7.
The more Bruegel’s work is studied the stronger grows the feeling that
almost everything may be attributed to him. To go to Vienna and through
that group of fifteen pictures to come into direct contact with his
mind across three hundred and fifty years is to be convinced that his
is one of the inexhaustible minds of the world. The material brilliancy
of the painting is more than matched by the brilliancy of the creative
soul behind them. Whether he himself was conscious of all that can now
be perceived in his work does not much matter; whether it came there
with him aware or unaware, it is enough to make him superbly great. But
this much is true: the more his mind is apprehended, the more vast and
purposeful it appears.
He was fortunate in finding his means of expression in what was then
a popular art; everything about that art was so alive that it drew
to itself some of the greatest minds of the time. There existed a
tremendous amount of give-and-take between the artist and his age, and
this degree of interaction it was which had most to do with endowing
both art and artist with vitality; they were fed from sources outside
of and larger than themselves. Thus it was that Bruegel attained to so
comprehensive an expression of himself and his age together that his
work has become one of the permanent things of art.
Each picture is a completely functioning organism with several
different aspects. There is the aspect of story-telling, that of
technical picture-making and that of philosophic thought. Each aspect
functions harmoniously with the others. Not only can one analyze out
at will the elements proper to each aspect, but one can move from one
to another without any feeling of shifting gear or changing speed.
(The one exception is the group of mourning women in the _Carrying of
the Cross_.) All these aspects function at the same mental rate. They
are all interwoven into powerful wholes. Every picture is a world in
itself, and coming to know them is one of the completest experiences
that can be found anywhere in the art of painting.
[Illustration: THE RETURN OF THE HERDS (DETAIL)]
Yet even with this completeness of expression attained, one has
before Bruegel’s work a feeling of still more behind, an immensity
of mind larger than any art can be. It is the feeling one has before
Michelangelo, but not before Raphael; before Shakespeare, but not
before Marlowe. The greater ones are not only greater in their art, but
they have something left over in themselves which their art suggests
but does not directly express. Of this greater company is Pieter
Bruegel.
There are purer painters, but for the purity of their art they pay
the price of going without something of importance to a complete
life. And even their gain in intensity seems hardly a gain in the
face of Bruegel’s intensity on all the levels of his completeness.
He transposes all life into his pictures in a scale of relative
relationship that preserves the values of human life itself. Every
other painter lacks something or has something in excess. Bruegel is
the most comprehensive and the best balanced, the most energetic and
the mellowest. Of all painters he is the greatest realist, and of them
all the most humane.
[Illustration: THE RETURN OF THE HERDS (DETAIL)]