In Our Time - Bruegel's The Fight Between Carnival and Lent

Episode Date: January 15, 2015

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Pieter Bruegel the Elder's painting of 1559, 'The Fight Between Carnival And Lent'. Created in Antwerp at a time of religious tension between Catholics and Protestants, the painting is rich in detail and seems ripe for interpretation. But Bruegel is notoriously difficult to interpret. His art seems to reject the preoccupations of the Italian Renaissance, drawing instead on techniques associated with the new technology of the 16th century, print. Was Bruegel using his art to comment on the controversies of his day? If so, what comment was he making? CONTRIBUTORSLouise Milne, Lecturer in Visual Culture in the School of Art at the University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh Napier UniversityJeanne Nuechterlein, Senior Lecturer in the Department of History of Art, University of YorkMiri Rubin, Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History and Head of the School of History at Queen Mary, University of LondonProducer: Luke Mulhall.

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BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. I'm looking at a painting which is looking down on a busy square with crowds of people dressed in a late medieval costume. To the left is a tavern hosting a festive parade. To the right is a church with a line of somber worshippers.

coming and going. Director in Funt is what appears to be a mock battle between a fat man straddling a barrel wearing a large pork pie in his head and he's jouting with a thin, lanky figure sitting on a modest wooden chair. The fat man, wheels a long skewer containing pieces of roasted meat, the thin figure holds a long paddle with two small fish

on the end of it. This is the scene in the painting, the fight between Carnival and Lent by the Flemish artist Peter Broigel, the elder. It was composed in Antwerp in 1559 at the height of the Protestant Reformation, a time and place where questions of religious practice were hotly contested and could be a matter of life and death.

Broigle is a key figure in the development of Northern European painting, but his work is notoriously enigmatic, often raising questions that he seems consistently to refuse to answer. You'll find an image of the fight between Carleman and Lent on our In Our Time website. With me to discuss the painting are Miru Rubin, Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at Quir. Queen Mary, University of London.

Jean Nicoline, senior lecturer in the history of art at the University of York, and Louise Milne, lecturer in visual culture at the University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh Napier University. Mayor Rubin, historians disagree about exactly where Peter Brogel, the elder, was born. Somewhere in the low countries, in around 1525. Can you describe what life was like then? Sure. We can think about this area, which is probably Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg of today.

as the provinces of, in his lifetime, the Spanish Netherlands. The Netherlands were in the 15th century, that is a century before Broygal, probably the most exciting, creative, rich, important, innovative part of Europe, absolutely. And in terms of commerce, in terms of artistic production, leadership in print, and leading technologies, very, very rich. Now, through dynastic marriages, this area, at the death of the Duke of Burgundy in the late 15th century, passed to his daughter,

who married a Habsburg and a Holy Roman Emperor to be. And so this part of Northwest Europe becomes part of the enormous Holy Roman Empire at that moment, late 15th, early 16th, ruled by the Habsburg dynasty. And so it happens that in the lifetime of Broigal, the Netherlands are ruled by Holy Roman Emperor, who happens to be a Spaniard,

Charles V. Charles V in the 1550s decides to hand over, still in his lifetime, to hand over this enormous empire, part to his brother, the Habsborg, part to his son. So when this painting is painted in 1559, the part of the world in which Broigel operates is under the rule of a Spanish ruler, a Spanish king. So this intellectual, sorry about this, hotbed, is governed, which is based on cities, powerful cities, who have made great strides in their liberties as cities, in their strengths cultural and political, if we use the word as strength, governed by Spanish hegemony, which is Catholic and which is rurally based.

And these cities have taken on the Reformation. Luther has been nearby. They've taken on their reformation very strongly, powerfully, intellectual and in terms of their practices. Now, what effect has that had? They've taken on the Reformation in as much as a lot of people, particularly in the north of these provinces, are committed Protestants.

But it is still nominally a Catholic domain of a Catholic emperor. So it is tolerated because, as you say, there are traditions of city life, of civic life, of toleration, and there are liberties that allow cities to rule themselves, and therefore to tolerate Protestants if they wish to. But the period we are talking about, particularly here, the 1550s is a period in which Philip the second now emperor from Madrid is adamant to really push a very, very strong Catholic agenda.

He's afraid that this whole part of his domain will go Protestant. But there's a very powerful Protestant agenda. Martin Luther King has posted those 95 thesis in 15. 1717, quite nearby. Calvin has broken from the Catholic Church in the early 1530s. These two powerful men have powerful followers, and they are around this area more vividly and more intellectually, effectively, than anywhere else in the Habsburg Empire.

So it has to take that on. Jean Noctaline, historians of art talk about the Northern Renaissance at this time. What was it? Well, that's a very difficult and challenging question. The term Renaissance really relates to Italian art, the concept of the rebirth, which is what Renaissance means. And it's a concept that Italian writers and theorists began to put forward actually as early as the 14th century, particularly in the 15th century and onwards, that they were looking back to the great ideas of antiquity and reviving them. And so when you look at Italian art of the 15th and 16th century, you see a great interest in motifs that kind of.

from Roman art, which are being revived, rethought about, so for instance, interest in the nude human body and its musculature. Now, in northern Europe, in the 15th century, certainly, there is absolutely no interest in antiquity whatsoever. And yet the term... No, new bodies, either as much of interest. No, there are some nude bodies, but not of the kind of classical style. No, no, no. Not those sort of new bodies, no. No. But it's interesting that we still use the term Renaissance for the 15th century, because there is a sense of a renaissance. nude interest in a new kind of art, particularly within painting, an interest in exploring the

techniques of painting in order to represent things realistically and naturalistically. And so that's seen as a kind of new step. And so we use the term Renaissance. Yeah, it's a misnomer, really, because they're doing something quite different. Yes. And printmaking comes into it quite strongly in the terms of the democratization of it, one might say, to a slightly misusing way, but spreading of the worth, spinning of the picture. Can you talk about how that played in? Yes, absolutely. So print making really develops most strongly in Northern Europe, in Germany in particular, and in the low countries. And one of the important things about printmaking is that it's relatively cheap. Prints can be circulated quite widely. And so it's a means by which artistic ideas can be

circulated and disseminated much more easily than other kinds of media that are larger and more expensive. Now, one thing, I wanted to come back to this issue about the Renaissance, because things start to change in the 16th century. So in the 15th century, as I said, there was no interest in the classical antiquity. That really started to change around 1,500. And Albert Durer, the great German painter, was the first northern artist, printmaker as well, who went to Italy and perceived Italian artistic culture as something to be emulated and something to be taken on board. And then you start to see Netherlandish artists also

traveling to Italy and taking on the ideas of Italy. Moving to Broigel now, he was apprenticed to a husband and wife and thought of in those days as artisan a worker

and it's interesting that he, most of his painting is about artisans and workers. You've mentioned printing, printing is developing rapidly and artists are being able to make a living from printing they couldn't before. People are starting to buy these sort of paintings. So there's a commercial private market, as distinct from the

popes and princes and that sort of thing. And there's the influence of Bosch, which is a powerful influence in that part of the world. Can you roll those all together, please? And tell us how those affected Broigel. Yes, absolutely. So the striking thing about Broigel is, as I mentioned, in the 16th century, you're starting to see this revival of interest in, or actually a new interest, I should say, in the art of Italy and in the art of the classical world. Broigel seems to deliberately disavow those kinds of interests. We don't actually know for certain that he was trained by Peter Cook van Elstbaum, were told that by a later biographer. And what we see within his art is rather than an interest in Italianate ideas or classical ideas, he's really looking

towards native ideas. He's interested in native subjects, Netherlandsish people and their customs, and he's very interested in the art of Hieronymus Bosch. So Bosch was a very important, very, very idiosyncratic painter, who was working in the late 15th, early 16th century and developed a very distinct style that remained popular for decades after his death. And one of the first things that Boykle does in his work, he begins with landscapes or the very first works that he does. And then he very quickly turns towards a Boschian mode. And it's in prints initially that he's working in these media. And Bosch is a powerful influence among all those painters because it's the striking

originality and the demonisation, the mixture of surrealism and realism and the crowdedness of the canvas and again and again you see things that Broigl and others are picking up. Yes, absolutely. So Bosch, he's really known for his depictions of fantastical scenes, particularly images of last judgment scenes, hell scenes, the temptation of St. Anthony, where you have lots of demons and hybrid creatures and strange things happening. Now, the Romanist

painters in the Netherlands. So these are the artists who are interested in Italianate work. They do not have any appreciation for that type of style. But Brogel, as it well, imitates it does his recommendation with the fish-each fishing. Bruegel absolutely does. Louise Milne, he spent most of his career in Antwerp. Can you give us some idea of the intellectual climate of that city at that time? Yes.

Antwerp, according to a great economic historian, was the greatest treating centre the world has ever seen because never before or since has all of world trade been concentrated in one place to this degree. So it's like 20th century New York and 19th century Paris rolled into one. One key thing we've mentioned printing, that means printing in terms of books and printing in terms of pictures and it really is the European centre for that. Bruegel works for Hieronymus Koch, who's also a member of the Guild of St Luke, the Guild of painters, but it's much, much bigger thing than just painters. The Guild of St. Luke covers a huge range of things, including mapmakers, button painters,

saddle decorators, enormous list of trades. So, Harmonus Koch becomes effectively the biggest, most important printer, publisher of images in Europe. And Brugel is right there at the heart of this thing. So I think that when we're thinking about its intellectual climate, the city is a place where mapmaking is going on. Very soon Brugle's friend, Abraham Autelius, is going to publish the first ever world Atlas, which he worked on obviously for years and published just after Bruegel died. The Atlas comes out in 1570. Hieroners Koch publishes these maps, which actually look a bit like Brugel.

If we look at the picture of Carnival Lent, it has a tilted perspective. And Cock published maps, which are not simply completely flat aerial maps of the kind that we're used to, they have a sort of panoramic tilt, just like this painting. Yeah, but just to stay over the humanism, it's interesting that Tyndall was over there in Antwerp, able to work in the translation of the Bible into English, well of course, Wicley, if I'd authorise one first, but this is the defining one in Antwerp,

hiding in Antwerp, being hidden in Antwerp, and the intellectual activity around him and those like him was again intense. It worked on many, many levels. Often when a city takes over a culture, it takes over everything, doesn't it? Yes, and Planton, Christopher Planton, is working on the polyglot Bible,

which, the party that we would think of really as the moderate in Europe, the Iranis Party, the ones that wanted some kind of rapprochement between the Catholics and Protestants, felt that a huge project like the Polyglot Bible, the Bible in many languages, would heal these breaches. Can you give us some idea how the fizz of ideas in Antwerp at the time is reflected, if it is reflected, in Broigel's work?

Well, Proigo is unique. It's possible to see that he has things in common with other artists working in the Guilds that look. The people who, as Jean said, are now making classicising allegories and Italian-looking things. However, his work really does have a quite different

sort of visual style. But it is full of ideas. His friend Ortelius gives an epitaph about Bargo. The geographer, the man in provost of first. The geographer, yes. And he says that Bargoe painted many things that cannot be painted.

Yes. And what we see on this painting, and in lots of his paintings, is they're encyclopedic. He crams in as many people his gangne as the Netherlandsish proverbs and everybody who is being a proverb. There's a man beating his head against the wall. He does children's games

and every child on this massive painting is playing a different game. And there's the crowding and the massivity here as well, Mary Rubin, in a fight between Carnival and Lent. It brings this... Can you talk about what Carnival and Lent meant to people at that time before we

step into the painting? Absolutely. Well, clearly there were practices that distinguished the period leading up to Easter from we are told very early on from the days of the apostles themselves. They wanted to find a way of sort of marking this remarkable event of the resurrection of Christ. So how do you prepare?

So one way of doing it is by taking 40 days, as it were, of fasting like Christ did, the 40 days that he went into the wilderness. And then there's the question of how you count the 40 days. You're not allowed to fast or give yourself a hard time on Sunday, so it has to be some extra days. There are all sorts of calendrical adjustments that happen over the centuries. But basically the idea is that the weeks that lead up to the miracle of Easter, which is the great news of the Christian story, have to be marked out by appropriate preparation. By medieval times, indefinitely prevailing in the 16th century amongst Catholics,

is that also Easter is the time of annual communion, the annual taking of the Eucharist, which has to be prefaced by proper penance and preparation. So this is a long period of the year in the winter into the spring of fasting, abstinence from sex in certain ways, and generally a different style, a different rhythm of life. Carnival means absence from meat, doesn't it? I read in the notes.

Oh, Carnet, absolutely. Right, but why is it a fight? A fight between Carnival. On Ash Wednesday, all these deprivations begin, okay? and for 40 and some days. What's before, Carnival marks the last day, Marti Gras, right? Fat Tuesday, as it were. The last Tuesday on which you can eat well, eat fat, eat meat,

and it's a way of marking the end of that part of the year. So it is a fight, as it were, between the days of just being human with all your failings in the way that you are, to the 40-some days of being an aware, enhancedly, Christian self-reflecting person that are about to begin. Let's go into the painting, Jean. Could you describe it in more detail?

For those who haven't got the painting on the website, it is extraordinarily crowded. It's in the village. Oh, you described it. What am I doing it for? You did. All right. Well, one thing to say about this is it's a relatively large painting.

So it's about 118, I think, centimetre, tall and 165 wide, something like that. So it's large, and it's got lots and lots of human figures in it. And one of the crucial things to recognize that's significant is that the proportion, the size of the human figure in relation to the overall picture space is very small. So you can crowd in lots and lots of detail. And this is something distinctive, I think, to this group of paintings that Borgle's doing at this time. So as you described at the beginning, we're looking onto what seems to be a kind of town square, maybe a sort of not quite a village, but perhaps a small town of some

kind, a somewhat urban setting. We're looking into the central market and there are lots of groups of figures doing lots of different kinds of things. And at the foreground, kind of at the lower part of the painting, is this battle taking place, this mock tournament as it were, between these figures dressed up to embody Carnival and Lent. And then there are groups of followers behind them. And when you start to look into the details of the paintings, and I would recommend that if people, you know, maybe after the program get a chance to look into, really to kind of look into the details,

you see, for instance, that behind Lent, for instance, there are figures who are carrying pretzels and bread, various motifs that relate to the... What you can eat in Lent. Exactly, what you can eat in Lent. You see lots of fish also on that side. side. On the other side, you see lots of waffles and pancakes.

Sausages. Yes, lots of sausages, lots of meat and so on. What you also see is that the figures behind Carnival are dressed up. So they've got kind of fancy costume on. A lot of them have masks or their faces are covered in veil. So there's a sense in which they're taking on a persona, sort of maybe stepping outside themselves

a little bit, whereas the figures who are behind Lent are dressed more in their ordinary. But there are nearly 200 people. characters in this painting. There's a documentary feeling about it and that people are watching a play what's it called The Dirty Bride. Thank you very much.

The Dirty Bride. Thank you very much. The Dirty Brine. The Dirty Brine and people are coming out of church and on and on it goes. Can you Louise, can you tell us this, if you look at that first time since there's a lot of people in a square isn't it interesting they're doing that at that time? Oh, that's what they were like at that time.

Can you tell us what a viewer then, not many people would see what kind of think about it, anyway, would think was happening in religious terms? Well, I think that it does look like a documentary, an ethnographic sort of study, and Vuel, as we said, is extremely interested in ethnographic matters. But the big clue, I think, comes from the trees at the very top. If you look at the left and at the right, the top strip of the picture,

you'll see that the trees at the left are a bear, and the trees at the right have little buds on them. This tells you that different kinds of time are present in the picture. So in fact, the picture is really like a huge clock of the seasons. It starts at the top with epiphany, it moves down through candle mass. These are carnivalest practices that would conduct it at different times of year, leading into the clash between Carnival and Lent.

Have we completely lost this way, most of us, lost this way of reading, a painting. Would it have been very obvious to you look like that that what you have said is what's going on? I think that one way in which Brugel is like his time is that he has this manuous thing where clues to the wider meaning of the work are so to speak hidden or not completely obvious.

And some major aspects which unlock the picture for you are in the background or hidden in a crowd or something of that kind. So I think that you would look at this. They would see, okay, so this must be a carnival play and there were plays where people dressed up as the personification of winter and the personification of summer

and jouts at each other, a sort of simple kind of carnival play. play. And this one, you see that carnival is on, his barrel is on a sledge. And this is how carnival floats were mounted in the Netherlands, up sledding on slates. And then they were pooled, right? And similarly, the monk and the nun pooling Lady Lent. Lady Lent is on a sort of little cart. So it looks like it takes the form of an actual carnival tournament, a mock fight. But Then you start seeing, wait a minute, what is going on as you follow the streams back, the two arcs leading into Carnival and leading into Lent. You see that different times, different calendar feasts at present. And I certainly think that viewers of the time would have clocked that yet. Can we talk about the Carnival?

Can we talk about the Lenton component, Mary? Absolutely, yes, because there are quite a lot of clues and indeed the documenting of practices. For example, on the right, on the Lent side, as it were, we can just peek into this church, this late medieval church, and see, for example, that the images are shrouded, are covered because decorative elements in the church were indeed covered during the period of Lent. We see this enhanced activity of almsgiving

and beggars being very active because people during Lent are much more attuned to doing good works in order to enact their penance. We even see, in the background, a lady cleaning her windows from the outside, and the Dutch are famous for being very careful about the cleanliness of their houses and so on, as Simon Sharma has so beautifully shown for a later period. But it captures here that sort of spring cleaning, that cleaning both within the person and within the household.

So I think, you know, it's extremely recognisable. And the combination is about, you know, the periods that one single person as well as a community will go through those days when we're negligent and the days when we're careful. Jean, the picture, do you want to say something? Sorry, did I miss that? Yes. I just wanted to add that the other key thing about this is that although it looks documentary, in fact, none of this would have been happening in Antwerp. This is a nostalgic picture about village customs, older customs. Really, it is looking back to a sort of idealised version of the way things were,

maybe in Bruegel's grandparents' time. Jean, can you, the picture looks like a chaotic, not a chaotic, but a crowd seeing people higgledy-piggled in now then. What would you say about the composition of the painting? Should we look, if we look harder, do we see something that's diagrammatic, mathematical in the composition? Well, I think with Broigel, he has this tendency in a lot of his works to depict what looks like just completely chaotic crowds of people.

and I think when you compare his style of painting with the Romanist types of artists, when you look at their works, you can instantly see what the composition is. With his works, I think actually it's very difficult to break it down and to identify how is it that he has done the balances that makes it work effectively as a visual work.

But one thing to point out, for instance, is that although he's got these groups of figures kind of dispersed all over the picture of space, It's not like they're kind of evenly dispersed. You can easily kind of pick out individual groups and kind of see all that. There we see a group of children playing with spinning tops. And there we see a group of figures

kind of spinning in a circle. And there we see a procession. And there we can see these theatrical performances. So you can easily identify the kind of key groupings and kind of pick them out. And he's somehow, I honestly don't actually know how he achieves this. But he manages to make the overall thing an effective, a kind of beautiful, attractive picture.

and yet it doesn't have a very obvious sense of balance. But it has right and left, very clear. It certainly has a right and left. Although even there, there's not a kind of absolute, you know, you can kind of go down the middle, but it's not a kind of absolute sense of, oh, here's just one thing on this side and here's something completely different on the other.

It does kind of blend in. The point of views, I found the point of view quite fascinating. You could imagine, say you're in a high seat in a grandstand at a football match looking down, you're high up, and you're looking from that height down on the pitch like that. That's the point of view. Now, that's interesting. So why did he have that point of view?

Well, he derives it in part from this genre of the world landscape, the Vadlandshaft, which in a way is pioneered. I can't quite follow that. What does that mean? The world landscape means a picture, which is what most people think of when you think of the Northern Renaissance like Patineer, where everything is in hallucinatory detail,

and you seem to have the whole world compressed into a frame. And this is a way, really, of holding the world in your hands. It's about the mercantile attitude about being masters of the planet and having a gods-eye view and being able to take in everything at once. So he would see this as a gods-eye view? I think that it places the spectator in a very privileged position. You developed the idea earlier on, maybe you could take it a little bit further, that this is not a painting of his contemporaries.

This is a painting by Broyal of rather nostalgic, bringing it together from his grandparents' time or whatever. What significance? Why did he do that? I think, as Edward Snow once said, Broigle viewed his art as a place from which to see the contradictions of his own time. So it's not quite a plague on both your houses, but it's a profoundly reconciliatory kind of view that you need to step outside the frame

in order to see that the quarrel, so to speak, between Carnival and Lent is balanced. It's part of a wider picture. I think that by his time, festivals in Antwerp took the form of big, organised, municipal processions. They were not homemade. Here in Carnival's train you see people wearing homemade costumes

There's a guy with a cushion up his front to look fat. There's another woman wearing a necklace of eggs. This is a sort of homemade spontaneous sort of thing that you would make in villages like people dressing up for Halloween. You don't commission

fantastically elaborate costumes. But at this date in Antwerp Carnival processions on gangan were really orchestrated. They were big, they were made by professionals. Jean commented on the difficulty of finding a compositional key to it, except there's the right and the left as Mary pointed out,

there's a big square in the middle, and so on. One aspect of it that strikes me is that, except for the carnival on the beer barrel and lent in their chair being pulled on the trolley, there's a totally egalitarianism about it. Every single person in that painting gets the same attention. and measure. Now, that's an idea, isn't it?

It's not just the way he paints. So what's going on there? Gene, do you want to say something first? Yeah, it's very significant, actually, that you don't see a lot of what we might call elites in this painting. I think we see... Some burgers at the top. Yeah, I was going to say,

and especially there's one, for instance, one man who's wearing a fur-lined coat, and he's giving on... But he doesn't give any more space. And most of the people that we can see, just judging by their dress, they're ordinary people, they're working people. And you get the sense that, Berger was really interested in the full panoply of social life.

Different kinds of people. How do they dress? How do they act? How do they behave? And one of the things that he's so brilliant at is just in the stance of each figure. You can almost just immediately read something off about the way that they are. You don't just do that. Why did he arrive at doing that? That comes out of an idea or ideas. Now what's going on, Mary? Well, I think it's remarkable that this is a painter who, as opposed to say, the great Van Eyck 100 years earlier, has never been in a courtly context,

has never been in a place where he has to do the portraits of great people. Indeed, he never painted a portrait of great people. This is art that it's consumed in cities and perhaps in how great cities see the bumpkins and the simpler folk of smaller towns and villages. That may be the vantage point. It's still an idea, though, isn't it? We told that when he went to Italy,

instead of painting the Coliseum, he put his back to the Coliseum and painting what you saw in there. So he's making a statement. It isn't that he couldn't have been a court painter. It could have been a court. He could have gone to a court. He could have stayed in Italy and found a court. He was a very good painter.

But he chose not to. He chose to do this sort of thing. And I'm intrigued as to... I think it is the civic culture. It is this more egalitarian form of government. It is also commerce and interlocking of interests that mean that people have to be valued for what they bring rather than their...

their birth or necessarily inherited wealth. I think it's crucial that he started as a printmaker. And printmaking is a very democratic sort of thing. It was initially outside the control of the guild. It's the first information age. He really has this fascination with the collection of data, which is to do with a whole stream of activity in his generation. This picture is often thought of as one of

his Teatro Mundi works, the theatre of the world. So all of the world collected in an encyclopedia, a book, a painting. The Prince introduces artists, artisan artists, which he thought of them from class, to the world of bestseller. On the way back from Italy, he painted views of the Alps, and then he made notes of them. He did them as prints when it came,

and these big massive bestsellers. One of the sources of his later wealth, such as it was. Would you agree with what Miris said about the... Yes, absolutely. But I also think a really crucial thing to recognize is that the genre of peasant painting or peasant imagery was very popular at this time. And this particular painting, it's not exactly peasant imagery or not in quite the same genre, but I think it's related to that same sense of an interest very often on the part of town's people in the lives of people in the countryside. And this is something that Borgle depicts very frequently within his works.

And there's been a lot of debate in the past in the literature about what this means. Is this interest in peasant culture about criticizing the lower classes who, yes, who behave in these very vulgar ways and don't have the graces of the upper classes? Or other people actually look at the same works and think, actually, Borgle is really depicting a very positive view of an egalitarian society where people work together and support each other. So it's very intriguing that the exact same paintings can often be interpreted by scholars in pretty much opposite ways. But what's really striking is, although he's so interested in the local and in the Netherlandsish,

the Netherlandsish proverbs that you already mentioned, he is not a provincial artist. He went to Italy. He knows what he's doing. He is so extremely sophisticated. And we see it particularly also in series of prints and so on. But he chooses to do this. This is interesting to him. This is relevant to the world around him and the merchants who like this art.

They like this sort of art which is about their own domain, their own part of the world. Bosch was mentioned at the beginning of this conversation. Is he figuring? Is he figuring in this painting? Is the shadow of Bosch there? I think, yes, Bosch made some design

which is called the Carnival Lent, which sadly we don't have and we've got some bad and cut down copies of it and that is a considerably more fantastical. It contains some of Botte's trademark imagery of the hybrids and the monsters and so on. And the notion would be then that Carnival is a time for the release of normally suppressed desires. It's a time when you can do the reverse of what you would normally do. It's desire in his mass goes through the city streets to support Mantuanas.

What I think is interesting about this is that, If you look at it in the context of the other things that Bruegel is doing at the time, this is not a very fantastical or extreme picture. It's not about the unleashing of desire. Everything is very controlled. It's too controlled. It's as if he is making an argument for the innocence of carnival. Whereas in other works, he uses carnivalesque imagery to depict sin and more monstrous states of mind.

One of the things that strikes you about the painting is that that very striking title, the fight between, but most people aren't interested in it. I mean, in the foreground, you've got the man on the barrel, the woman on the trolley, and with a few follows it. Most people are just getting on with their lives. A lot of people have their backs to it. And so what do you make of that? Well, there's also a lot of, I think, debate about, to what extent are these two sides being seen as oppositional to each other? Or actually, is it just a depiction of the different cycles that people go through? So there are some scholars who look at this work and say, well, actually both sides are being very much satirized.

So we're looking at the indulgence of people in Carnival and the way that they misbehave. So, you know, a man vomiting out the window and so on. But then on the other side, people say, well, then you see the hypocrisy of religion. And yet, when you look at the details, it's not really that clear that there is so that great of a critique going on in this image. And indeed, of course, Luther, although we abolished. many, many practices that were not grounded in scripture, he actually thought Lent was a good thing, although it's not in scripture, the whole Lent cycle,

because he thought it concentrates the mind, it makes people reflect, and it makes them think, of course, of Christ's resurrection. I think that the other thing to remember here is that the Reformation is not just about theological dogma. There is also a cultural reformation which is shared in by both Catholic and Protestants and it's about cleaning up popular culture.

It's about making sure that people don't go vomiting in the streets and dressing up in masks and dancing and so on. So there's this anti-carnavour movement. Carnival is banned continually, obviously, unsuccessfully, or they wouldn't have to keep on banning it. So against it on both sides. And the Calvinists are just as anti-carnavill as anyone else. And this is about the coming in of our sort of civil society,

which is like our own society, where people are supposed to police themselves and internalize proper rules of behavior. It's moving towards the most extreme goal of this, really, is the Puritan culture of the following century, right? But the beginning of Puritanism is at this time in the anti-carnavul movement. So to present an innocent carnival of people,

obviously having harmless family fun, is quite a strong political statement. at this time. How we turn to the legacy with the three, please. Let's start in Mary. Broigel, probably the best possible legacy, two sons who became. Not as good as him.

Still, there we are. What was his legacy? First of all, briefly, how highly was he thought of in his own day? He died when he was 44. He died with the reputation, which was what? It was a good reputation. We know that by the early 17th century

when he is described amongst other netherlandish artists for his accomplishments and so on. So clearly there is a reputation already in his lifetime. He basically defines two genres which come to dominate Western art, landscape and peasant painting or the painting of everyday life.

By the time you hit the 19th century, that is what everyone is painting. And I think during his own lifetime, he was seen very much as the painter of nature because he was seen as very different from the Romanist painters of his time. And that really does. dominated his reputation for a significant amount of time,

and then seen as the peasant painter who came from peasants himself, supposedly. And I think it's more recently that he's been seen as a very sophisticated painter who's actually very in tune with humanist ideas and aiming at a very sophisticated audience. But he disappeared from view sort of thing for quite a few centuries. It's really a massive rediscovery from the late 19th, particularly the 20th century, and some real advocates about his importance, like the whole importance of Netherlands. And in the later 20th century, with all the movements of democratization and the world upside down and definitely the movements of the 1960s, I mean, when I was a student in the 80s, everybody had posters of Broigel on their walls. It was something about a gesture towards people, towards the valorizing of working people and so on. And then, of course, the whole Boschian-Broeglian sort of fantasy side, I mean, you cannot dissociate that, I think, from filmmakers like Bunuel. I mean, thinking of Rydiana.

Filini, yeah, absolutely. Did he have a direct influence on the generations of painters which followed him in the Netherlands and elsewhere, June, just after his death? He dies and then what happens to his influence? Well, it's particularly carried on through his older son, who actually made an entire career out of copying his father's composition. So, in fact, a lot of Borgle's works were known by copies by his son,

which weren't quite as good as the originals, but pretty close to them. In fact, we can sometimes find out things about Borgle. those works by the ways in which they were copied. Yes, I would say that it's particularly the way that he transformed landscape that is copied in the 17th century. People really find that useful artists

build on it. Down that route we have, Claude, Prussin, Toner, Constable, all these kind of guys. We haven't been neglected to say that one of the things is it was landscapes. I mean, this is an encyclopedia painting.

It was the landscape. as it were attached, but it's an encyclopedia painting. The landscapes were one of his strengths as well. That's right. And it's a map of human culture, really. These are very much the Teatro Mundi pictures, like our carnival and lent here, is a theatre of human time spread out in space.

And that's fascinating. What happened to that actual painting, Mary? Gene, do you want to tell us about it? Who owned it and who owns it now? Well, it's now in Vienna, and we know that it came to the collection of Rudolf II, who is one of the later emperors. We don't actually know exactly how it got there.

So a lot of Boygels' paintings were being collected in the years after his death. A lot of them were collected by the younger brother of Rudolf II and they then passed to his brother. We're really not sure exactly about this one, and we don't know who owned it originally. But the Habsburg started collecting. They understood there.

Something really interesting is happening in their netherlandish domain. and they became quite interested in that art, so they're important. But for Brogel, one simply has to go to Vienna. Right, well, that's a... When we just get one of these cheap travel tickets, and off we go, Mary. Okay, well, thank you very much, Mayor Rubin, Jean Nogdeline and Louise Milne.

And next week, we'll be talking about phenomenology, which came in at the beginning of the 20th century and hasn't gone away. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. My lifetime just to see the different attitudes because now he's taken very seriously

and you can see how much he read and how much he knew. It's the surrealist really, 1930s. Oh, yeah. Daly. Breton discovers him. His penny of Londoners is the most bought Christmas card. The best selling Christmas card in the world, yes. Really? There you go.

I think he would love that actually. As a printmaker, he would be very happy with that. I think the printmaking is absolutely crucial, just as you said. It's hard. You know, they're basically making a living from these sort of mass-producing. It's the information age, you know. Due to cock and the shop of the Four Winds, the pictures of Michelangelo of Tishin and so on,

go all over the world. Anyone can buy these prints and look at them and then cocked them. We've been neglected the fact that prints seem. to the printmaking in the Netherlands seems to drive various strands of civilisation because not only our painting is shown everywhere but the ideas of

the Reformation and there are driven through print rather through preachery. The point about Tyndall was very interesting because although it's supposed to be the Catholic Netherlands, it's the place where all the exiles go. I mean the city of Andon. But it's also

that it's an imperial city and city era makes free as a proverb goes. So these three cities were not directly under the control of even of the governor of the Netherlands. They really did have a lot of libertating. Yeah, but Philip the second really came down hard. Philips second then tracks

it down. Just before he dies of course, just before he dies. The year before he dies, we have the revolt of the Netherlands, which is not a joke. The great riots. Seriously. Can I just say something about why I think Broigel is so long-lasting? You know how with political satirists, they take a person, they take a feature, they take a feature,

that's distinctive, so a long nose or a chin, and they really exaggerate it. It seems to me that what Boyle often does is that he does that but to a really small extent. So he kind of captures the essence. And so when people look at his work, they can either see it as really naturalistic or they can see it as slightly exaggerated and caricaturish. And I think that then leads to people being able to read them in so many different ways and respond to them in so many different ways. He's really in command, though, of the virtual space of the Renaissance.

You know, he's like a cinematographer or a director. the cast of thousands. He can take all these technical tools which have been bashed out by the end of the 50th century perspective. He can do anything he wants with perspective. And so he can really just expand the frame of the world

to contain all this stuff. I think though that you really need to look at this along with his other carnivalesque work which are much, much more Boschian and these are the print designs but also the duel griette which is a sort of mad, crazy, hallucinatory picture and then you'll see

how that this is an argument for innocence I think for old-fashioned popular culture if he'd wanted to make kind of a look demonic and hellish then he could have done that there are many more

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