81 After Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Fall of Icarus, oil on linen. Copyright IRPA-KIK, Brussels
In the brief period between 1559 and 1563 Bruegel created a series of unprecedented paintings, sophisticated in conception, complex in construction, and executed with extraordinary skill. The later enthusiasm for Bruegel's peasants has tended to overshadow the subjects that occupied him in these years, but even if his career had ended at this point Carnival and Lent, Children's Games, the Dulle Griet, and the Triumph of Death would have ensured Bruegel's place as one of the world's most gifted artists. It is a truly impressive achievement given the inevitable losses that have occurred and the apparent lack of any workshop participation before 1564, an accomplishment all the more remarkable because these paintings were produced in difficult times; and like every artist, Bruegel was a product of his own time and place, the constraints they imposed as well as the opportunities they presented.
To trace Bruegel's subsequent career and the art produced after 1563 is beyond the scope of the present study, but aside from its intrinsic interest the creative process involved in the works produced between 1559 and 1563 has special relevance for two questions that have proven troublesome in Bruegel studies. The first involves changes in Bruegel's procedural practice after this time, and the second, the legitimacy of the claim that Bruegel was a Renaissance artist in the true sense of the term, that he was indebted to the ancient world and created art that reflects the interests of Christian humanists in the Low Countries in the middle of the sixteenth century.
Bruegel's move to Brussels initiated a number of changes in his creative process. Painting became the dominant medium, with a decline in the number of drawings made expressly for the printmaker. Prints of the Peasant Wedding Dance and Land of Cockaigne were based on his paintings. Woodcuts such as the Dirty Bride (or Wedding of Mopsus and Nisa) were probably created for the same reason that motivated his etching for the Rabbit Hunt—Bruegel's interest in experimenting with a different medium.1 The subjects chosen also changed, with the familiar replacing the idiosyncratic. The unprecedented subjects of the paintings produced between 1559 and 1563 such as Children's Games and Carnival and Lent required an involved patron willing to support something new. Traditional subjects permitted a different relationship with the consumer. The degree of patron participation evident earlier with a painting such as Proverbs was no longer necessary. There was less need for an elaborate preparatory drawing such as the one Bruegel created for the Dulle Griet. Contact with the patron could be minimal, with the commission based simply on the artist's reputation for painting proverbs, landscape, or peasant festivities and the particulars left to the artist's discretion. This raises an interesting question. The paintings done after 1563 continue to exhibit a high level of wit and ingenuity. Do they continue to reflect the views of his patrons, or are they more likely to be an expression of Bruegel's own interests? Just as the audience for Bruegel's art could vary over time, there were variations in the relation between painter and patron, and these constitute one reason why a close analysis of the paintings may be more informative than records of ownership.
Bruegel's success also allowed him, to change the way his paintings were produced. There is no sign of other hands in his painting of the Procession to Calvary of 1564, and the same is true of a number of later works, including The Blind Leading the Blind, the two peasant paintings in Vienna, and The Adoration of the Magi in London. Others, such as the Numbering at Bethlehem, show evidence of workshop participation, a departure from Bruegel's earlier practice suggesting that his continued success allowed him to increase his output by employing assistants. Copies of his work become more frequent, a development that started well before the seventeenth century and the activities of his sons. There is more than one version of both The Massacre of the Innocents and the Fall of Icarus, for example. The survival of a large number of copies of a small, saleable painting, the Ice Skaters with Bird Trap dated 1565, was probably due to the availability of the original in Bruegel's workshop at Brussels, where it could be copied by his assistant(s), either during his lifetime or after his death as the demand for his work increased.2 Paintings left unfinished could be completed. A landscape could be added to a pre-existing foreground, a distinct possibility in the case of the Numbering at Bethlehem with its ineptly painted sky and trees,3 or a landscape fragment could be used as part of a more complex composition.
The problems of attribution for Bruegel's later work are complicated and far from resolved. The tools of technical analysis have an important role in making these determinations, but a historical perspective is also necessary, one that takes Bruegel's working procedures prior to 1563 into account and considers how they changed in the following years and what effect the changes had on the works themselves. The conclusions in the present study suggest that assigning contested paintings such as Landscape with the Parable of the Sower or the Fall of Icarus to an early period, rather than considering the possibility of a workshop, makes little sense. Comparisons should be made with paintings produced before 1563 in which the execution was entirely his own.
The second question, the legitimacy of the claim that Bruegel was a Renaissance artist capitalizing on the ancient heritage, requires that a distinction be made between art indebted to Italian models, such as that produced by Frans Floris, and an indigenous development based on the literary remains of Greece and Rome. As the history of northern art is now written, the Renaissance in northern literature preceded the Renaissance in art by several decades, and its recognition depends on Italianate stylistic criteria. This may be a case of mistaking the obvious—an infusion of Italian forms—for the essential. Northern authors such as Erasmus and Sebastian Brant valued ancient literature for its pragmatic and moralizing possibilities, adapting it and using it for their own ends. Working in the same period, Hieronymus Bosch drew on those aspects of the ancient heritage most useful from a Christian perspective, the satires of Juvenal, for example, rather than the myths of Ovid. A generation later Bruegel created works that owe more to Bosch, the example of the satirists, and the authority of Horace's Ars poetica than they do to the stylistic example of Italian artists.
Christian humanism was a potent source for change in the north in the years after the advent of the printing press. The reluctance to recognize the impact of Latin literature on the visual arts and preference for vernacular sources is due not only to the primacy given to Italian visual models, but also to the assumption that this preference was shared by artists and their audience, a view that probably says more about modern misconceptions than about the reality of sixteenth-century practice. The majority of books published in the Low Countries during Bruegel's lifetime were written in Latin. Presumably there was a market for them. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, and government officials needed Latin for their work. The publisher Christopher Plantin and the geographer and collector of antiquities Abraham Ortelius did not have a university education, yet they corresponded in Latin.4 Dirck Coornhert taught himself Latin after age 30 so that he could translate ancient texts. The artist Lambert Lombard managed "to penetrate to the core of ancient texts" in spite of the fact that he was not versed in ancient languages,5 and Albrecht Dürer advised the young aspiring artist to acquire a knowledge of Latin in order to learn as much as possible about ancient art and artists.6
The development of Bruegel's career and evolution of his art did not depend on the patronage of the upper echelons of society, but on his ability to satisfy a less affluent audience, the growing segment of society composed of professionals and educated laymen, who tended to take a pragmatic view of the literature of the ancient world, treating it as a source of useful ideas and information. Bruegel's canonical status in our time is at odds with his more modest reputation in his own. His lack of noble patrons and important commissions from church or state made his survival in the years between 1559 and 1563 dependent on this audience and the support of adventuresome patrons willing to fund new and unprecedented projects. Landscape, his original specialty, and Boschian grotesques did not have the prestige of histories, mythology, and religious subjects. Patrons impressed by a classicizing, Italianate style did not place the same value on scenes of everyday life when the ordinary activities of people were still accounted a minor genre—Pliny's "minoris picturae" (minor style of painting). Writing in 1567, Guicciardini referred to Bruegel simply as a "second Bosch," and credited "Peeter Aertsen" with painting a religious subject that commanded a high price.7 Subjects drawn from daily life are not mentioned for either artist, even though Aertsen was appreciated as a "rhyparographos"—painter of low subjects—by the humanist doctor Hadrianus Junius.8 The motivation for owning a painting such as Proverbs might be simply the desire to see a collection presented in visual form, or in the case of Children's Games an interest generated by the ideas and images already suggested in Bruegel's earlier work, but without the patronage and participation of an attentive audience it is difficult to account for Bruegel's unprecedented subjects, the many intriguing interconnections that set his art apart from that of his contemporaries, and the ingenious ways in which ideas and images from one work resurface in others, developed and adapted in meaningful ways.
A reconsideration of Bruegel's Fall of Icarus addresses both the issue of workshop assistance and the question of whether humanist concerns had an important role in Bruegel's creative process. The painting exists in two versions, unsigned and undated, and while the conception is clearly Bruegel's own there is considerable doubt about his actual participation in the painting process (Figure 81).9 For example, in his discussion of the challenge that art historians face in their study of the Fall of Icarus John White argues against Bruegel's physical participation, but considers the concept Bruegel's own and a "masterpiece.10 In both versions the lightweight figure of the plowman lacks the sense of mass and weight that makes the old male dancer in Bruegel's Peasant Dance in Vienna so impressive. The landscape is amorphous compared with those in paintings such as the Stormy Day in which Bruegel's own hand is evident. Details of costume and physiognomy are summary. Subtleties such as the disoriented eyes of the drunken peasant in the Vienna Peasant Dance,11 or the velvet sleeve turned inside out in the Dulle Griet, are absent, and this cannot be explained simply by the fact that both versions were painted on canvas. The eyes of the blind men in another late work on canvas, The Blind Leading the Blind in Naples, prove otherwise.
Bruegel's hand may not be evident in the copies, but in all other respects the Fall of Icarus is his own. The structuring of the composition with its high foreground opening up to the specious landscape with its distant city is similar to other late paintings such as the Harvesters and The Magpie on the Gallows. The body lying at the edge of the wood is the kind of small and provocative detail typical in Bruegel's work, an anomaly and one that a copyist would hardly insert on his own. Most important, the use of the Icarus myth is so unusual that it is difficult to name any other sixteenth-century artist who would have presented the classical tale in such an original manner. Whether the painting was commissioned, the most likely possibility given the size of the copies, or undertaken on his own initiative,
81 After Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Fall of Icarus, oil on linen. Copyright IRPA-KIK, Brussels
a. Detail: body in woods
82 Bruegel the Elder, Warship with Icarus and Daedalus in the Sky, engraving. Trustees of the British Museum, London
Bruegel's Fall of Icarus is an unprecedented version of Ovid's familiar classical tale. The loss of the artist's physical participation is regrettable, but it has the positive effect of highlighting the inventiveness of Bruegel's conception, the ways in which his relation to the ancient world differed from that of his competitors, and the degree to which the success of Bruegel's art depends as much on the intelligence of his mind as the skill of his hand.
The timeliness of Bruegel's art is one of its most striking characteristics. Problems that engaged his contemporaries—charity, justice, civil upheaval, and religious dissension—are addressed in a number of his works. Details accurately document current events such as the punishments being inflicted on those accused of heresy. References are made to the work of contemporary artists such as Frans Floris and to literature available and of current interest in the Low Countries. This recurring pattern of timeliness extends to the Fall of Icarus. Mythological subjects are rare in Bruegel's art dating from before this time and are restricted to prints, including his Warship with Icarus and Daedalus in the Sky from 1562 (Figure 82). In the 1560s Ovid's Metamorphoses, the primary source for the story of Icarus, was receiving a great deal of attention in the Low Countries. Christopher Plantin published the work several times between 1561 and 1567.12 Victor Giselinus, friend of both Ortelius and Plantin, was responsible for the edition published in 1566, an obviously noteworthy publication, as Giselinus wrote that he had used "several ancient manuscripts, among them, two examples of very old date that I have received from Germany" thanks to "Gryphius" (Corneille Walterius).13
One of the most hackneyed of ancient myths in the Renaissance, the fall of Icarus became proverbial for the sin of presumption, an argument for the middle way—Daedalus cautions his son to fly midway, "Gaze not at the boundless sky"14—and was familiar from sources as diverse as Sebastian Brant's Ship of Fools, where Icarus is used as an example of foolish disregard for sound advice,15 and Alciati's Emblemata, in which when Icarus "sought not the attainable but let his mind carry him into the zenith, he came short of truth and defected from reason and was precipitated into a sea of unfathomable perplexities."16 As a caution against overweening ambition and an argument for the "middle way," Ovid's tale had obvious relevance for those trying to live a life of moderation and pursue a middle course in the political and religious struggles of their time.
Bruegel certainly knew Ovid's version of the Icarus myth, for details such as the plowman and the partridge are taken from the Metamorphoses, but he altered the story in significant ways. There is no precedent in Ovid's story for the knife, purse, and belt on an outcropping in the foreground, the ship sailing on the ocean, the dead body in the woods to the left, or the fact that everyone ignores the white legs and glimpse of feathers, the only sign of the ill-fated Icarus as he vanishes below the waves. In Ovid's version everyone watches Icarus and his headlong fall in amazement, and this is how it was usually presented, for example in the engraving by Hans Bol, where the plowman looks up at the sky and the shepherd points to the falling figure (Figure 83). In Bruegel's Fall of Icarus the plowman, shepherd, and fisherman remain intent on their tasks. Only the artist and by extension the viewer witness his demise. The Ovidian myth is turned upside down, and this cannot be attributed to ignorance on the part of the artist.
Bruegel's changes are radical, and it is not the mythic world of the Metamorphoses that accounts for them, but literature that was equally timely—the venerable, anti-mythic tradition of the satirists. Just as Ovid's version of Icarus's fall was of interest in the Low Countries in the 1560s, so were the satirists. Horace, Juvenal, Persius, and Lucian were readily available, and so were Martial's satiric epigrams, which were edited by Hadrianus Junius and published by Plantin in 1564 and again in 1568.17 Opposition to the mythic and unrealistic is fundamental in satire. It was traditional to make fun of the ancient myths, and Icarus was a favorite target for this deflationary treatment. Instead of viewing Icarus's death as a tragic event, Lucian makes fun of people whose good fortune makes them careless: "therefore, as in the case of Icarus their wax quickly melts, their wings moult and they bring ridicule upon themselves by falling head first into deep waters and breaking seas."18 Gilbert Highet, the classical scholar who wrote extensively on the satirists, sensed the affinity between Bruegel's Fall of Icarus and this humorous use of the Icarian myth when he observed, "Those legs always do raise a laugh."19
83 Hans Bol, Fall of Icarus, engraving. Albertina, Vienna
In this tradition the fall of Icarus was used to attack the bombastic and overblown, the kind of grandiose and unrealistic literature that the satirists found offensive. It was also used to make a serious point about the nature of poetry and the subject-matter of the poet. For Bruegel, an artist who had personal reasons for defending the value of everyday subjects, this anti-mythic tradition was directly related to his own concerns. When the satirist Lucilius mocked his rivals and wrote, "You think you cannot win esteem unless you write of prodigies and winged serpents in the air,"20 it was a view he could share. When the satirists used the tale of Icarus to defend their genre and attack their opponents, writers who pandered to the taste for the unrealistic and the readers who preferred it, Bruegel could recognize their problems as his own. Juvenal challenges his critics to explain why he must write about hoary, old subjects, asking, "What can you get from the legend of the flying boy and his forced landing in the drink?" and why he should write poems about "old tales of Hercules ... or the bellowing in the labyrinth" and the boy who "splashed into the sea" ("et mare percussum puero fabrumque volantem")."21 In an age when crimes abound, vice is rampant, honesty is praised and left to shiver, and you can fill up a whole notebook standing at the street corner, Juvenal asks—why must I write about old myths and why should anyone want to read them? Martial, whose epigrams are akin to Juvenal's satires, asks the same question:
When you read about Oedipus and gloomy Thyestes—and Scyllas and Medeas—what are you reading but fairy tales? What difference can they make for you—Hylas' rape, or Parthenopaes and Attis or Endymion sleeping? Or the boy whose wings fell off when he was flying? ... Why should such wretched pages attract you with their useless nonsense? Read these, of which life itself can say "That's mine."22
When Martial concludes his defense by observing that the trouble with most people is that they are unwilling to look at their own manners or follow the precept "know yourself" ("nec te scire"),23 he is raising the same issue that Bruegel addressed so effectively in his drawing of Elck (Everyman).24
The satirists were quick to defend their genre and denigrate their critics. Horace defended his prosaic muse against patrons impressed by heroic, high-flown subjects.25 Persius attacked the "lofty style" of those who "do not have art enough to describe a grove, or commend the abundance of country life."26 Martial defended his epigrams as "a more serious form of art than what currently passes for literature," and Juvenal expressed the same "hostility to the current literary fashions."27 Rabelais's attack on writers who "treat of nothing but heroic exploits, great themes ... and all this in a crimson satin style"28 is in this tradition, and other Renaissance satirists had made similar complaints. Bruegel had rejected an archeological and reverent approach to the past in favor of a classical art that followed the guidelines of an ancient genre in which it was legitimate to "tell the truth" about the world as the artist experienced it. The enthusiastic response of Bruegel's contemporaries to frivolous classical subjects such as Frans Floris's Banquet of the Sea Gods and his own, more modest, status gave Bruegel ample reason to identify with the complaints of the satirists. Martial's claim that his epigrams have "real life written all over them. You can search my book from cover to cover and you won't find a single centaur, Gorgon or Harpy. What you will find there is the authentic taste and smell of man,"29 was a manifesto that could be applied with equal validity to Bruegel's art.
Bruegel was not alone in rejecting the mythic for the commonplace and choosing images of the ordinary over grandiloquence. Arguments for a more relevant and realistic art were already familiar in the north and had been made earlier, for example in a letter written by Erasmus in 1513:
Some would have it that a poem is not a poem unless you summon up all the gods from the sky, sea and land, and cram hundreds of legendary tales into it. I myself have always liked verses that were not so far removed from prose, albeit prose of the first order.30
Erasmus's own writing makes his preference clear. As a proponent of art not so far removed from real life, Bruegel could identify with Erasmus's view. Bruegel had defended his own artistic agenda and its superiority in The Fall of the Rebel Angels, and in his revision of Ovid's mythological tale he
made the case again. Prestige and monetary rewards continued to advantage Italianate painters, and Bruegel had to contend with imitators. Other artists were responding to the growing demand for depictions of daily life and were painting peasants and low-life subjects that were often hastily executed and relatively simple-minded compared with Bruegel's own work such as the Peasant Dance and Peasant Wedding Banquet in Vienna.31 Fashions in art, the penury of patrons, and the activity of competitors are all matters of personal concern for an artist trying to survive in a competitive environment. The serious side of Bruegel's art is not always concerned with affairs of religion, state, or popular philosophy. For an artist his own career can be an equally serious matter.
The anti-mythic agenda of the satirists and his own stake in it accounts for Bruegel's interest in altering the Ovidian tale, but the contribution of the satirists may be even more specific. Traditionally, satires are "serio ludo"—both playful and serious—and when Horace wishes to draw attention to the serious side of his satires he uses the image of the plowman and "sailors who boldly scour the seas":
... not to skim over the subject with a laugh like a writer of witticisms—and yet, what is to prevent one from telling the truth as he laughs [ridentem dicere verum] even as teachers sometimes give cookies to children to coax them into learning their A B C—still, putting jesting aside, let us turn to serious thoughts: yon farmer, who with tough plow turns up the heavy soil, our rascally host here, the soldier, the sailors who boldly scour the sea.32
This passage introduces Horace's attack on the man who will never stop until he is richer than everyone else, the man whom "neither burning heat, nor winter, fire, sea, sword, can turn aside from gain," a subject that recurs in a number of Bruegel's early works such as Elck. The plowman acts as an onlooker in his Ovidian role. In Bruegel's Fall of Icarus he behaves in the opposite way. And when Horace continues by asking, "what odds does it make to the man who lives within Nature's bounds, whether he ploughs a hundred acres or a thousand?" the same question is raised in Bruegel's Fall of Icarus. The plowman is intent on his task, and there is nothing finite about the field he is plowing. Its limits are hidden, its twisting furrow vanishing over the curve of the hill.
In his seventh satire Juvenal uses the figure of the plowman as a metaphor for the poet: "we poets stick to our task; we go on drawing furrows in the thin soil and turning up the shore with unprofitable plough."33 The proverb "Arare littus" (to plow the seashore), conveys a similar sense of futility, and Erasmus includes it in the Adages with a quote from Ausonius—"What are you laboring on, there at the world's end, O poet, tiller of sands, fated to plough the shore?"—meaning, he says, that the poet is laboring in vain.34 "Nugas agere," meaning to play the fool, or do "something trivial and silly or make efforts in vain," is also included in the Adages, and again Erasmus quotes Ausonius—"Phoebus (the sun) demands we should speak the truth. He may let the Pierian sisters rave, but he himself will never twist the furrow."35 Erasmus explains that "formerly plowmen were delirare when they deviated from the straight line of the furrow," and so the furrow is transferred to people who act crazily. In his Fall of Icarus Bruegel includes the sun on the horizon, the peasant plowing near the shore, and even the "twisted furrows."
If the plowman is understood as a metaphor for the painter as poet, Bruegel's unusual conception of the plowman raises questions about his behavior. Should he be admired or is he laboring in vain? Is he "plowing another man's land," to quote another proverb that Erasmus includes in the Adages, a painter/poet capitalizing on Bruegel's success?36 Is he like Horace's greedy plowman, who wants more and more acreage, with the large bag, knife, and belt evidence of his true concerns? A belt hangs from the basket of loot carried by Madness in the Dulle Griet, and a bag and a knife in front of St. Anthony in Bruegel's print of the Temptation of St. Anthony indicate anger and avarice as temptations to be resisted. Do these details indicate a painter with materialistic values? Is he engaged in telling the truth or do his twisted furrows reveal something negative about him?
The plowman is tending his task to the exclusion of all else; his concentration permissible for a real peasant plowing real ground, but if seen as a surrogate for the painter/poet is his narrow focus admirable? In Bruegel's unique conception of the classical tale the role of spectator is reserved for the artist and the viewer.37 Bruegel and, by extension, those who view the painting are the only ones who witness it all—the headlong plunge of Icarus, the plowman and his horse, the shepherd and his flock, the sailing ship, the island rising from the sea, the sun and the distant luminous landscape, the world of man and nature. The painting becomes a meditation on the role of the thoughtful spectators, those who look at the world around them and think about what they see, adopting the contemplative attitude favored by Christian Stoics.
This question of looking and thinking may account for Bruegel's inclusion of the small, incongruous detail of the body lying near the wood. Lucretius's great nature poem De rerum natura (On the Nature of the Universe) was also of interest in the 1560s. An edition of Lucretius was published by Christopher Plantin in 1565 and again in 1566,38 and Corneille Wouters, a humanist listed in Ortelius's friendship album, was the author of Observations sur Lucrece, published at Antwerp in 1566.39 In his poem Lucretius presents an encompassing vision similar to Bruegel's own landscapes, surveying the world from a high place and meditating on the universe and the activities of men, the distant prospect serving as a stimulus for his contemplation.40 In Book IV Lucretius uses the image of a dead man to explain how one should think about what one sees: "Suppose you were to see the lifeless body of a man lying some distance away. You would have to mention all possible causes of his death to be sure of mentioning the right one."41 Bruegel's dead man lying at a distance invites a wide range of questions. Closure is not the point. As Lucretius writes of his dead man, "You could not prove that he had perished by the sword or by cold, by sickness or by poison."
In the Low Countries in the 1560s, a society dominated by impassioned extremists making hasty judgments and killing each other in defense of dogmatic positions, Lucretius's argument was timely. It was the kind of thoughtful response adopted by those who favored a Christian Stoic position in the religious and political controversies. Understood as a visual reference to this passage from Lucretius's poem, Bruegel's dead man could be seen as a subtle indictment of those who saw only their own point of view and a telling argument for the role of the patient, thoughtful spectator, the open-minded person willing to look at all sides of a question and consider all possibilities.
In the Fall of Icarus, as elsewhere in his art, Bruegel's skill at involving the viewer—raising questions about a wide range of problems, from the ordinary encounters of daily life to matters of life and death—remains one of the most fascinating aspects of his art. In Otto Van Veen's emblem from the seventeenth century the allegorical figure of Liberality stands between Avarice and Prodigality, with Icarus and Daedalus in the sky above.42 There is no mystery about the emblem, no doubt about its meaning, nothing to remain in the memory as something unresolved and requiring further thought. Bruegel's conception for the Fall of Icarus affects the viewer in a different way, arousing curiosity and inviting consideration of a wide range of issues, from the role of the painter/poet as witness to man's place in the universe, what it means to be a spectator watching the theatre of the world, and what is lost if one focuses only on one's own concerns. The viewer does not need to know a great deal about Bruegel's art and career to recognize some of the issues at stake. It is not surprising that so many poets in our own time, from W.H. Auden to William Carlos Williams, have responded to Bruegel's poetic conception with poetry of their own.43 For his knowledgeable contemporaries who followed Bruegel's work closely, his transformation of the myth of Icarus made a compelling argument for the role of the meditative Stoic spectator and the superiority of his own artistic agenda.
As the representative of an alternative tradition inherited from the ancient world, Bruegel's Fall of Icarus was a telling critique of those who trivialize the past, who enjoy the ancient myths for their entertainment value and fail to grasp their relevance as a source of philosophical insights about mankind's place in the universe. Like the ancient satirists, Bruegel defended his art with his art, attacking competitors and unappreciative patrons who supported the facile and fashionable and failed to appreciate properly the value of his own efforts. The ancient satirists were scathing in their criticism of patrons who have more money than taste and refuse to buy any work of art in which the artist looks at the world without illusions. Horace satirizes the man who delights in his money-bags as if they were "painted pictures," an image that would have special meaning for an artist who had struggled to make his way and had expressed his views of the stingy patron in his drawing Artist and Connoisseur (Figure 84). Juvenal writes that "Your real poet, who has a vein of genius all his own—who spins no hackneyed lays, and whose pieces are struck from no common mint"—should be the one who is supported, but patrons give more money to their mistresses.44 Even when rich misers admire your work, Juvenal says, they won't pay for it. If Bruegel's Fall of Icarus was commissioned by a patron with conventional tastes, a collector who simply wanted a traditional classical subject that included a beautiful landscape, this was an ingenious response. It was a witty demonstration that when faced with the task of painting the most trite and "hackneyed lay," the gifted artist with a "vein of genius all his own" could still create an extraordinary work of art.
84 Bruegel the Elder, Artist and Connoisseur, drawing. Albertina, Vienna
By 1563 Bruegel had developed a distinctive artistic agenda, adapting the Boschian heritage and the traditions associated with the genre of satire to suit the interests of viewers in his own time and place. He had begun as a specialist in landscape, a subject that resonated with poetic and philosophical concerns for Renaissance viewers. When that specialty was integrated with the Boschian heritage, the traditions of Roman and Menippean satire, and the high standards for an art of the commonplace articulated by Horace, Persius, and other ancient writers the result was a potent combination. Rather than emulating the works of Italian artists Bruegel adopted the strategies advocated in the ancient world for creating successful art.
The shift to more traditional subjects after 1563 did not prevent Bruegel from pursuing this agenda. Adaptation is not capitulation, and even as he made the change, broadening his clientele, improving his financial status, and avoiding the dangers posed by original allegory, he continued to develop his earlier interests, acting as a thoughtful, often critical, observer of the world around him. Bruegel continued to use ideas and strategies developed in the early years and treated many of the same subjects. Medical interests surface again in a painting such as the Blind Leading the Blind and in his small physiognomic portraits. Neo-Stoic interests are relevant for his Peasant Dance in Vienna, with its reference to the laughing and frowning philosophers of antiquity In his later works Bruegel continues to arouse curiosity and hold interest by inserting clever details such as the single die under the tub in the Peasant Wedding Banquet. The activities of men are still framed within the magnificent landscape in paintings such as the Harvesters in New York, where the universal subsumes the temporal. John White describes Bruegel as one of the most penetrating artists and "in the deepest sense, one of the steadiest and most consistent in his development."45 When Bruegel's creative process is followed closely and the works are considered in relation to each other and to the circumstances surrounding their production this is an accurate assessment. To the end of his life Bruegel created art that challenges the viewer to look closely and think carefully. It is art that satisfies in many different ways, accessible in some respects, arcane in others, serious as well as entertaining and, even when grounded in the minutiae of daily life, profound and philosophical in its implications.
1 The Fall of the Magician (1564), St. James and the Magician, and his drawings for Spring (1565) and Summer (1568) are exceptions, with the latter two not published until 1570, a year after Bruegel's death. Jan van der Does, a humanist with one of the longest entries in Abraham Ortelius's Album amicorum (fol. 83v, fols. 83-4), owned Bruegel's Summer, a double-folio print of the View of Naples, and his Landscape with Three Pilgrims, another example of the appeal of Bruegel's art for those with humanist interests.
2 For Bruegel's reputation after his death see Larry Silver, "The Importance of Being Bruegel: The Posthumous Survival of the Art of Pieter Bruegel the Elder," in Orenstein (2001), pp. 67-84.
3 Bruegel's Numbering at Bethlehem in Brussels is signed "BRVEGEL," but the date, 1566, is not in Roman numerals, and aside from the area near the inn the overly precise tree and much of the landscape look questionable when compared with the subtlety of sky and trees in Bruegel's Return of the Herd. For another view, accepting the attribution, see Christina Currie, "Demystifying the Process: Pieter Brueghel the Younger's The Census at Bethlehem, a Technical Study," in Van den Brink (2001), pp. 80-131.
4 For Ortelius see Abrahami Ortelii (geographi Antverpiensis) ... epistulae cum aliquot aliis epistulis et tractatibus ..., ed. J.H. Hessels (Cambridge, 1887).
5 Walter S. Melion, "Theory and Practice: Reproductive Engravings in the Sixteenth-Century Netherlands," in Timothy Riggs and Larry Silver, eds., Graven Images: The Rise of Professional Printmakers in Antwerp and Haarlem, 1540-1640 (Evanston, IL, 1993), p. 56. For Lombard see also Godelieve Denhaene, Lambert Lombard: Renaissance et humanisme á Liège (Antwerp, 1990).
6 The Writings of Albrecht Dürer, ed. William M. Conroy (New York, 1958), p. 172. Dürer wrote in German, but that does not mean that he could not read Latin. Writing in any language is obviously more challenging than reading it.
7 Guicciardini, Troubles religieux (1905-6), p. 153.
8 Sullivan (1999), p. 240.
9 The version illustrated here is in Brussels, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts. The other is in a private collection and differs in showing Daedalus flying in the sky. See Marijnissen (1988), pp. 378-9, where both versions are illustrated in the section on contested attributions. Grossmann (1973) states that most scholars place the painting early in Bruegel's career, although "Vanbeselere's arguments for a date around 1567-8 deserve serious consideration" (p. 190). See Philippe Roberts-Jones, Bruegel: La chute d'Icare, Musée de Bruxelles (Fribourg, 1974), p. 14, and for the views of Friedlaender, De Tolnay, and others, ibid., pp. 49-50. See also Beat Wyss, Pieter Bruegel: Landschaft mit Ikarussturz, ein Vexierbild des humanistischen Pessimismus (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1990); R. Baldwin, "Peasant Imagery and Bruegel's Fall of Icarus," Konsthistorisk Tidskrift, 55/3 (1986), pp. 101-14; Lyckle de Vries, "Bruegel's Fall of Icarus: Ovid or Solomon?" Simiolus, 30/1-2 (2003), pp. 4-18; Arthur E. Bye, "Pieter Brueghel's Fall of Icarus in the Brussels Museum," Art Studies, 1 (1933), pp. 22-7; and Ethan Matt Kaveler, "Pieter Bruegel's Fall of Icarus and the Noble Peasant," Jaarboek van het Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten te Antwerpen (1986), pp. 83-97. Kavaler based his interpretation on the assumption that the peasant is working and therefore noble, but in the context of this classical story it does not account for the unusual aspects of Bruegel's conception. For the distinction between peasants at work and leisure see Sullivan (1994), pp. 15-23.
10 John White, Pieter Bruegel and the Fall of the Art Historian, 56th Charlton Lecture. University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 1980 (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1980), p. 3.
11 Sullivan (1994), pp. 84-6.
12 Voet (1980), vol. 4, pp. 1720-725.
13 Kinon (1945), p. 132.
14 Ovid, Metamorphoses (1958), pp. 220-22.
15 Brant, The Ship of Fools (1944), p. 154.
16 Alciati, Emblemata, vol. 2, emblem 104.
17 Voet (1980), vol. 4, no. 1637, p. 1490.
18 Lucian, Essays in Portraiture, in Lucian in Eight Volumes, vol. 4, p. 293.
19 Highet (1962), p. 120.
20 Lucilius, fragment 723, in Warmington (1979), vol. 3, pp. 232-3, and Niall Rudd, Themes in Roman Satire (Norman, OK, and London, 1986), p. 5. Lucilius also uses the phrase "strange and monstrificacious" ("nunc ignobilitas his mirum ac monstrificabile").
21 Juvenal, Satires, I. 53-6, pp. 6-7.
22 Martial, Epigrams from Martial: A Verse Translation by Barriss Mills (Layfayette, IN, 1969), p. 152.
23 Martial, Epigrams, X. 4, in Martial's Epigrams, trans. Walter C.A. Ker, 2 vols., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1978), vol. 2, pp. 154-5.
24 For Bruegel's Elck, see Sullivan (2008).
25 Horace, Satires, II. 6. 17, pp. 210-11.
26 Persius, Satires, I. 68-71, pp. 322-3.
27 H.A. Mason, "Is Juvenal a Classic?" in J.P. Sullivan, ed., Critical Essays on Roman Satire (London, 1963), p. 98.
28 "gestes heroiques, choses grandes ... et le tout en rhétorique armisine, cramoisine": Rabelais, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 2, p. 282.
29 Mason (1963), p. 100.
30 Quoted in C.A. Miller, "The Epigrams of Erasmus and More: A Literary Diptych," Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook, 1 (1981), p. 12.
31 For example, Marfan van Cleve's painting of a Peasant Feast, reprod. in Sullivan, (1994), pl. 3. For Marten van Cleve see Marlier (1969); G.T. Faggin, "De Genreschilder Maarten van Cleef," Oud Holland, 80 (1965), pp. 34-46; Van Mander, Dutch and Flemish Painters (1936), pp. 138-9; and Van Mander, Schilder-Boeck, fols. 230a-230b.
32 Horace, Satires, I. 1. 23-31, pp. 6-7.
33 Juvenal, Satires, VII. 48-9, pp. 140-41.
34 Erasmus in the Adages, CWE, vol. 31, no. 51, p. 357. See also Ausonius, vol. 2, p. 17.
35 Erasmus, Adages, CWE, vol. 31, no. 91, pp. 378-9.
36 Erasmus, Adages, CWE, vol. 34, p. 197.
37 For the importance of the spectator role in Bruegel's art see Sullivan (1994), ch. 4, "The Spectator and the World," pp. 98-126.
38 For publications of Lucretius see Adams (1967), vol. 2, p. 629. For editions of Lucretius in the Renaissance see George D. Hadzsits, Lucretius and his Influence (New York, 1963), p. 268.
39 For Wouters see Biographie nationale de Belgigue, vol. 27, col. 402. His entry in Ortelius's Album amicorum is on fol. 46r.
40 Lucretius, De rerum natura, II, in Lucretius: De rerum natura, trans. W.H.D. Rouse, rev. M.F. Smith, Loeb Library Edition (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1992), pp. 94—5. All references to Lucretius are to this edition. For the availability of Lucretius's De rerum natura and evidence that his poem was of current interest in the north see ibid., p. lix: editions were published in Paris in 1511, 1514, and 1563-64, and by Plantin in Antwerp in 1565-66. Lucretius shared the satirist's disdain for old tales and myths when he stated that the real need is to follow the straight and narrow path purging the mind of pride, lust and other failings, and understanding nature (ibid., p. 495)—views that also find expression in Bruegel's art.
41 Lucretius, IV, p. 238.
42 This print is discussed and illustrated in I. Gerards-Nelissen, "Otto van Veen's Emblemata Horatiana," Simiolus, 5 (1971-72), pp. 20-63.
43 R.J. Clements, "Brueghel's Fall of Icarus: Eighteen Modern Literary Readings," Studies in Iconology, 7/8 (1981—82), pp. 253-68; John E. Coombes, "Constructing the Icarus Myth: Brueghel, Brecht and Auden," Words and Image, 2 (January-March 1986), pp. 24-6; and William Carlos Williams, "Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems," in Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, ed. Christopher MacGowan (New York, 1988), vol. 2, pp. 384-437, esp. pp. 385-93. Discussing the response of Williams to Bruegel's Fall of Icarus, Braider argues that the poet is surely "right in seeing in Bruegel's pictures not just a record but a subtle dramatization both of art and of himself as artist." See C. Braider, Refiguring the Real: Picture and Modernity in Word and Image, 1400-1700 (Princeton, 1993), p. 76.
44 Juvenal, Satires, VII, 53-5, pp. 140-43.
45 John White, Studies in Renaissance Art (London, 1983), p. 347.