Rendez-vous with Art by Philippe de Montebello & Martin Gayford

Author:Philippe de Montebello & Martin Gayford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thames & Hudson

Albrecht Dürer, Adam and Eve, 1507. Oil on panel, two panels, each 209 × 81 (82 × 32). Museo del Prado, Madrid.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Triumph of Death, c. 1562. Oil on panel, 117 × 162. (46⅛ x 63¾). Museo del Prado, Madrid.

A couple of rooms away, we came face to face with horror. That kind of savouring of visual meaning and the pleasures to be obtained from brushstrokes, from the creamy application of paint and the exact rightness of tone and colour, turns queasy and uncomfortable when we step in front of one of the most chilling pictures in the history of art: The Triumph of Death by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

PdM It’s a picture filled with detail: here is a dog eating a dead baby, there, the figure of death slitting the throat of a man. But it is a painting from which, seductive as the paint layer is, I can’t but recoil.

I actually can’t look too long at this picture. Bruegel has been so successful in rendering the sheer horror, the agony, the tortures – can you imagine being broken on the wheel, as those pathetic tattered corpses in the background have been? First, you were beaten, then laid on these wheels, and it took days to die as the birds picked at your eyes. If you look at the chariots being pulled full of skulls, I cannot avoid thinking of the Nazi concentration camps. There is something about this picture, even about its gruesome, almost clinical, realism – which is part of its greatness – and its universality, that makes it impossible for me not to have this somewhat anachronistic response. But then, we are of our own time and we can never shake off its baggage. There is another picture that has this effect on me, perhaps even more strongly, and that is the Flaying of Sisamnes by Gerard David, in Bruges. The business-like way the executioners inflict unspeakable pain on the corrupt Persian judge is almost too much to bear …

MG I agree. I had exactly the same thought. But this is a perfect illustration of the way our gaze is changed by history. Someone walking round the Prado in 1900 could not have had the same association. On the other hand, a mid-16th-century Flemish viewer would very probably have thought immediately of the death squads sent by Philip II to terrorize and exterminate the Protestants of the Low Countries. At precisely the time that Bruegel was painting, his native land was experiencing massacres, judicial murders, show trials: the horrors we associate with the totalitarian states of the mid-20th century and the brutal regimes that still exist in the world today.

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