How can we license ourselves to see what was intended to be routinely
overlooked in paintings made during a time of oppression, images made not
to whip up opposition but nevertheless used to record a conviction? Here
it is proposed that there is more embedded history and less modern
ambivalence in Bruegel's paintings of the later 1560s than recent
scholarship has been geared to analyze and that the current approaches to
the work inadvertently lead the viewer to see it as Bruegel intended for the
authorities of his day. Bruegel’s distinctive and broadening approach to the
task of figural composition is examined as a symptom of his Netherlandish
identity, both as it is manifested in his intriguingly limited response to what
he saw when travelling in Italy (though perhaps if we adjust our
expectations for what counts as an influence, the Palazzo Schifanoia
Months in Ferrara by Cosmè Tura and Francesco del Cossa might be
supposed to have played a part in Bruegel’s thought) and in small
adjustments made in his later paintings, which may indicate sympathies
which could be expressed only covertly. The Rabbit Hunter autograph
etching, the small Louvre painting of crippled beggars, and Bruegel’s last
painting, centered on a gallows, are analyzed as if meant to be fully
understood only by those who already knew that the artist held the anti-
imperial sentiments, while others should see instead only the welcome
continuation of Bruegel’s amusing lack of the idealization associated with
Italian art and its theory. His responses to what he saw in Italy were, in
general, as quirky as his depictions of his homeland, and the motivations
extend beyond the religious (more often discussed) to the political. Van
Mander’s take on Bruegel’s art as droll and anecdotal needs to be better
balanced with Ortelius’s comments about Bruegel’s sophistication, and it is
time to retire the thesis that Bruegel’s pictorial meanings cultivate
irresolvable ambiguity reflecting the artist’s philosophical orientation.
