and great-grandsons, taken together, make a blurry bruegel/Brueghel/Breughel object.

There was also a daughter, Maria Bruegel. Or Brueghel? We are not even sure about Maria: some have it as Marie. We know nothing about her. Older than her brothers, most likely, and certainly older than Jan, who was born only months before his father died. Probability suggests death in infancy. Her brother Pieter the Younger would have seven children, only one of whom would survive to adulthood.

Some children barely draw breath. My mother recollects a brother, Harry, who died before morning on the night he was born. She says she heard him crying that single night in the 1930s, in the solitary room in the west of Ireland that would constitute his universe. Crying perhaps under the baptismal hand. Harry, in the eye of God. And then he was gone.

So too Maria. Gone. The merest flicker of data in the endless ticker-taping lists of the quick and the dead.

I move between the invisible apices of my triangles, comparing Bruegel with Brueghel. It is a midweek morning in early January, raining outside the museum and largely empty inside. This is where my as yet undefined project has brought me, dead-reckoning in a room of old paintings.

I am forty-two, around the age at which the Elder died. Forty-two is the number of Bruegels on the spreadsheet. My own father has died, a year or two previously, aged eighty-four. When I was born he was forty-four. I was the second son. There are two years between my brother and me. I have also recently become a father myself, to two sons, between whom there are two years. Pieter Bruegel had two sons: the Younger, and Jan the Elder, between whom there were four years.

And so on. You do not really explain an intersection by following up or down any of its convergent, or for that matter divergent, paths. It is sufficient to note that my midlife is characterized by the interaction of multiple convergent (divergent?) vectors: my dead father, my brother, my small sons, myself, and the Bruegels. Many similar triangles.

*

The census is an unusual subject. Bruegel has painted one of the culminating moments of bureaucratic life. Bureaucracy is the science of docketing the routine comings and goings of existence – births and deaths, taxes paid and taxes owing; it is a rolling programme of work, one without end.

A census, however, is a one-off. It is a flourish of the bureaucrat’s art. You do not merely keep the ball of a census rolling: it wants planning and execution. It is, properly speaking, a project, a projection of bureaucracy. And it has an end: a Domesday Book of taxable, pressable souls.

From a distance – to the administrator or historian – a census is an exercise in control and power, not always pleasant, but always impressive in its way, like a datastream ziggurat or Hoover Dam. Seen close to, however, it pixilates into a sequence of inexact iterations. The bureaucratic ground troops do not mechanically fill in blanks. They have to keep a weather eye cocked on the confusion of crowds, have to sort quickly, roughly (there are only so many categories) but accurately. They have to fix a point in time where there are no points in time.

Bruegel’s Census at Bethlehem therefore depicts a world in transformation. The census is drawn through the village, through that mess of humanity at the inn door, like the carding of wool. The stream of individuals passes back and forth over the frozen river: people come in nebulous and free to have their names written down in a book, their existence validated in ink; they go out docketed and numbered, but also informed, no longer unlicked stray lumps of humanity but named individuals, with a location and an occupation and a marital status, enjoying a spark of existence beyond their own clay.

*

How, then, to number the paintings which hang in this room? How to enter them on the spreadsheet?

On an adjacent wall to the Census in Brussels is the Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap, a small sepia painting. Little figures skate on the frozen river, or huddle over their game of curling. On the bank, under a tree, a trap is set for birds: a heavy assembly of planks (in construction, not unlike the panel it is painted on) is propped up on a stick, a lure of crumbs beneath it; from the stick, there is the merest trace of a taut string leading into a house on the left of the panel. Snatch the stick from under the planks and you might catch a bird or two, just as the painter of panels, ever watchful, might catch and trap a soul, or a village of souls. Snatch the ice from under those skating children, and you might drag one or two down. The birder, the painter, the Devil are always watching, always waiting.

Always watching, always waiting: Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap, detail.

The skaters and the birds are linked by two stylized black birds in the foreground. They are the same size in real terms as the skaters, the same tonality also; they could be mistaken at first glance for skaters.

Birds and skating villagers live a similar existence: birds have wings and skaters ease along at great speed; both are in danger, both seem at liberty. The birds could fly away, live in the woods, while the villagers could slide around that bend in the river and be gone in minutes, never to return. But the ice will melt and the villagers will remain. Winter birds, too, are territorial. All are rooted here.

Including Bruegel. Bruegel might have skated around that bend and away, to Antwerp, to Royal Brussels, to Rome and Naples and Calabria. But he came back. According to Karel van Mander, who included, in his 1604 Schilder-boeck, or Book on Painting, brief lives of the great Netherlandish painters, Bruegel frequently visited the villages around Antwerp and Brussels in disguise, infiltrating festival and kermis (a kermis – from ‘kirk mis’ or ‘church mass’ – being the annual festival held in honour of the village church’s named saint), observing but unobserved.

His panels are littered with figures standing on the edge of crowds, watching. Some are well-heeled, clearly not village folk, returned from the city for family weddings, to partake again, briefly, of the drunken, cavorting rhythms of village life.

One way or another, in paint as in life, this was Bruegel’s world.

*

Bruegel’s Bird Trap was a popular subject. There are at least 125 known and documented copies.

But what is a copy? If I were to take out paint and easel now, and run up some version of my own, would that constitute a copy? Number 126. Mark it down. At what point does the painterly spore of Bruegel peter out to blank snow? When can we say that the code has replicated itself into muddy, unrecognizable progeny, into mass reproduction?