Figure and Background: Bruegel and the Others
Now let’s get to the heart of the matter. On September 20th, 2023, I was at the Kunsthistorisches Museum and spent several hours in the Bruegel Room. While standing before The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, I wondered how the artist conceived the role of chance and fate in human life. As you know, in this great master’s paintings, the human condition appears quite different from how his Italian colleagues depicted it: take a painting by Raphael or Parmigianino.
The Italian Renaissance shows us a free and self-sufficient man who stands out against the landscape, dominates it, forgets it—he can almost omit it, in short. Nature and the world are always in the background, functioning mostly as inert scenery, caption, or decoration. A nature, however (as shown in Leonardo’s paintings for example), is freed from the whims of the divine or the diabolical, of the symbolic and the magical. It is subjected to the tranquility of Euclidean geometry: the same geometry that one day would answer only to the forces christened by Galileo and Newton (not even the appearance of an angel in the foreground could disturb that placid ordo rerum). In that world, between human will and the outcome of the action aimed at fulfilling it, there is almost no intermediary that facilitates or hinders.
With Bruegel, it is different: the world is not an inert backdrop. Man is entangled in the world and subjected to the climate, resources, geography, and his body: he depends on the world. He must chop wood and light fires to stay warm; nothing guarantees the success of his hunt. To move his herds or harvest the grain, he must follow the (not always favorable) seasons. His joy and sorrow are not the center of the scene—they occur among countless other things, as W. H. Auden observed. A very important man drags a cross, lost in the crowd.
What is most significant might be found in a corner. A man urinating against a wall is not free: he depends on his physiology. And Bruegel tells us this, making us smile or recoil in horror, from a corner, while another man repairs the roof of a house. Between human will and its fulfillment or failure lies a merciless world governed by the unpredictable forces of fate. This awareness could even have unexpected therapeutic consequences as likely suggested by Gerolamo Cardano, who “recommended gambling as a remedy for anxiety precisely because the sense of being completely at the mercy of fortune and unable to exercise any form of control over one’s life had, for him, a powerful therapeutic effect.”4
And here we are, in front of our painting, which sees the forces of vice and virtue clashing. The geometric center of the panel is empty. Around it, the clamor of 200 moving figures. But we are interested in two figures in a corner.