Headlong (19 page)

‘I mean now.’

She stops for a moment in mid-yawn. This is going to test our new arrangements.

‘I know,’ I say, ‘but I want to be in the library tomorrow first thing. If he’s started carting that picture round and showing it to people, then I’ve got to be ready to move just as soon as the bank’s got the money through.’

She unhurriedly finishes her yawn. Of course; she’s entirely confident now that I’m not going to meet the conditions I’ve set myself.

‘Don’t forget to look up the Giordano prices this time,’ she says mildly.

Bruegel, I discover next day, sitting with my back turned obstinately once again upon the real spring in St James’s Square, wasn’t the only artist to attempt a reconstruction of Apelles’ vanished masterpiece. The detailed description that Lucian gave was evidently so vivid that a dozen centuries later, in the Renaissance, it caught the imagination of a considerable number of artists, and the scene was illustrated by, among many others, Botticelli, Mantegna and Dürer. A French art historian, Jean-Michel Massing, has devoted a whole book to the subject. There’s something profoundly odd about Bruegel’s version, though, that Massing sets out but doesn’t comment on, and that no one else seems to have noticed at all.

I think about it to myself. (Yes, we’re still working on this together, myself and I, even if Kate’s out of it.) Lucian wrote in Greek, and the knowledge of Greek wasn’t widespread at the time of the Renaissance. The great rediscovery of classical civilization was made through Latin, either from original Latin texts or from Greek ones translated into Latin. Bruegel had plainly read Lucian’s account of the
Calumny
in translation – the figures are all identified by their Latin names. The labels in the other famous versions of the picture, by Botticelli, Mantegna and Dürer, don’t correspond to any of the various known translations. But Massing’s able to identify the one that Bruegel had read, because his labelling follows, exactly and to the letter, the
version done in 1518 by the German humanist Philipp Melanchthon.

The more I ponder this to myself, the more astonishing both I and myself think it is. I happen to know something about Melanchthon because he began life as a nominalist, but in the sixteenth century he was notorious throughout Catholic Europe as one of the founding fathers of Protestantism. He was a personal friend of Luther – out of transubstantiation even before Luther himself – and the principal author of the great statement of Lutheran beliefs, the Augsburg Confession. In the Spanish Netherlands, in other words, he was Satan’s archangel. Bruegel had already taken amazing risks by reading God’s word in the Bible, but to start on the Devil’s works as well was insanely reckless.

And at once a practical question arises: where in Brussels at that time could Bruegel have possibly laid his hands on a text by Melanchthon?

Well, where would you look for a copy of Trotsky’s writings in Stalinist Russia? Where would be the likeliest place to find
The Satanic Verses
in Iran? I know where I’d look first: Beria’s bedside, some ayatollah’s coffee-table.

My guess is that Bruegel found Melanchthon in Cardinal Granvelle’s library.

Bruegel’s all-powerful patron was possibly the only man in Brussels who could possess heretical texts with impunity. He had a professional obligation to read them, to know what it was that he was protecting everyone else from. In any case, it might have amused him to own forbidden books, even to display them. It’s a demonstration of the great man’s power, to permit himself liberties denied to lesser men. They’re in chains; he holds the chains.

So maybe this is why Bruegel fled from Antwerp to Brussels – to secure a foothold inside the lion’s den, because he
knew that no one would dare to touch anyone living so close to the lion. The Cardinal perhaps found Bruegel as chic as the writings of Melanchthon. He might have found it even more piquant to tolerate a live pet radical about the house, a painter with heretical leanings, like a jester licensed to mock the king, or a wild tiger cub permitted to foul the carpets and bite the courtiers – a living demonstration that not only did he hold the chains, but that he kept the key to them, and locked them and unlocked them at his own good pleasure.

The pilot fish survives all the lesser predators of the ocean by having a shark right behind it, and survives the shark by swimming just in front of its nose. Perhaps
The
Flight into Egypt
, which Bruegel painted in the same year as his move to Brussels, and which is known to have been owned by Granvelle, was a graceful allusion to the sanctuary that the Cardinal was offering him.

I see Bruegel settling into the same easy terms with the Reichskommissar as Apelles was with Alexander the Great, according to Pliny. When Alexander visited Apelles in his studio and ventured a few opinions about art, Apelles felt free to tell him how ridiculous they were. I hear Bruegel uttering a short insulting laugh when the Cardinal tells him, over a bottle of white wine amidst the genial chaos of the artist’s studio, how much he admires Frans Floris and
The Fall of the Rebel Angels
. I see the Cardinal smiling good-naturedly at this touching little sign of professional jealousy. Alexander gave Apelles a most handsome present – his favourite mistress. I imagine the Cardinal making a few knowing remarks about the little servant girl Bruegel had abandoned in Antwerp, who keeps sending his officials long letters in green ink full of wild allegations. The Cardinal has her ravings filed away for possible future use, but in
the meantime orders a huge birthday cake to be delivered to Bruegel, and when Bruegel cuts it – out jumps a very pretty little nun as a substitute …

Or perhaps not. The following year, 1564, when he paints the
Adoration
, Bruegel’s still evidently worrying about gossip. The pilot fish must always remain a little anxious, in spite of the mighty bodyguard at his back. One moment’s inattention, one brief failure to anticipate which way your great friend’s turning next, and – snap! – no pilot fish. And by the spring of that year this particular pilot fish suddenly had an urgent reason for paranoia. A sudden commotion in the water behind him, and when he looked round – no shark!

What had happened? The Cardinal had gone home to Burgundy to see his mother.

It was a neat reversal. Granvelle had often prompted the King what to say and do, and modestly told him not to mention the source of the suggestion. By 1564 the ubiquitous prelate had made himself so loathed by all parties in the Netherlands, from the Prince of Orange to the Duchess of Parma herself, that the King was obliged, after endless hesitation, to make a decision of his own at last without the Cardinal’s assistance. He instructed Granvelle to go and visit his mother in France. And he modestly told him not to mention who’d prompted this little filial piety.

So Granvelle left, and never returned. There was wild rejoicing in the capital, though possibly one abruptly abandoned pilot fish didn’t join in. Once again Bruegel was as alone and unprotected in the great ocean as he’d been in Antwerp.

Put not your trust in princes … The Spaniards and their local hirelings, like all failing imperial regimes, were particularly dangerous friends to have. If Bruegel could have foreseen what would happen after his death he might have
been even more anxious. In 1572 Granvelle’s palace at Malines was wrecked and looted, not by the Protestant rebels, but by the Spaniards themselves, under the command of the Duke of Alva, who’d come to put an end to the Netherlanders’ disobedience once and for all, and who sacked not just Malines but a number of cities, all with spectacular and ghoulish brutality.

What happened to the Cardinal’s collection of Bruegels inside the palace? Some of them, at any rate, had remained there up to then. Granvelle, still in exile, sent an envoy, Provost Morillon, a devoted and conscientious-looking priest in his portrait in the
Correspondance
, to inspect the damage. Morillon reported that Don Frederic, the Duke of Alva’s son, who was acting as the local Spanish commander, had sold a collection of loot to a certain captain Erasso, and that ‘this fine brigand’ would make a handsome profit if he got the chance, ‘because he was still taking the pictures while I was there, and has declared that he will carry off all the casketing and wainscotting, beds and chamber doors, if they are not redeemed to his satisfaction.’ Nine days later he reports again. ‘I have sent Christian the painter to buy the XXV canvas perspectives and Antwerp landscapes … but you must not expect to recover the Bruegel pieces, or only at a price: because they are more sought after since his death than before, and are estimated at 50, 100 and 200 escudos, which is unconscionable.’

Whether Granvelle ever did recover them, the correspondence doesn’t record. Perhaps he did, and they disappeared again later, in the seventeenth century, when one of his descendants, the comte de St Amour, began to sell or give away
mille belles choses
from among the late Cardinal’s effects. What the Count valued least, papers and books, was abandoned to the mercy of his servants. The Cardinal’s
dispatches, says his editor, were treated as waste paper, and could be seen used as wrapping and ‘undergoing the uttermost indignities.’ Maybe the last record of the fate of the Cardinal’s Bruegels disappeared into the staff latrine.

On the other hand, it may well have been the approach of war in the provinces that preserved some record of Jon-gelinck’s Bruegels in Antwerp, by ruining his friend de Bruyne and forcing Jongelinck to list them for his pledge to cover de Bruyne’s debt. The pictures themselves, for that matter, were probably saved only by the City’s seizure or purchase of them, because Jongelinck’s villa, for which he’d commissioned the great cycle, was in the suburbs – a luxury spec development put up by a builder who’d acquired a plot outside the city walls. When Alessandro Farnese besieged the city in 1584 this early experiment in suburban living turned out to be premature, and the defenceless villa was destroyed by the Spaniards like so much else.

Back to 1564, though, with Bruegel in Brussels – and his great patron gone.

There he is, unprotected again, and in the following year he’s defending himself against actual or potential accusers with the
Calumny
and
The Woman Taken in Adultery
. His fears remain with him to the end of his life and
The Magpie
on the Gallows
. But by then the story’s taken a slightly different turn.

The bequest of
The Magpie
to his wife wasn’t the only disposition he made on his deathbed, according to van Mander. He also ordered her to burn a number of pictures. Exactly what they were van Mander doesn’t say, but he describes them as ‘strange and full of meaning … careful and beautifully finished drawings to which he had added inscriptions,’ and says that Bruegel wanted them destroyed ‘from remorse or for fear that she might get into trouble and might have to answer for them.’ It seems unlikely, though, that they showed the great unpathed Lande named Many-maner-of-walkings, because van Mander says that they were ‘compositions of comical subjects’ and that ‘some of them were too biting and sharp.’

Comic drawings that might get their possessor into trouble because they’re too biting and sharp sound like caricatures of some sort. If so, they must have been most carefully retained in Bruegel’s own possession up till then, and most comprehensively suppressed by his widow, because there are no known caricatures of identifiable individuals among his extant works. There are plenty of sardonic representa
tions of peasants and beggars, of course, and some of these were apparently taken from life, but I can’t believe Bruegel was worrying about peasants and beggars recognizing themselves and bringing lawsuits. Van Mander suggests that the drawings which Bruegel ordered to be burnt were like others of which engraved copies have survived. But the extant engravings of comical subjects are all fantastical scenes scarifying human vice and folly in the most general way, and I don’t find it any easier to believe that Bruegel thought his widow might be troubled by group actions brought by misers and lechers who thought their interests had been damaged. So perhaps these dangerous drawings, with the inscriptions he’d added, were something more like … yes,
The Calumny of Apelles
once again.

And so I turn to Lucian. He was a rhetorician, I discover – a performer, a kind of early Eddie Izzard, who toured the Greek world in the second century after Christ reciting witty essays he’d written. One of them was about slander, a subject which he says was long before pre-empted by Apelles for his famous picture. Lucian calls him Apelles of Ephesus, Pliny Apelles of Kos, but he seems to be the same man, and from the way he talks about the picture it’s plain that Lucian actually saw it and had some kind of guided tour of it.

He says that Apelles had a good personal reason for wanting to do a picture about slander, because he’d once been falsely accused himself, and almost executed. A rival artist called Antiphilus was jealous of him, and denounced him to the king. He told the king that Apelles had been seen whispering in the ear of one of the provincial governors and inciting him to revolt. The king’s judgement, according to Lucian, had been corrupted by flattery, and without further inquiry he began raving and shouting that
Apelles was an ingrate, a plotter and a conspirator, and was going to have him beheaded until one of Apelles’ fellow prisoners spoke up and absolved him of any part in the plot, whereupon the king was so ashamed that he gave Apelles his rival as a slave.

The circumstances of the revolt identify the credulous monarch as the debauched and drunken Ptolemy IV, otherwise Ptolemy Philoprator, one of the Macedonian kings of Egypt in the third century BC – which means that the story, like so many others, has got corrupted in transmission at some point, because Apelles had been dead for nearly a hundred years when the incident occurred. The details are so circumstantial and vivid, however, that Lucian’s account must be based on some sort of actual events, even if he or his informants have elided them with something that happened later. What’s most striking about the allegation – so striking that it’s survived the change in the story’s setting – is its nature; it’s a political one.

But then so was the allegation against Christ, as Herod understood it, that led to the great massacre and to the hurried removal of the infant Christ from Bethlehem. The charge in both cases was sedition, committed or threatened.

Was the allegation haunting Bruegel in those last six years of his life also a political one? Was he in fear of being denounced as a danger to the state? Of being revealed not so much as a heretic but as a dissident?

This is the new tower of Babel I’m building: politics. Can I find room here for the cycle of the year?

I look through the five known panels once again. I can see not a ghost of a political idea in them anywhere, except the general air of disconcerting quietism, the suggestion that life in the Netherlands was one long rural idyll.

Could there be some detail in the first picture in the
series, in my picture, that suggests otherwise? That puts a different spin on the whole series? I can’t imagine what it could be. I could easily imagine the little walker. But what sort of detail might carry a political meaning? Barricades? Rick-burning?

Or could swimming earlier in the year than the Books of Hours allow for be a form of political protest?

There’s nothing more to be discovered in London. What I have to do is head north once again and make another attempt to see the picture. I’ll go to Upwood and offer my services with the mysterious patch in the corner of the picture – but before I knock on the door I’ll reconnoitre carefully to make sure that Tony’s Land-Rover’s in the yard, and the dogs are at home. If not, I’ll lurk patiently in the undergrowth until he returns and extinguishes any possibility of embarrassing misunderstandings.

Because there’s
something
in that picture of mine! I know that. Something that explains why it disappeared. Something that unlocks all the mysteries. Something that identifies it beyond any reasonable doubt.

Actually, there
was
one thing more to be discovered in London, I realize, as I roll north through a sudden sobering downpour of spring rain – the Giordano prices. Damn.