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The Procession to Calvary
(painting, 1564)
In 1987, British illustrator Martin Handford launched the first in a very popular series of children’s books called Where’s Waldo? Its uniqueness lies in the fact that the bespectacled protagonist of the series is on every page of the book, but is hidden from plain view amid all the busyness and chaos around him. The fun, for readers, comes in trying to locate the skinny young man with the striped shirt with all the other stuff going on in each picture. Sometimes it can be quite a challenge to answer the question, “Where’s Waldo?”
In his famous painting The Procession to Calvary, Pieter Brueghel seems to be asking a similar question: Where’s Jesus? Though the title clues us in to the fact that we are looking at a religious painting, at first glance this is anything but obvious. For the figure of Christ, laboring under the effort of carrying his cross, may not immediately be seen by the viewer of the image.
But when you look carefully, you’ll find him at the very center of the canvas. Jesus has fallen under the weight of the cross he is carrying and is struggling to regain his feet. He is wearing a robe that is appropriate to the first century, but all those who surround him are wearing sixteenth-century garb. And what a mass of figures there are in this painting! Dozens of them are clumped together in little painted vignettes, going about their business, most seemingly oblivious to the Savior’s travails. Those who are leading Christ to his execution are dressed in red and mounted on horseback. This is the costume of the troops who would have been responsible for executions in Brueghel’s day, known to be merciless and efficient. Soldiers and bystanders alike all seem unaware of the spiritual import of what is happening right there in their midst.
The Procession to Calvary by Pieter Brueghel, Künsthistoriches Museum, Berlin [Wikimedia Commons, CC-PD-Mark]
Above all the flurry of activity a solitary mill stands upon a craggy mountain peak, which is a very unlikely location for such a building but may represent a “God’s-eye view” of the unfolding story below. It stands as quiet sentry over the whole ordeal. In the right foreground of the picture we find the only figures other than Jesus who are dressed in ancient costume. These include Mary, the mother of Jesus, who is being comforted by John and two women. The solemn mood of deep sorrow implied in their poses contrasts with the people in the rest of the painting, who are either just going about their business or seem excited about the opportunity to witness a public execution.
Perhaps Brueghel is asking us to ponder the fact that the most sacred moments can occur right under our noses. That in the hustle and bustle of our lives we can miss the thing that matters most. That whether in the sixteenth century or our own, Christ walks the Calvary road for our sins, his sacrifice ever-relevant and ever-available. That God is hidden in plain sight, but we must have eyes to see.
Pieter Brueghel is one of those famous artists whose personal life we know very little about except what we might learn from looking at his paintings. Art historians generally place his birth in the late 1520s somewhere in the northern Netherlands, and records indicate he was living in Antwerp by 1551, where he was a member of the guild of painters. We also know he traveled to Switzerland and Italy between 1552 and 1554, as he created a series of dated landscape sketches from that period. These remarkable sketches show an interest in broad, sweeping landscapes that would remain with him throughout his painting career.
Brueghel married the daughter of the man who was likely his artistic mentor, Pieter Coecke van Acist, and had several children, two of whom (Pieter the Younger and Jan) became very accomplished artists themselves, working in a style similar to their father.
Much of Brueghel’s earliest work was with prints and engravings based upon his own drawings. One of his most common early themes was illustrating the virtues and vices, often with Bosch-like humor and bizarre figures. Some of these kinds of figures made their way into early paintings that were crowded with people involved in various activities, some strange as in Battle Between Carnival and Lent (1559), some playful as in Children’s Games (1560), a visual encyclopedia of children at play in various games, and some moralizing as in Flemish Proverbs (1559), which depicts well over one hundred different traditional wise sayings, many of them quite humorous. A famous biblical proverb is also illustrated in one of his later paintings, The Parable of the Blind (1568), which is based on a saying from Jesus about the danger of trusting oneself to corrupt and foolish religious leaders: “Leave them; they are blind guides. If the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit” (Matt. 15:14).
Of course, Brueghel is best known for his delightful paintings of peasant life, which are filled with energy and celebration and honor the dignity of the peasant class. The dancing and feasting bring a smile to the most jaded viewer, but it would be a mistake to think that this was his primary subject. While these paintings are wonderful, they do not have the gravity of some of his biblical paintings.
The painters of the northern Renaissance developed a great love for painting the natural world, and artists such as van Eyck took great pains to paint lush and detailed landscapes as backdrops for the human figures who were the primary focus of their paintings. But Brueghel was one of the first to do something different: to place his human figures into vast landscapes almost as if they were an afterthought, as though nature itself was the real subject of the work. In one of his earliest works, Landscape with the Parable of the Sower (c. 1557), we have to work a little to find the man sowing seeds in the bottom left of the painting. The landscape, which stretches for miles, seems the main point, and the only suggestion of Jesus as the teacher of this parable is the likelihood that he is among the little mass of figures next to the river far, far below. A similar effect occurs in Flight Into Egypt (1563), where the holy family pass by at the very bottom right of the picture and the rest is all majestic scenery. It would have been almost inconceivable to a sixteenth-century artist to paint a landscape for its own beauty, so his contemporaries would have looked to find the meaning of the work in whatever narrative was unfolding, even if on a very small scale compared to the way nature was presented.
The perspective for many of Brueghel’s greatest works is a high vantage point that takes in all the teeming activity of human beings in the midst of an immense and lovely landscape. This might suggest God’s own exalted viewpoint over his creation and imply his sovereignty over all that happens below. In Brueghel’s famous series of paintings of the seasons of the year, we see this perspective and can easily intuit a divine eye overseeing the hunt in the snow or the harvesting of the fields. These are also some of the first paintings in history that effectively evoke a sense of the weather and climate. You can feel the cold snow crunching under the hunter’s boots in The Hunters in the Snow (1565), or long for a rest on a hot autumn day like the man sprawled under the tree in The Corn Harvest (1565).
When Pieter Brueghel painted a biblical narrative, the main story usually receded into the background or was embedded among the usual goings-on of sixteenth-century life in the Netherlands. This can be seen in The Procession to Calvary but also in his two famous paintings of The Tower of Babel (c. 1563), in The Massacre of the Innocents (c. 1565), and in The Census at Bethlehem (1566). In a painting like The Census at Bethlehem, it would be very easy to miss the important event that is occurring in what appears to be a normal village in the Netherlands on an unremarkable snowy winter day. While the townspeople go about their business, Mary and Joseph ride in to register themselves in their hometown as required by Roman law. As in The Procession to Calvary, one must look closely or miss the main point. The unfolding of God’s plan is taking place amid all the hustle and bustle of ordinary life. And isn’t that how the spiritual world usually interacts with our own? Brueghel reminds us that we must pay attention if we are to see the divine story of redemption hidden in the midst of our own story.