Headlong (15 page)

Bruegel shows his face quite literally in three of his pictures. Or so some scholars believe. I’m sitting in the library at the V & A, distracted from my quest for the Giordano prices by these three rare materializations. In his drawing of
The Painter and the Connoisseur
he works away, grim-faced and wild-haired, while a bespectacled patron watches over his shoulder with a vacant grin and a hand already in his purse, too stupid to be able to see or understand what he’s about to pay for. In
The Peasant Wedding
he sits at the edge of the picture, listening expressionlessly to the expostulations of a Franciscan friar. In
The Sermon of St
John the Baptist
he lurks very small and inscrutable among the preacher’s congregation.

I can’t help noticing that in the first picture his beard seems to be grey, in the second brown, in the third black. The only evidence adduced for believing that any of them is a self-portrait is the similarity that various scholars have been able to discern to his appearance in the two copper engravings of him done by Dominicus Lampsonius and Aegidius Sadeler, in both of which he’s clearly identified by name.

It’s easy to find the Lampsonius – it’s reproduced over and over again in the biographies. It shows Bruegel in a crude and simple profile, his face half-hidden by his long beard, his expression and character unreadable. The Sadeler I eventually track down in Hollstein’s
Dutch & Flemish Etch
ings
, and in this one he looks out at us from above the beard,
now elegantly trimmed, with sad and serious eyes, and for a moment … yes, he seems real and human.

But then Sadeler didn’t do the portrait until 1606, thirty-seven years after Bruegel died – which was a year before Sadeler was even born. The portrait’s framed in an allegorical surround by Bartholomeus Spranger, who worked with Sadeler in Prague at the court of Rudolf II; and the most scrupulous scholarship, by Bedaux and van Gool, on the unbelievably arcane images and even more arcane Latin text that Spranger has written – both in the most esoteric Rudolfine tradition – suggests that it was a mystical attempt to portray both the Elder and the Younger Bruegel as a single entity, since they were reputed to look alike, and using the son, whom Sadeler may have met, as the model. In plain language, then, it’s not a portrait of Pieter Bruegel the Elder at all.

I turn back to the Lampsonius. Lampsonius
was
a contemporary of Bruegel’s, but there’s no evidence that they ever met. For most of Bruegel’s working life Lampsonius was in England as secretary to Cardinal Pole, Bloody Mary’s Granvelle, who had formally received England back into the bosom of Rome, and when he returned to the Netherlands in the year before Bruegel’s death he went not to Brussels but to Liège, where he was kept fully occupied as secretary to the Bishop. The portrait comes from a series he did of famous Netherlandish painters, and it’s in much the same style as the ones of van Eyck and Hieronymus Bosch, who died long before Lampsonius was born. The chances that Lampsonius’s picture is in any real sense a portrait are vanishingly small.

And if neither the Sadeler nor the Lampsonius is a likeness of him, then there’s no reason for thinking that any of his three supposed self-portraits are, either.

Every time you think you catch a glimpse of Bruegel, he slips away like this as soon as you look closer. The mantle comes down; there’s no one looking out from behind the canvas. So, the Giordano prices, then back to Upwood. But as I pull out the first volume of sale-room records, I have a stroke of luck. I make one of those almost random discoveries that sometimes happen after hours of patient, systematic effort. I realize that I’m standing next to one of the computer terminals which list current research, and that for once no one’s using it. I push the sale-room volume back.

It takes only a moment to tap in ‘Bruegel’… and then the system takes over. It’s so swift and seductive – so unlike hunting back and forth through the broad fields of the microfiche reader, or stooping like a potato harvester over the dog-eared cards in the filing cabinets. No sooner has that merest hint of a wish been formulated than up come 114 different ways of satisfying it.

They’re mostly contributions to scholarly journals, none of them, so far as I can see, of any imaginable relevance to me – until I get to the eighty-seventh item on the list: the
Gazette
des Beaux-Arts
, February 1986, with a contribution on
Pieter
Bruegel peintre hérétique
.

A heretic? This is way beyond what even Tolnay claims. The author is Pastor H. Stein-Schneider, I discover when the item arrives on my desk. He’s evidently a French Protestant clergyman, and he describes himself as a heresiologist and a historian of the sixteenth century. He makes no bones about his claim. Bruegel, he says, was ‘a manifest heretic, and his paintings Manichaean and neo-Cathar charades.’

Wow, as Laura Churt might say. Manichaeanism, a strand of thought that keeps recurring in Christianity, however often it’s suppressed, insists on the reality of darkness and evil as fundamental constituents of the world. Once
upon a time good and evil, light and darkness, were clearly separated, and in the last days they will be again. Our present state, though, it sees as a mixture or balance of the two, half day and half night. The Cathars, or Albigensians, were brutally suppressed by the Inquisition in the thirteenth century. If this is what Bruegel was painting, then he was certainly playing with thunder and lightning.

Stein-Schneider, like me, has been struck by the cryptic hints in the Ortelius epitaph. The key to the epitaph, he says, is a letter written by Ortelius that came to light in 1888. It was found in a drawer in an old printing house in Antwerp owned in the sixteenth century by the publisher Christophe Plantin, and it establishes that both Ortelius and Plantin were members of a sect founded by Hendrik Niclaes called the Family of Love, which is presumably the
schola caritatis
referred to by Tolnay. Between 1550 and 1562, while Bruegel was living in Antwerp, Plantin had printed many works relating to the sect. He’d done it clandestinely – and for good reason. Stein-Schneider takes a very different view of the Family of Love from Tolnay. To a heresiologist, a reading of Familist documents entirely confounds Tolnay’s view that the sect was faithful to the Roman church. The Familists’ doctrines of irenicism and ethic soteriology … I run to the shelf where the dictionaries are kept – their doctrines of pacifism and salvation through goodness … together with their sexual asceticism, identify them as a Manichaean movement in the Cathar tradition.

A heretic, yes. I think of that little figure in the background of so many of Bruegel’s pictures, the ordinary-looking man no one’s paying any attention to, the Icarus, the Saul, the condemned Christ, the one whose view of the world is different, whose fate is against the grain of the everyday world around him, and whose unremarked pres
ence changes everything. The unobserved observer with dissent hidden in his heart.

‘One volume in particular of this Familist collection,’ says Stein-Schneider, ‘entitled
Terra pacis
(‘Land of Peace’), printed by Plantin at Antwerp between 1555 and 1562, is not only completely clear, but seems to contain the description of a certain number of Bruegel’s paintings. It even contains the enumeration and explication of forty heretical symbols that Bruegel seems to have used in his Familist charades …’

If I can lay my hands on a copy of
Terra pacis
, all my problems may just possibly be over. Where would I find one? The British Library, of course. I’m on the Piccadilly Line before I remember why I was in the V & A in the first place.

I gently open the ancient cover of the little volume.
Terra
pacis. A true testification of the spirituall Land of Peace; which is
the spirituall Land of Promyse, and the holy Citee of Peace or the
heauenly Ierusalem; and of the Holy and spirituall People that
dwell therin: as also of the Walking in the Spirit, which leadeth
therunto. Set-foorth by HN: and by Him newly perused and
more-playnly declared. Translated out of Base-almayne
.

The British Library’s English edition is undated, but from the style it must have been published not too long after Plantin’s ‘Low German’ original. I slowly turn over the packed, irregular pages. It’s a kind of novel – the story of the pilgrim’s painful journey out of this sinful world, which it identifies as ‘the North Country’, or ‘the Country of Ignorance’, to the New Jerusalem, the promised land of the soul’s peace. The journey is entirely on foot, and the laboriousness of the travel is brought out by the archaic spelling of the word.

For as long as one is in the Journey, he must account of him self
as a Pilgrim or Walker in strainge Landes … This great unpathed
Lande that he travaileth thorow is named Many-
maner-
of-
walk
ings because the Travaillers do travaille and passe from all Quar
ters thorow the same Lande to that one good Lande of Rest
…

The Travailler crosses a landscape of topographical allegory assembled from biblical sources, all scrupulously cited in the margins. There are fayre Hills, that seeme to be
somwhat delytfull, but the Travailler must beware of them, because they are nothing but Deceit, Vanitee and Seduceing. He must pass a daungerous Ryver wherin many Travaillers be drowned and choaked, named A-delyte-in-the-pleasurs-of-the-flesh. His life is threatened by divers Natures of Beastes that are mynded to Devouring, the which also do pursue the Travaillers very stoutly, and a crafty Murderer lurking in the thickets, whose name is Unbeleefe.

I look at my photocopy of Stein-Schneider. A number of his forty heretical symbols enumerated and explained by
Terra pacis
occur in the cycle of the year. The North Country, he says, is shown in
The Gloomy Day
, and its cold and hunger in
The Hunters in the Snow
. The deceptive hills are represented in the Hay Harvest, while the treasure that is to be found in the field (see Matthew 13, v 44) is described in
The Corn Harvest
.

The cycle can’t exactly be a record of the great hike, I realize, because if
The Gloomy Day
is the last of the series, the wretched travailler would be ending up back in the North Country where he started. It might, though, be intended to show not the consecutive stages of the journey, but various views in Many-maner-of-walkings at different times of the year. So what we’re looking at is a kind of illustrated almanac of the North Country and the ‘wildernessed Landes,’ where the snowy crags remind us that ‘God wil now bring-downe all high Hills, and make the high Stony-rocks and the Vallyes playne that Israel may walke and dwell free without Fear; to the Honour of his God.’ In each of the pictures is one of the Castels thorow the middest of the which the Travailler must passe, and half-seen, or just out of sight, at the end of all these valleys is a town – the Citee of Peace that he finally hopes to reach.

‘But in all the same Lande named Many-maner-of-walk
ings there is not one playne pathed Waye.’ And in the whole of Bruegel’s cycle, apart from the village streets in
The Hunters in the Snow
, there’s not a single path or road. ‘The most-part of the Lands are besett with greevous Laboure, and with much Trouble …’ And so they are – the traditional labours of each season.

Long before I’ve travailed the length of the book I feel I could name all the topographical features in the series, as if I were standing in front of the pictures with a gazetteer in my hands.
The one of these Castels is named The-
power-
of-
the-
devils-assaulting, the second The-
forsaking-
of-
hope, the third is
named Feare-
of-
death … These Hils are named, Taken-
on-
witt-
or-prudence, Riches-
of-
the spirit, Learned-knowledge, Taken-
on-
freedom, Goodthinking-prophecie, Zeale-
after-
chosen-
holynes,
Counterfeit-righteousness, New Invented-humilitee, Pryde-
in-
ones-
owne-
spiritualnes, Unmyndful-
of-
any-
better
… And those unseasonably early swimmers in the
Merrymakers
must be plunging into A-delyte-in-the-pleasurs-of-the-flesh – the daungerous Ryver wherin so many Travaillers be drowned and choaked.

Or am I wandering off into great unpathed Landes myself? Am I getting close to the edge of the dizzy precipice named You-can-fit-almost-anything-into-any-pattern-you-like-to-name? I remember all the hikes and other travails I’ve been on myself where I’ve stood looking from landscape to map and back, seeing the shape of the hills in front of me in six entirely different parts of the contour lines. If only I could see one single detail in the landscape that related unambiguously to one single sign on the map. One church spire. One lighthouse, one narrow-gauge railway.

And here I have another of the unpaintable flashes of lightning that are guiding my steps forward on this vertiginous day.

Maps! Yes! The maps in
Theatrum orbis terrarum
, the great atlas of 1570 by Abraham Ortelius! Perhaps they also contain some reference to the heretical symbols of the Family of Love! Something that’s reflected in some detail of the
Merrymakers
!

I rush back to the catalogue. It lists various editions of the
Theatrum
. The first four were published by someone called Aegidius Commenius Diesth. But from 1579 onwards publication was taken over by … by Christophe Plantin of Antwerp, Ortelius’s brother Familist, the underground distributor of Terra pacis.

I’m on my way to the Map Room.

I work my way slowly through the first Plantin edition of the
Theatrum
. I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for. Some reference to the great unpathed Lande, to the Walking in the Spirit. I can’t imagine what it would be.

What emerges page by page under the protective sheet of talc is a historical document: a view of the world seen from a particular place at a particular moment just as surely as the landscapes of the cycle are. What I’m looking at is the world of the late Renaissance as viewed from the Netherlands. In the foreground, like the dancing peasants on the hillside from which the
Merrymakers
was painted five years earlier, is the close-up detail of the Netherlands themselves; in the middle ground is the rest of Europe, stretching away like the valley in the picture to the new horizons opened up by the great navigators.

‘The wholl Earth’, says Niclaes in
Terra pacis
, ‘is unmeasurable great and large: and the Lands and People are many and divers.’ So are the scales and colours and cartographic styles of the various mapmakers whose work Ortelius has assembled in the
Theatrum
. And yet the world it shows is strangely static. It’s a place of rivers, mountains and forests, of kingdoms and duchies, of towns and cities. But there’s no sign of any communications connecting the isolated human settlements, any more than there is in Bruegel’s landscapes. No railways, obviously – but still no roads worth marking, either. It’s as trackless as the great
unpathed Lande. Only on the seas, exactly as in Bruegel, do a few symbolic ships set sail for emblematic destinations.

The map of Salzburg appears to curl back from the page to reveal the city itself behind it, seen as Bruegel might have seen it from the same high foreground. On the other side of the Alps, Lake Como curls back in the same way to reveal a scene even more like one in the cycle of the year, with a distant city and green mountains beyond … And there in the foreground is what I’m looking for. A little Travailler. A walker, striding along past what might be a wayside cross or a signpost, or both.

He’s coming down out of the north, on his way from the Country of Darkness. He’s descending from the Alps, from the high passes through the deceptive hills, into the balmy air of Italy, the New Jerusalem, the promised land of the soul’s peace.

No, of course he’s not. It’s just a casual thumb-nail sketch, a decorative flourish by the Italian cartographer.

Or is it? I order up the earlier editions of the
Theatrum
, published by Diesth. And in the first edition of 1570 … no little walker. He doesn’t appear until the second edition, in the following year. So he’s presumably been added, not in Italy by the cartographer, but in Antwerp by Ortelius himself. Why? I can think of only one good reason for such a small but strange editorial intrusion: it’s a secret sign to the initiated, like a masonic handshake. By setting that little walker on his travels and travails through the unpathed Lande of his roadless world, Ortelius was quietly signalling to his fellow adepts that the entire terrestrial theatre was the setting of life’s great journey. He was declaring it all to be the land named Many-maner-of-walkings.

And this is the thought that comes to me as I sit there in the Map Room, at the end of this extraordinary day: if there
were also a little walker in the
Merrymakers
it would identify the whole cycle of the year as a Familist document. It would explain why this particular picture was removed and hidden. If I could find a little walker coming down from the cold north lands of March I should have identified it beyond a doubt.

I should be the man who’d finally solved the mystery of Bruegel. I should have lifted the veil, revealed the hidden figure behind the canvas. I should have found the thunder.

Another thought strikes: there
is
a little walker in my picture. I can see him as clearly as if I were standing in front of it in the breakfast-room at Upwood now.

Check, though! Yes? Somehow!

And already I’m out on the street and heading for home. The season that my picture shows, it seems to me now, is the moral equinox, the uncertain days we live in, when light and dark in the world are equally balanced. Or perhaps, more accurately, the weeks just after it, at the start of the old New Year, when the long winter nights behind us are beginning to give place at last to the long summer days ahead. Outside the windows of the train the north-western suburbs, too, are full of sunshine, and everywhere there’s the same shimmer of green that’s spreading across the woods in the picture. There’s also a travailler here – me, coming down from the winter air in the high passes, heading for the soft lands of summer, where the ship’s waiting to weigh anchor and set sail for Jerusalem. And what a delight it is to have some great journey to undertake, some great enterprise under way, so that all one’s thoughts and efforts are guided by the onward momentum of it.

Everything we do has bad as well as good in it, dark as well as light, and that includes the enterprise I’m embarked upon now. But the days are drawing out and the nights are
drawing in, and I know now that the good is going to predominate.

I open the
Country Life
I bought at St Pancras; not a journal I’ve ever bought before. As the train rolls north, and the land named Many-maner-of-commutings rolls south, I flick through the property ads looking at the price of country estates. For a million pounds, say, we could get something really rather impressive. Somewhere not entirely unlike Upwood, perhaps. Upwood itself, it occurs to me, may come on the market sooner or later, in spite of all my efforts to help Tony out.

I remember I still haven’t looked up the Giordano. But by this time the exact figures involved in the stupendous deal I’m about to do seem to me of remarkably little importance.