Bruegel Painting the Cold and the Snow November 13, 2009
Posted by cantueso in art, drawing, history, painting.2 comments
The Three Kings have arrived on a snowy day in old Belgium. No fanfare, no angels, no halos, no star. The Virgin and her child are almost out of the picture, in that little roofless ruin on the left.
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And this is another Bruegel. It is called The Bird Trap, but to find the trap, you must look for a long time and see so many things that you end up forgetting you were looking for a bird trap. — Brueghel likes to do that, but what is it? Does he use the title to hide his real subject ?
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Children playing on the ice, and a little girl on her sledge : they are in a big painting about the beginning of the Bethlehem story, the census.
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Many of the children in Brueghel’s paintings are seen playing with this toy called a top or a spinning top. Google says it is now a desktop toy:
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People coming from all over to be included in the census. Look how big the roofs are, hanging down on some houses almost to the ground ! At the time, a house was first of all a roof (just as an airplane, at least to its designer, is first of all a wing).
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Funny little house ! The scan is no good. Even enlarging the picture I can’t see whether the whole little house is woven, basket-style. The chimney clearly is ! Those were hard times, but at least people did not have to pawn their lives just to get a house…
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Those last three pictures are fragments of the painting called The Census :
where again you see the funny little house to the right of the picture and many more children playing all over. And if you look long enough, somewhere to the front (the bottom) of the picture, there is somebody in a long dark coat riding a donkey : that is certainly the Virgin, the subject or maybe the pretext of the painting. But she is only one more of many people who are going to the left, the offices of the Civil Registrar, to be included in the census.
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The pictures are from Brueghel published by Noguer Rizzoli in 1971 and by now available only second hand, for instance at ABE Books. There are 60 large colour plates and then his complete works as thumbnails. –
And below are two more contemporary views, one from the US.
and one from Switzerland
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