Bosch and Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life

"In Bosch and Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life , Koerner uses these two artists to tell us again this simple classic story about the Renaissance, namely the transformation of one world view into another. A medieval world view—xenophobic, superstitious, bound by traditions, fear of God, acutely conscious of the distance between God and man on the one hand—that’s Bosch, and on the other hand Bruegel, who is two generations younger, well into the 16th century, working with a more recognisably modern and humanist worldview—resigned to man’s alienation from God, aware that if man is going to make meaning out of his life it’s going to have to be in harmony with other human beings. We’re going to have to live with one another, Bruegel’s work seems to say, so it replaces a religious worldview or cosmology with an anthropological worldview. Joseph Koerner is one of the great art historians of my generation. He wrote at least two other books—on Dürer and on the Reformation —which could have been on this list. I chose this one because it’s the most recent. Koerner had published some articles and had given lectures which gave a hint of the book’s argument, but the result when it was published was magisterial and stunning. Everybody loves Bosch and Bruegel. Bosch is known for his monsters and demons, his grotesque depictions of this world and others. Bruegel also painted demons and was seen in his time as a kind of new Bosch. But Bruegel is also known and perhaps more famous for his depictions of rural life. His bulbous peasants, comic scenes of peasant life, weddings and dances, are typical. What Koerner brings out in his book is art history as a history of ideas or a history of mentalities. He brings Bruegel close to Shakespeare really, suggesting that Bruegel has a secular but also a tragic sense of man’s destiny. It was completely revolutionary. Bruegel did not paint altarpieces. He was living in an age of scepticism about religious images. Instead, he painted large pictures which in some ways resemble altarpieces but replaced the traditional subject matter with this new body of material. A lot of Bruegel’s subjects were already circulating, as we said earlier, in the form of prints, which were iconographically freer. Bruegel took the simple but radical step of promoting that material onto the larger stage of panel painting. He basically proposed a toleration of difference, an acceptance of a disenchanted world view. As Koerner puts it at one point, it’s the transition from divine certitude to the incertitude of being human. The paintings basically promulgated and proposed a certain acceptance of contingency. The old discourses and traditions of thought, scholastic philosophy and so forth, were no longer going to provide answers to the big questions. So Bruegel basically sets us out wandering on our own in search of answers. “Our grasp or embrace of the world pictorially through perspectival measurement is the symbol of our self-reliance” I see this as classic art history in the way that Baxandall in the long run turned out to be classic art history. How is Koerner’s story different from what Panofsky told us once upon a time about perspective? Perspective was also a way of saying that the world is what we can measure with our own senses, and our grasp or embrace of the world pictorially through perspectival measurement is the symbol of our self-reliance. There is no divine perspective in the arts from this moment on. With this book, as with others in the selection, I see the argument as an updated account of a classic narrative of the Renaissance. That is emphatically not the case for our final book, Into the White ."