Headlong (24 page)

The Spanish troops left the Netherlands in 1561, amid general rejoicing, three years before Bruegel painted
The
Mas
sacre of the Innocents
– Kate’s right about that. But she’s wrong in telling me that this means the picture doesn’t allude to them. Why should Bruegel have forgotten them? Why should
anyone
have forgotten them? Their behaviour had been infamous, and they went only after years of outrage and agitation, only after the most strenuous political efforts by William of Orange, only after it was made a condition for granting Philip’s ‘Request’ for the three million gold sovereigns. Had the peoples of Holland and Belgium stopped thinking about the
German
Occupation by 1948? Kate’s being absurd. She’s simply repeating what most of the commentators on Bruegel have said. They’re
all
absurd. I feel like throwing them across the room. They none of them seem to have used their common sense. They’ve all put their noses up against the surface of the panels and squinted at the details with myopic literal-mindedness. They don’t stand back and look at the general sense of the pictures in the context of the times.

They’re all iconographers. What this problem needs is an iconologist.

It’s Sunday. I’m sitting in our flat in Oswald Road going through all the books once more at the kitchen table, trying to make good my pledge to Kate before tomorrow morning, when I go out and sell
Helen
, and take almost the very
last step before I’m totally committed. Though why I should be so scrupulous about Kate’s feelings I’m not sure, because the more I think about what she said, and about all the massed choir of art historians who sang the same tune before her, the angrier I become. How can they not see what’s in front of their eyes? How can they be so
wrong
?

Meanwhile, Helen sits on the other side of the table, occupying considerably more of the room than me and myself and the table together, still with that unshakeably indifferent expression on her face, still with her right arm raised in mild concern. I’ve taken her out of the wet black plastic to let her dry out and breathe a little. She seems none the worse for her elopement apart from smelling rather strongly – she’s acquired the rancid dirty-hair smell of sheep, that attaches itself to everything they come into contact with.

What she’s mostly concerned about now, I think, is not her personal hygiene, or her exposure to the weather, but the suspicion that she’s even less covered by our household insurance than she is by her dress. It’s worrying me, too. This is a moderately high crime area, and our policy, I imagine, requires that any individual item of value has to be specified. By the time I rushed back from the shops on Saturday afternoon I was convinced that I’d find she’d taken off again with another suitor already, leaving me with £20,000 odd to find. My one reassurance is that it would take a whole team of burglars to get her out of here. It had plainly not struck the Victorian architect who designed this house that its occupants might one day want to hang a canvas covering 42 square feet, in an elaborate gilt frame, in one of the upstairs rooms. I had to ask Midge, of course, to help me get her in. But we also needed her boyfriend Alec, her son Jeremy and the Japanese couple in the basement. Midge crushed a finger against the newel
post on the stairs, and won’t be able to type for some time, though when she can she’ll have her best column yet.

Now I’ve got to get the poor old soul out again tomorrow morning. I’ve also got to run to the window every few minutes to see if the Land-Rover’s still outside, since I have a feeling that the baler twine holding the tailgate shut may not be proof against the more sophisticated sort of car thieves we have in London.

And when I think of what the rest of tomorrow’s going to be like, manoeuvring all this lot around the West End … I’m pleased to have a quiet day at home with her first. I’m getting quite fond of her, as a matter of fact. She’s a peaceful person to be with, after the last week or two. She hasn’t made any alarming advances to me, or announced she’s given up smoking. Her silence isn’t pointed, in the way that Kate’s was when I rang her last night and told her humorously that I was sitting at the table here gazing into Laura’s eyes – a silence that continued even after I’d explained that ‘Laura’ was a slip of the tongue for ‘Helen’.

Another of Helen’s virtues: she hasn’t got any art historian friends of hers to come and buy her behind my back. Also, she isn’t a closet Catholic, and she hasn’t tried to tell me that the troops in the
Massacre
aren’t Spanish! Anyway, even if they
aren’t
it doesn’t make any difference to the sense of the picture, because after the Spanish had gone there was still the local mounted gendarmerie, the Bandes d’Ordonnance, ready to put down religious or political dissent. It was detachments of this security police, together with a company of the Duke of Aerschot’s regiment, that rounded up the victims for mass execution in Valenciennes after the crowd rescued Faveau and Mallart from burning. That was in 1562, after the Spanish troops had gone, probably just two years before Bruegel painted his
Massacre
. Do
you really think that he hadn’t made the connection? That everyone who saw the picture didn’t make it in his turn?

I look at Helen. She says nothing; there’s nothing she can say.

There are more troops in The
Adoration of the Kings
. Why? There are none in the Bible story. More again in
The Procession
to Calvary
, wearing the red coats of the gendarmerie. A complete army in
The Suicide of Saul
, painted in 1562, as the new campaign of religious persecution got under way. This is another iconographic rarity – the Saul of the Old Testament, falling on his sword because the crushing of his nation by its enemies the Philistines has reduced him to despair. Are you trying to tell me that the Netherlanders looked at that and didn’t think of their own nation, also crushed by its enemies?

There’s another army marching up into the mountains in
The Conversion of Saul
. This is the other Saul, the Saul of the New Testament, and his accompaniment by an army on his journey from Jerusalem to Damascus is exceedingly odd. In Acts 9, where the story’s told, there’s no mention of either mountains or army. Saul was trained as a rabbi, not a soldier, and he’s on his way to Damascus (‘yet breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord’) accompanied only by unspecified ‘men which journeyed with him,’ and bearing letters from the High Priest to the local synagogues authorizing him to arrest Christians.

But in 1567, the year when the
Conversion
was painted, there
was
an army marching through the mountains. It was the Spanish army under the command of the Duke of Alva, on its way through the Alps from Italy to put an end once and for all to dissent and rebellion in the Netherlands. Alva was a reasonably good model for the unconverted Saul. According to Motley, ‘the world has agreed that such an amount of stealth and ferocity, of patient vindictiveness
and universal bloodthirstiness, were never found in savage beast of the forest, and but rarely in a human bosom. ‘Like Saul, he was coming with orders to extirpate heresy. Like Saul, he was bearing letters from higher authority – what Motley calls ‘a whole trunkful’ of blank execution warrants, already signed by the King. I can’t see in Bruegel’s picture any indication of the two thousand specially enrolled prostitutes who were travelling with the Spanish troops, but perhaps they’re further back in the column, or perhaps Bruegel didn’t know about them. But if God had taken the hint he’d surely have struck the Duke of Alva down at the roadside, just as he did Saul, and converted him into a Protestant.

Glück agrees that the theme of the picture may have been suggested by Alva’s approach, but other commentators are scathing about any explanation so vulgarly obvious. I wonder what the Spanish security services in the Netherlands thought. I’m sure they were too sophisticated to fall into any simplistic interpretation themselves, but they must have been a little surprised at the coincidence – and a little anxious lest local malcontents and agitators made something of it.

Or go back to the
Calvary
. The crucifixes waiting for Christ and the two thieves aren’t the only engines of execution set up on the muddy hillsides that bright spring morning – the landscape’s studded with gibbets, and with those cartwheels on top of poles on which victims were exposed and left to die. Never mind what Bruegel’s intentions were – what did his Spanish and Netherlandish contemporaries think the scene represented, at a time when five thousand or so people were being executed each year by a variety of means? What did they think when they turned to another landscape of gibbets and wheels in
The Triumph of Death
,
with one victim actually being beheaded in front of them? What came into their minds, in a land where so many towns were to be sacked and subjected to mass reprisals, when they lifted their eyes to the horizon of the
Triumph
and saw it prophetically smudged with the smoke of one burning town after another?

Once you start seeing it, the apparatus of persecution, and the allusions to oppression, leap out at you from almost every picture. Another Flemish village in winter, like the one in the
Massacre
– and how often it’s winter in these pictures painted during the long winter of Spanish rule! – is the setting for
The Census at Bethlehem
, at an earlier stage of the story of the Nativity. Why are Joseph and Mary, together with the rest of the population of Flanders, going to Bethlehem to be counted? Because ‘it came to pass in those days, there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed.’ It also came to pass, from the mid-1550s onwards, there went out successive decrees from Philip II to the same effect; inquisition, occupation and taxation – these were the three heads of oppression that the Netherlanders rebelled against.

Scholars furrow their brows over the mysteries of
Two
Monkeys
. Heaven knows why. There sit the two dejected creatures, in chains, in what looks like part of a dungeon, with Antwerp in the background, and the shells of what scholars identify as hazel nuts scattered around them. To my eyes they’re almonds, but even if they’re not, hazel nuts are Barcelonas, and in either case they come from Spain. They’re the trifling return for which the wretched pair have traded their liberty.

All right – look at the
people
in these pictures.
The Triumph
of Death
, bottom left: a king being shown the fatal hourglass by a skeleton, and gesturing helplessly in his death
throes as another skeleton dressed as a soldier helps himself to a barrel of gold coins. Next to him: a cardinal, dying in the arms of a stick-like figure of death who’s also wearing a cardinal’s hat. All resemblance to any real person, living or dead, as it used to say in the front of novels, is purely coincidental. All the same, there weren’t all that many cardinals around for this one to coincidentally resemble, and only one king. So Granvelle, who’d got
his
round hat only the year before this picture was painted, must have wondered if there wasn’t just a bit of a secret tease in it. How he must have wished Philip could have been there to enjoy the joke with him.

I suspect that Granvelle smiled, too, in spite of himself, at
Dulle Griet
, or Mad Meg, a crazy old biddy staggering out of hell with her pinny full of the swag she’s looted from its unfortunate inhabitants. I’m sure
he
didn’t suppose for an instant that this had any reference to his nominal boss, Margaret, Duchess of Parma, Governor of the Netherlands, and the hell she ruled over, but he must have speculated what others might think – you know how people’s minds work!

The Triumph
and
Dulle Griet
were probably both painted in or around 1562, and their imagery’s a throwback to the grotesque world that Hieronymus Bosch was creating some fifty years earlier, as if this was the only way to come at the unfolding horrors of the times. The same fantastic creatures recur in
The Fall of the Rebel Angels
, also painted in 1562. The title makes it sound as if it predicts the victory of the Counter-Reformation, like Floris’s altarpiece of the same subject. But in the context of the other two pictures, a cautious church official might have wondered if he’d understood it aright. The suspicion might cross his mind that it displayed the horrors not of dissent but of its violent repression, and that what it prophesied was the downfall
not of the Lutherans and Calvinists, but of the Cardinal and his inquisitors.

I put myself into the clogs of an ordinary Netherlander in 1568, gazing at
The Parable of the Blind
that Bruegel painted in that year. I look at the five blind beggars in the picture who follow their visionless leader into the ditch, unable to grasp the realities of the world around them. The Eighty Years’ War, the long struggle for Netherlandish independence, is just beginning. Not being trained as an art historian, what I see in my simplicity is the King of Spain and his successive lieutenants and local collaborators, stumbling uncomprehendingly into disaster.

I look at
The Bad Shepherd
, who runs off and abandons his flock, and what I see is the Church that’s left me to my fate.

I look at
The Death of the Virgin
, the mysterious grisaille that Bruegel probably painted for Ortelius, since Ortelius had an engraving made of it, and I see …

Yes, what do I see here? Nothing obvious, nothing that leaps to the eye. This is an altogether much more difficult picture to read. As I look at it I get more and more caught up in the multiple puzzles that it presents.

We’re in a room in a house at Ephesus belonging to St John the Evangelist, where according to legend he took the aged Mary to end her days. It’s night, and a positively Manichaean darkness surrounds the room. Almost the only sources of light are the radiance emanated by the dying Mother of Christ in the bed, and the glow of the hearth on the very left-hand edge of the picture, beside which sits St John himself. Mary Magdalene’s smoothing the Virgin’s pillow, St Peter’s offering her a candle.