Art
Bosch and Bruegel
JEROME Bosco, the Encyclopaedia Britannica tells us. " may be called the Breughel of the fifteenth century, for he devoted himself to the invention of bizarre types, diableries, and scenes of the kind generally associated with Breughel." This com- ment sums up concisely the traditional view about Bosch and Bruegel—a view which is now generally abandoned in con- nexion with Bruegel. but which is still at any rate too popular in connexion with Bosch. Nothing could be better designed to dispel this view and to provide a sound basis for the com- parison of the two artists than the juxtaposition in the National Gallery of the recently acquired Crowning with Thorns by Bosch and the Adoration of the Magi by Bruegel.
Both paintings are of religious subjects, and may therefore serve to remind us of the fact that neither the whole nor es:en the most important part of the energies of these two painters was devoted to the painting of merely fantastic diableries. In the case of Bruegel, works in this style were mainly hack drawings done to order for an engraving establishment, and when he became more completely his own master and took to painting he abandoned the theme of diableries almost entirely. Bosch treats it more often, but even in his oeuvre the propor- tion of realistic religious painting is far greater than is usually imagined.
It is, of course, clear that the two painters have much in common. Both stuck to their native Netherlandish tradition at a time when their contemporaries were being.sedueed into a hopeless imitation of the tricks of Italian painting, without any understanding of the method underlying those tricks. Surrounded by artists who were attempting to fit their figures to the Italian canons of proportion, and filling their canvases with undigested imitations of Italian Renaissance architecture, Bosch and Bruegel continued to select the most peculiar and unusual peasant types for their models, and to use for their settings the ramshackle half-timbered houses of Flanders, which they could study with their own eyes, rather than the palaces of Italy, which they could only know from engravings
In their choice of queer types both artists often reach the point of caricature, but with a different purpose. Bosch, one feels, was impelled by a violent hatred of the sordidness and ugliness of the human race, Bruegel by a sympathetic curiosity for the extraordinary people among whom he found himself living. In the Adoration of the Magi many of the faces arc, ordinarily speaking, ugly, but few of them show a really disagreeable character ; in the Crowning with Thorns the actors are not only ugly but also terrifying. As it has been unkindly expressed, Bruegel paints lunatics whereas Bosch paint criminal lunatics. To put it in yet another way, Bruegel is merely commenting on his situations and characters, whereas behind Bosch's painting there lurks an intense ethical feeling. Bosch is not a religious painter in the sense that Giotto is a religious painter. He appears to have no feeling for whatever supernatural elements may occur in his themes, nor does he seem to realize their almost universal significance, but he does convey an intense moral horror about the particular action which he is painting. With this difference between Bosch and Bruegel may be further connected the fact that if we make the grand exception of the Calvary in Vienna, the latter had little feeling for the dramatic situations implicit in the themes, whereas the former uses every possible means to emphasize them.
In technical matters Bruegel was much influenced by Bosch, though the two pictures in the National Gallery display the differences rather than the similarities between
the two artists. At first sight the Bosch makes the Bruegel look curiously coarse, but before condemning Bruegel on this score we must remember two points. First that Bruegel was trained entirely as a draughtsman and only took to paint- ing some eight years before he executed the Adoration, with the result that it took him some time to rid himself of the draughtsman's approach to painting. Secondly, that he was struggling to free himself from the silky handling of his predecessors, so exquisitely displayed in the Bosch panel, and to acquire a freer, more flexible technique—an aim which he only achieved in the last years of his life in a painting such as the Conversion of St. Paul in Vienna.
Avrnoxir BLUNT.
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