Headlong (13 page)

No one could have known at this stage, of course, quite how great Bruegel was going to become. But then no one can have realized to quite what heights Perrenot would ascend.

No one, that is, except Philip. The King had secret plans to bring the Netherlandish church under his personal control. He intended to replace the four bishops who’d run it up to then with fifteen new ones, all his own nominees, and each with his own staff of inquisitors. Ruling the new bishops were to be three new archbishops. The senior of the three archbishoprics was to be Malines, and the Archbishop of Malines was to be Perrenot. So Perrenot would be primate of the Netherlands, and the managing director of this great conglomerate of religious enforcement.

To execute his policies in his absence, Philip installed a Regent – Margaret, Duchess of Parma, his father’s illegitimate daughter. According to Grierson, she was an excellent and popular choice. She was Netherlands-born, though Motley says the only language she knew was Italian. He agrees, however, that she was ‘most strenuous in her observances of Roman rites, and was accustomed to wash the feet of twelve virgins every holy week.’

She was not, however, to be the real conduit of royal power in the provinces. A Council of State was set up to advise her – and the President of the Council was none other than Antoíne Perrenot, the ubiquitous Bishop of
Arras. In fact he was more than President, because Margaret had secret instructions from the King not to be guided by the Council as a whole, but only by a cabal of them, the Consulta – and the Consulta, it need hardly be said, included the good bishop, who governed the Regent with what Grierson calls ‘adroitness and the natural delight in ruling that mark the born man of affairs.’ He also maintained a direct correspondence with the King, behind Margaret’s back, so that he was in effect, as Motley says, the real ruler of the Netherlands.

Perrenot wasn’t a Netherlander but a Burgundian from the Franche Comté. Motley credits him with outstanding force and intellect, and describes him as serene and smiling, smooth in manner, and plausible of speech – but also as overbearing and blandly insolent. In the Anthonis Mor portrait of him in the Kunsthistorisches he looks elegantly and sceptically askance at us, in the manner made fashionable by Titian (who, as it happens, had painted his father). You can hear the bland insolence, though, in his contempt for ‘that wicked animal the people,’ and in his opinion that the rebelliousness of the Netherlands arose from the country’s excessive prosperity, ‘so that the people were not able to resist luxury and gave in to every vice, exceeding the proper limits of their stations …’ He also thought, like Stalin and his henchmen, that great harm, especially in the matter of religion, resulted from the unfortunate commercial necessity of contact with foreigners.

In the Gaetano portrait, in the London Library’s edition of his collected correspondence, Perrenot seems slightly surprised, perhaps at his own ever-growing eminence. Motley says that he frequently instructed not only Margaret but the King himself what to say. He also told the King to conceal the source of his instructions, and the King
habitually obeyed. One of the earliest measures of Philip’s reign was undertaken on Perrenot’s express advice – the re-enactment of Charles V’s notorious ‘Edict of Blood’ of 1550. It seems at first sight surprising that he opposed the King’s restructuring of the church, the device by which Perrenot rose to his position; but he confessed, with engagingly open cynicism, that it was because ‘it was more honourable and lucrative to be one of four than one of eighteen.’ He claimed that he lost money by becoming Archbishop, and perhaps he was forced to undergo further financial sacrifices for his faith when the Duchess of Parma, as a charming secret surprise for him in 1561, persuaded the Pope to give him a red hat, and make him cardinal. Over the gate of La Fontaine, his delightful country house outside the walls of Brussels, which he preferred to his palace within them, he carved a stoical motto:
Durate
– ‘patiently endure’ – though Motley says that ‘by trading on the imperial favour and sparing his Majesty much trouble’ he grew enormously rich. It says a lot for his character that he himself felt able to resist the evil effects that excessive prosperity had produced upon the people he ruled.

All in all, he was the Seyss-Inquart of his day – a Burgundian brought in by the Spanish to repress the Netherlands just as the Austrian later was by the Germans. And how did the Nazi Reichskommissar’s predecessor use his newfound wealth? What did the newly created Cardinal Granvelle spend his rapidly accumulating guilders on?

On paintings by Bruegel. He had become Bruegel’s most important patron.

Not, so far as anyone knows, his
biggest
patron, who was Nicolaes Jongelinck, the Antwerp merchant. Jongelinck, according to the famous schedule of security for the debt to the Wine Excise, owned sixteen Bruegels. The inventory of the archbishop’s palace at Malines lists seven. Jongelinck, though, was just another member of the subject people, on the same level as Bruegel himself; his brother Jacques was an artist, a sculptor, and also under the Cardinal’s patronage. The Reichskommissar himself was something else again, the incarnation of absolute power.

He may actually have owned more than seven Bruegels. Which the seven at Malines were, and what happened to them, no one knows, but they were still there long after Granvelle left. The only Bruegel ever traced to Granvelle’s possession is
The Flight into Egypt
, which Bruegel didn’t paint until 1563, the year he left Antwerp and followed the new cardinal to Brussels, so it probably wasn’t one of the Malines seven. Granvelle may well have bought it to decorate one of his two new establishments, and if he bought one picture for Brussels he may have bought others.

Am I beginning to think of Bruegel the way we think of the artists and entertainers in Occupied Europe who worked for the Nazis – as some kind of collaborator? I don’t know. You can’t project modern sensibilities back on to the Renaissance; no one holds it against Michelangelo or Raphael that they worked for Alexander VI, the bad Borgia Pope.
All the same, the regime over which Granvelle presided was quite strikingly loathsome. Under Charles V, between fifty and a hundred thousand people had been executed for religious reasons over the course of fifty years. Under Philip II, according to the calculations of the Prince of Orange, who eventually emerged as the leader of resistance to Spanish rule, some fifty thousand people were slaughtered in the first seven years alone.

You have to keep a sense of proportion, of course. There was nothing particularly remarkable about people being slaughtered by the devout for practising slightly variant forms of devotion, even by the tens of thousands. In any case, if those fifty thousand victims of the re-enacted Edict hadn’t been burnt at the stake or hanged or beheaded or buried alive they’d have died one way or another – probably painfully and before their time, of any one of a hundred different natural plagues and pestilences. No one would have counted them; no one would have remarked upon it. It would be unreasonable to expect some wretched painter to turn down professional success, even if he had much choice about it, just because some of his fellow citizens had died of burns and asphyxiation rather than smallpox or typhus.

All the same, fifty thousand is quite an impressive total to run up, given the limited technology of the time. It’s in the range produced by dropping an atomic bomb, or by the collision of a hundred or so Boeing 747s. You can’t help wondering what Bruegel thought about his patron, and the reign of terror that he was presiding over.

Nothing at all, if we’re to believe van Mander, the only writer who might have known him personally. Van Mander could have told us without any danger to Bruegel if he’d ever heard of him expressing the odd reservation, because by 1604, when his book appeared, the painter was long dead.
He could have told us without any danger to himself, for that matter, because he published it in Haarlem, and by then the Dutch north had fought its way free of the Spanish and their thought police. For van Mander, though, he was simply ‘the very lively and whimsical Pieter Brueghel,’ always ready with the jokes, but not, apparently, with any opinions.

None of the scholars seems to show any interest in Bruegel’s relationship with Granvelle. There’s something a bit odd about it, all the same, however indifferent he was to what was going on around him. The re-enacted Edict made it a capital offence for any lay person ‘to converse or dispute concerning the Holy Scriptures, openly or secretly, especially on any doubtful or difficult matters.’ It also promised death to anyone not having ‘duly studied theology and been approved by some renowned university’ who taught or expounded the Scriptures – or even
read
them. Well, Bruegel was a lay person, so far as anyone knows. He can scarcely have had time, before he took up his pupillage as a painter in Antwerp, to study theology or graduate from any university, renowned or otherwise. So he was forbidden on pain of death to read the Bible. And yet he somehow managed to paint
The Conversion of Saul,
The Procession to Calvary, The Tower of Babel, The Adoration of
the Kings
, not to mention Granvelle’s own
Flight into Egypt
. On the face of it, the Cardinal was buying self-evidently illicit merchandise from a flagrant criminal.

All the artists in the Netherlands who worked on religious subjects were in the same position, of course; maybe they were allowed a little latitude. Their status had improved somewhat since 1425, when Philip the Good hired Jan van Eyck to be his
peintre et valet de chambre
. All the same, they were still members of craft guilds, very like the other craft workers and small tradesmen who were the
readiest converts to Protestantism, and the most frequent victims of its suppression. Let painters indulge their vices, and how do you draw the line at weavers and candlestick makers? Difficult even to turn a blind eye, because there must have been plenty of people ready to out a closet Bible reader. The Edict required everyone to inform upon suspected heretics. If you failed to, you were liable to the same punishments as the heretics themselves; if you succeeded in getting a heretic executed, you were entitled to up to a half of his property.

What did Granvelle think about the traffic he was abetting? It’s not as if he were above taking a personal interest in the prosecution of religious offenders. The records are full of his letters urging on inquisitors throughout the provinces, and pursuing individual cases wherever the zeal of others flagged. When the local authorities in Valenciennes proved reluctant to prosecute two dissenting ministers, Faveau and Mallart, the good Cardinal pressed forcibly for their condemnation, and then, when the local powers dragged their feet again over carrying the sentence out, specifically ordered their execution by burning. The crowd rescued them from the flames, whereupon troops were despatched by Brussels to arrest everyone who might have been among the rescuers, and burn or behead them in place of the original victims.

Perhaps Bruegel was able to give the Cardinal a solemn assurance that he hadn’t read the stories himself – that he’d simply heard them in church, or had them read over to him by a properly qualified specialist. Then again, Granvelle was a worldly and cynical man – think of his regret at having to share the spoils of office with all the new bishops. If Bruegel was a favourite, the Cardinal might well have been prepared to overlook small personal weaknesses. He was
well placed to protect him, after all. But Bruegel must have been acutely aware how precarious his position was.

And if Tolnay’s right, he was also vulnerable in another way. He had a bit of a past. Tolnay believes that while Bruegel was living in Antwerp he was in contact with a group of geographers, writers and artists called ‘the Libertines’ – not rakes, but ‘liberal spirits, tolerant on questions of faith, enemies of confessional fanaticism, with a Stoic ideal of life, founded on the great belief in the moral dignity of the free man.’ Tolnay curiously insists that this didn’t mean Bruegel was ever a heretic. But they were strange ideas, to say the least, for the Netherlands in the sixteenth century – and a number of the Libertines, according to Tolnay, had stranger ones still. They were members of a sect that he calls the
schola caritatis
, founded by Hendrik Niclaes, the author of
The Mirror of Justice
, a work in which salvation is envisaged as being brought about by the power of universal love alone. All external cults are secondary, Niclaes believed; all religions are symbols of a single truth and Holy Scripture has merely an allegorical sense.

I imagine the Cardinal dropping in at the studio one day to check progress on his latest commission. The two men chat about this and that, and the conversation turns to philosophical matters. Bruegel tells him about the views of his friends in Antwerp. Human freedom and the moral dignity it confers. No need for the intercession of the Church. Catholicism and Calvinism much of a muchness. The Cardinal’s very interested. ‘You must let me meet these friends of yours,’ he says. ‘Invite them round one evening, why not, and we can … stoke up the fire and have an enjoyable evening together sorting out our little differences.’

I suspect that Bruegel didn’t mention his old Antwerp
friends. They all seem to have survived. A dozen years later, one of them, Abraham Ortelius, even went on to become geographer royal. Failure to inform upon suspected heretics: another charge hanging over Bruegel’s head. Another little capital offence.

No wonder he had to be somewhat elusive. Either he had to conceal his past, or if the Cardinal knew about it already, he had to be discreet enough to allow him to overlook it. Or perhaps Bruegel distanced himself from his youthful vagaries even more firmly, by persuading Granvelle that he’d become a sincere and useful supporter of the regime. Art was one of the most powerful instruments of the Counter-Reformation. Another Netherlandish artist, Frans Floris, also collected by Jongelinck, travelled to Rome to study the heroic style favoured by the Catholic Church at this period, and then did a
Fall of the Rebel Angels
in which St Michael, with obvious topical symbolism, is striking down the heavenly dissidents with great violence and effect. Eight years later, in 1562, with the Cardinal installed in Brussels and the new terror well under way, Bruegel weighed in with a
Fall of the Rebel Angels
of his own.

So what am I saying now – that Bruegel was simply a hired hack of the Counter-Reformation? It might explain why he went back to the old Books of Hours as the source for his great cycle of the year. He was merely serving up the same old reassuring myth, so carefully sustained from generation to generation, of a happy bucolic world untouched by the conflicts and savageries of real life, one more episode in the long-running story of Arcadian shepherds and Bourbon milkmaids, of Soviet tractor drivers and Merrie England.

I offer this interpretation with judicious scholarly detachment. But I don’t feel detached about it at all. I don’t believe it. Not for a moment. I refuse to believe it. If Bruegel is all
things to all men, then he certainly isn’t that to
me
.

Do I have any evidence for this? Yes – the evidence of my eyes! Of plain common sense! Those six magnificent panels can’t have sprung from such base origins! The suggestion’s ludicrous!

But I need something a little more objective than this. What other evidence can I find?

There’s one other fragment of contemporary testimony apart from van Mander, though it looks at first sight too insignificant to consider. Abraham Ortelius, the Antwerp geographer with whom Bruegel shared his dangerous past, must have remained a friend, even after Bruegel moved to Brussels, because it was probably in the following year that he commissioned a picture from him,
The Death of the Vir
gin
; and in the 1570s, after Bruegel’s death, he began assembling an
Album Amicorum
, a collection of tributes to his friends, in which he included an epitaph for the painter – the only contemporary account of him still extant apart from van Mander’s. An epitaph isn’t the kind of source that usually provides much illumination, and when I glanced at it before, in Tolnay’s end-notes, unable to understand more than a few words of the Latin, I assumed it was the usual bland tribute, and passed on. Now that I look at it again, though, in the light of all those fires, with the smell of all that burning flesh in my nostrils, and His Eminence the Reichskommissar looking over my shoulder, I start to wonder if it’s quite as innocuous as it seems.

Multa pinxit, hic Brugelius, quae pingi non possunt
…’ begins Ortelius. ‘He painted many things, this Bruegel, that cannot be painted …’

Why can’t they be painted, these things that he did in fact paint? Because they’re in some way elusive, hard to observe, difficult to render pictorially? The rawness of early
spring, the heat of summer? Or does the difficulty go deeper? Is he referring to things that can’t be seen? To the feelings that landscape and the changing seasons induce? To the lift of the heart as the spring draws on and the mind goes out to the far blue horizon?

Or does he mean things more abstract still? Beliefs? Ideas? Strange ideas, perhaps, like religious tolerance and the moral dignity of the free man? Ideas which are unpaintable for more reasons than one?

My spirits have suddenly begun to lift. All my senses are alert. How does the epitaph go on?
Multa pinxit, hic
Brugelius, quae pingi non possunt, quod Vilnius de Apelle
…

But here both my Latin and my grasp of classical allusion give out. Also, I suddenly realize that I have to get to Kentish Town before the bank shuts.