Bruegel in Words

As Above, So Below (2002), a novel by Rudy Rucker, gives us a lively if somewhat melodramatic fictional account of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The known details of Bruegel's life are few so Rucker layers his novel with fairly prosaic relationships, almost soap opera-esque, and colors the narrative with known historical detail of the Low Countries under the reign of Charles the V and Phillip the II of Spain. What the novel lacks in prose elegance and style it makes up for by conjuring the sights, sounds, smells, and day-to-day goings-on of life in places like Antwerp, Brussels, Mechelen in the 1500s.

During Bruegel's short life (1525-1569) he no doubt witnessed the atrocities and persecutions perpetrated by the Spanish monarchy against the occupied peoples of the Low Countries. His Massacre of the Innocents, a Biblical theme, has been adapted to portray a village scene in his native country and depicts the depredations unleashed on the citizens by the soldiers and mercenaries of the Spanish Crown. Rucker includes various details and scenes that aptly illustrate life under occupation and weaves these into the imagined narrative of Bruegel's life.

Massacre of the Innocents, 1567

The novel begins with Bruegel as a young man traveling to Rome and encountering real mountains (the Alps) for the first time (a salient detail as Bruegel would become known as one of the greatest landscape artists of all time), and ends with his untimely death of an unspecified stomach condition in 1569. In between, Rucker uses Bruegel's masterpieces as jumping off points for creating the fictional details of his novel. It's a useful method and lends meaning, real or not, to the works themselves while allowing the author to sketch key periods of the artist's life.

For those interested in his research and process, Rucker has posted his notes on the writing of So Above, So Below.

Two other novels in which Bruegel plays a staring role are Bruegel, or A Workshop of Dreams by Claude-Henri Rocquet (1991), and Headlong (1999) by Michael Frayn, both worth reading.

Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

There are many reasons to visit the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, but I went with a single purpose in mind: to see the extraordinary collection of paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. There are more of Bruegel's great paintings gathered here than anywhere else in the world and they can be viewed in the Bruegel room, Salle X of the Picture Gallery. These are paintings of breadth and grand sweep down the ages, they have charmed and haunted viewers for hundreds of years. Today, you can be with them, you can sit on comfortable couches nearby and look at them for as long as you like, you can study them in comfort.

Bruegel Room, Salle X

I visited in November, on an overcast Sunday, just before noon. The museum was not very busy. In fact, for brief moments I was alone in Room X, not even a museum guard in casual surveillance. Just me and Hunters in the Snow and Peasant Dance and Tower of Babel. Just me and Bruegel's 445 year old vision.  Oddly, two additional Bruegel Works, the playful Children's Games and the wild Fight Between Carnival and Lent, were in a special room and shared gallery space with a temporary exhibition of work by Ed Ruscha, a somewhat incongruous pairing. But no matter.