Brueghel changed secular landscapes into historical ones by changing the moment chosen for portrayal from after the event to just the moment before the event portrayed. A further limitation imposed by the artist on himself changes his landscapes into what can be called, with hindsight, novelistic landscapes. The landscape is composed in such a way that any one of the figures in it could be the framing figure. The hunters descending the hill in “Hunters in the Snow” are not yet returned to the village and they are also the focal figures of the picture but the picture can be imagined from the viewpoint of any of those who see him descend, many of the same details caught in the frame, just from a different angle.
It is very difficult to imagine this in earlier Flemish landscapes. The Van Eyck paintings both Biblical and secular are obviously portraits that may point the camera out the window or have it look back through the window so that the primary subject is obscured or seen from the back or at an angle. The most important picture there is that of its subject. That provides the stability that goes along with the sense of the frame of the picture as part of the picture. The composition is given an essential integrity. In Joachim Patiner’s “An Extensive Rocky Landscape with a Camel Train and St. Jerome in Penitence Beyond”, for example, there might be other stories that could be caught by taking another vantage point, but the one the painter wishes to capture is O. Henry like in that you would overlook the point unless it was pointed out to you, which means, in visual terms, that you cannot shift yourself away from what the painter declares to be the subject. In this case, it is St. Jerome, whatever the life and scenery that is going on about him, and even if St. Jerome is made very small. Everything but St. Jerome is an irony.
In Brueghel, however, who is a Lowlands painter some half century after Patiner, the relation between the parts, at least in the early works, are not so carefully composed that only a single relation of the parts can give the picture either its theme or balance. None of the characters are lost if the picture is seen from the perspective of another one of the characters. This fact has significant consequences. First, it means that there is a joint point of view. The perspective chosen is just one of a number that could be chosen and these alternatives occupy the viewer’s mind just as is the case when the user of a digital camera inspects all of the closely related pictures that were taken at a family gathering. The simultaneity of discrete points of view creates a sense of something greater than the individual picture that is generated from the discrete points of view, and so projects a sense of abstract objectivity. That is very different from perceiving all the figures as part of a single painting for that would yield a sense of the interrelatedness of all the people in the pictures into something of a community. Rather, what is accomplished is the multiplicity of stories rather than the singularity of story that a painting might be supposed to present. The artist’s presentation is independent of the subject matter because finding points of interest or emphasis without altering the subject matter means the subject matter has a life of its own which the artist is not free to alter.
“Hunters in the Snow” is therefore historical in that it is related to the past in the same way that the past tense is used in the novel as a metaphor of the historical. Multiple perspectives, multiple visual versions of the same scene, provides a visual reality akin to the novel’s “this is what happened even though I, as the author, am telling you one way in which it happened, or acting as an omniscient observer who does not claim that the single perspective presented is not the only perspective that can be presented, that job done by using the past tense to say it happened”. That an author’s perspective is rumination on the scene does not alter that something like this happened, the reader to figure out how the narrator altered it, the viewer to figure out how the artist altered the scene that was there by adopting one perspective rather than another. What the viewer is left with is the notion that village life in the Lowlands was pretty much like what has been rendered, the artist’s molding of the scene already taken into account by the viewer’s eye.
Artistic composition is a two stage event. There is the creation of an imaginary (or purportedly real) event that is followed by a portrayal of the event that is “accurate” to the first imagining of the event. The artist enters the picture as a new force, not a participant. He is a God-like framer of a history made inevitable because he has committed to one version rather than another of what it is that is portrayed, and the artist draws from his rendition whatever he cares to, which is also what God does when He draws the moral meaning of events as He cares to, until He is caught at that game by Job, and then God just gets angry rather than supply an answer. The artist as creator is an easy metaphor but still is somewhat inaccurate because although it conveys the power of the artist to form his material, it does not convey that this is accomplished by the self denial by the artist of his ability to alter the accuracy of the original image, of what is “historical” just as the novelist becomes a fabulist if he is not accurate to the time and feel of the place in which he sets his characters. The novelist is, in this sense, always historical. A contemporary novel must be true to the immediate past it wishes to work in. Anachronistic feelings or settings are devices used for a purpose and call attention to themselves as such or else they are simply artistic lapses.
Two of Brueghel’s crowd paintings make this point. “The Peasant Wedding” has the structure of a cartoon. That means it doesn’t just have sharply outlined figures; it also means it leads the eye so as to unfold the story told by a single panel. In this case, we are led from the children in the left foreground who are eating their cakes, to the servants or bakers who are carrying cakes on a board in the lower center, around to the table where the cakes will be deposited in front of the bride. This is a story of affluence distributed: it isn’t all that bad to be a peasant. But the eye can be distracted and start the picture elsewhere—with the people looking on the table from slightly left of the center of the picture. Who are they? Relatives? On which side of the marriage? Are they considering whether the affluence shows the couple will do well together or will ruin themselves? Affluence can go either way. The moral message of this cartoon is therefore ambiguous if one is able to look past the cartoon to the separate stories told in different parts of the picture.
The same is true if one considers “The Fight Between Carnival and Lent”, which is usually considered to picture the conflict between Tavern and Church, the secular and the sacred, the tavern on the left of the painting and the Church on the right of the painting. The eye is led to jump to comparisons between a mini-story on the left with a mini-story on the right. And there is the very artful way the crowd leads the eye in a grand circle from the top left down to the lower center where there is a battle between the drunkard and the saint and up again on the right of the painting into the Church. Is that the way things should go?
A more complicated moral can be drawn if one’s eyes dart about from one mini-story to another. Then what becomes striking is that, costumes aside, everyone on both sides of the painting are doing the same thing. A man fancily dressed is escorting a nun—or is he making a pass at her? There is a cripple on the left, and there is a cripple on the right. Both are begging. Is begging different when done before a church? And the joust between the left and right is really just a joust between one dress up costume and another. Is she really a nun and is he really a rascal? Again, what underlies the stories is that there is plenty of affluence so people can beg and be subject to begging. Affluence is not such a bad thing. These Lowlanders are abundant in spirit as well as material things. Don’t knock it.
Again, contrast Brueghel’s novelistic use of place with the a-temporality of the Van Eycks who make the past real by making it all present. They have a different two-stage process. They pick a subject matter and find a contemporary way of rendering it. They are limited by iconography and the extant rules of composition to the eternal verities of the group they portray but they are free to arrange the setting to meet their contemporary interests. So they cannot invent details, but they can invent a story, which is just the same situation that obtains in Hollywood historical “sand and sandal” movies, where the settings are carefully researched however much the feelings of the people in “Quo Vadis” are those that the screenwriters thought the public felt or wanted to feel or ought to feel. Brueghel is under a different constraint. He gets the story right and he gets the relationships right. But he can be cavalier about which particular rendition of the story he is telling because it doesn’t really matter.
To put the point a different way, Pre-Bruegel landscapes are lost without their central focus but can become occasions upon which the rich details that are filled in become the main interest and accomplishment of the painting. Brueghel is not so interested in the details of his scenes. They do not approach his predecessors’ abilities at conveying the texture of garments or wood or other objects. But he is keenly concerned with his point of view and that is what gives a picture its particular focus as one among many choices available to the artist. Composition is not a way of displaying riches. It is a way of allowing a picture to take any direction at all in the eye of the viewer. Unlike cartoons, there is no order in which the panels or the word balloons are to be read.
Brueghel’s basic innovation is the inclusion of the protagonist within the landscape. The significance of this convention is very broad. It accounts for no less than the elements of a secular mentality, the world separated from its supernatural features. The most abstract of these separations is the treatment of distance itself as a disembodied entity with only an arbitrary reference point. This view foreshadows the Cartesian reduction of algebra to geometry, all forces represented and resolved as intersections of arbitrary distances, a point that we have just seen Brueghel work through in what I have called his novelistic paintings.
A reappraisal of the meaning of distance is also present in Brueghel’s representation of technology. He was familiar with technology in his own right as well as a painter in a time where the role of painter had not been separated from that of technologist. Brueghel’s sense of distance is evidence of the profoundly different sense of distance that led to the European conquest of the world and to the magnificent intellectual accomplishments in the Seventeenth Century in the Lowlands and elsewhere in Europe.
Brueghel did not discover or invent this new sense of distance, but he certainly did make use of it as it was unfolding about him. The new sense of society as a place that used rather than just noted distance as a feature of landscape was not so much a revolution as an unfolding of themes as old as Western civilization and so, sooner or later, inevitable. The basic source is Greek mathematics which focuses on the relation of line and circle, noticing the profound tension between infinite extension and the infinitesimal limitation of the curve of the circle. The trigonometric functions are defined on the circle. Arcs and axes supply lengths conversely, the perfect non-linearity of the circle made a mysterious function of length through the irrational constant pi.
The Christian context makes the circle and its relations less important than the line which portends the extension of sequential units or blocks. This sequence is closed in the sense that there is an end to it that occurs when each of the units have a distinct quality as ordinals and so there is an internal order which launches the line till it ends rather than a symmetry which turns everything into a circle, whether that circle is actual or merely the compilation of ironies whereby everything refers to everything else, as is the case with Greek tragedy, all the parts of a play referring back and forward to one another. This centrality of line is Augustine’s view of time: there was a timeless time before time; there is time from Creation forward to Adam and Eve and forward beyond that to the coming of Christ and then forward to the Second Coming and then to the end of time. Irreversible time lines are everywhere in the modern mind, even in high school instruction in history, which requires getting the order of Presidents and Kings correctly rather than seeing them as a jumble of grand figures, a pantheon of Washington and Lincoln and Roosevelt to be chosen from at will for whatever purpose (even if that is just what Presidential candidates do, as when Obama evokes Reagan).
To create a gap between Heaven and Earth entails the creation of a gap between infinite enumeration and the extension of the lines of pictures. To introduce perspective is to insist that lines supersede the imposition of figures next to one another, every one an insert on a background rather than a figure in its background. For the medieval mind, the special dispensation of being inserted in a picture provides a unique quality to each of the heavenly figures who play a role in the Christ Story. Their supernal nature also allows them to be awarded a distinct role and meaning in the heavenly scheme of things as that is carried out in life. Women are Mary or Martha; men are John the Baptist or St. Paul or Judas. There is a single cast of characters for all of history.
Time operates, therefore, on two levels. There is the worldly one, where flesh decays, and so there is change and time for people. And then there is the way that time works beyond what is known as human time. The clock ticks only a few times and God can watch simultaneously all the events within a time that poses as time. Augustine working out of the two senses of time out of his Christianized Aristotelianism remains today the most vivid and basic statement of philosophical dualism.
Aristotle is the philosopher who explains how angels can be singular because they each have a distinct form and therefore essence. The Aristotelian medieval Christian understanding is conveyed through merchants, mourners, soldiers, artisans, painters and those other technologists who make the medieval world safe for philosophy only to take it over themselves when, like Marx’s bourgeois, they move from being a by water of the social system to being its central movers.
Lucretius is a Roman philosopher who takes the other tack. He explains the multiple repetition of humanity, each person different because of some variance in one of the intersecting variables that describe what the person is, rather than because there is a distinct essence or soul for every person. And Archimedes is the Greek philosopher who provides the medieval world and what follows its taste for technology. Archimedean machines break down the transmission of power into the ratios of distance. That is what happens with the lever and the screw, the second of which is nothing but a spiral lever. The particular grandeur of medieval technology is in machinery which translates power over distance by making use of mechanical principles for changing direction and otherwise providing a physical arrangement to cover physical space. This is the common principle behind the windmill, the clock, and the chain transmissions which were the marvel of medieval technology. All depended on gear systems which maximize power and so can utilize relatively weak power sources.
Chinese technology, however ingenious, highlights the particular insight and preoccupation of the west. Eastern culture was, in general, not an elaborate meditation on the line and the circle. There is little formal geometry even in Islam or Hindu culture, however much they make use of geometry for decorative purposes. Moreover, Islamic design is a meditation on squares rather than circles, which means that the idea of a limit, as that is conveyed by similar squares inscribed on one another and so approach an ultimate end as a single square. That idea is not complicated by the idea of infinite extension which alone allows how a limited distance is also infinite. Moreover, chemistry in China far outpaced the mechanical arts, which focus on distance. The Chinese invented gunpowder and the rocket, but the West invented the strategic importance of the application of explosive power as a way of projecting force over a distance. Calculus explains the arcs of an artillery shot. The willingness of the Western military mind to explore this dimension of artillery is all the more significant when we recognize that there is usually a trade-off between distance and what is today called throw weight. A tank projects less far than infantry but with more power. Chinese inventiveness created the compass, which depends on the chemical property of magnetism, but the West elaborated charts which allowed the calculation of distances across the smooth shape of the sea. European explorers need an abstract sense of distance as well as a practical knowledge of mechanical technology.
It may well be that it is difficult to decide the precise degree of technology needed to carry out a task, much less to come to understand that technology itself is the spirit of the modern age. If an engineer needs a specific invention to make a project possible, it can be invented. Edison knew how he wanted a light bulb to work, and then it was a matter of finding what could serve as a filament. And he found one. That is the real way in which necessity is the mother of invention: the project creates the necessity that will have to be filled. Similarly, in social life, what has to be invented is made clear by what one is trying to accomplish. A Supreme Court is invented by Spinoza because there is a need to decide what the limits of legislative bodies are once one has decided to give a legislature a significant role in government. Therefore it is more important to describe the context which allows invention than it is to provide an enumeration of inventions. What the European inventors point to is a preoccupation with open-ended distances, both when contemplating machines and when contemplating the world. The Chinese voyaged to exchange ambassadors. Westerners voyaged to the unknown and to peoples they saw as servile or useful rather than as competitive. Westerners sailed off the end of the world to new worlds while Easterners simply extended into a world already carved up and so perhaps not worth the ordeal.
The Western world was sanctioned by its religions which envision spiritual discovery as an epic voyage of discovery, whatever the religious view in question. The Hebrews adventure to Egypt, and then adventure out of it to conquer their own land (not to take up residence in Canaan as fellow Canaanites) even if some of the freed slaves might have wanted just to keep up their residence in Egypt as a slightly better off ethnic group than had been their condition before the Moses rebellion. Christians have to conquer back Jerusalem and are willing to make the very dangerous voyage to get there. Odysseus traveled to get back to his patrimony and Aeneas carries Troy on his back to deposit it elsewhere.
Brueghel was the laureate of mariners and technologists, of the triumph over distance. As I say, he did not invent the new world of science, mathematics, and technology but was very much in tune with them. His was a preoccupation with a practical life distinct from its spiritual afflatus, however much this preoccupation is engendered by a spiritual tradition. This is very clear in his “The Tower of Babel”, which is a meditation on the relation of distance to technology.
“The Tower of Babel”, the one of the two paintings that Brueghel did on this subject that includes Nimrod as the king in the corner presumably presiding over his handiwork in much the same way that many a king presides over a map or portrait of his conquerors in the New World, shows Babel to be a wonder of architectural construction. It is like a blueprint for a contractor. Far from being a construction that has already begun to disintegrate, it is an edifice which is magnificent and already functioning even though it is only partly done. It is like the orbiting space station in Kubrick’s “2001”. The side that is largely done is on the obscured side of the building, and those parts of the side facing the viewer that are done, a section to the left on the canvas, are filled with porches that contain businesses which seem open for commerce. The rocks at the front that descend to the seashore are the places where material for the work above can be drawn up, just as happens in any construction project, the unfinished space used for this purpose because it is closest to the harbor which is filled with construction boats as well as ships of commerce.
That the building is not a rectangle but something of a cone is, despite what some critics say, a sign of its functionality. It means that the tiers of the building are accomplished not by piling stories on top of one another, which is the contemporary way, but rather by providing a long ramp that spirals up the side and grows narrower as the still incomplete building comes to its top. The ramp serves as a thoroughfare along which heavy loads can be taken both for construction and for commerce after the building is completed. The building has the shape of New York’s Guggenheim, but to a more practical effect. The angle of ascent is gentle and there is sufficient setback so that no person or load is in danger of falling over the side. Both of these facts suggest the solidity of the foundation. The architecture of the building is in the Romanesque rather than the Roman style, as is indicated by the decorations on and the shapes of the windows and entrance ways, which suggest that Brueghel was up to date on architecture.
The building does not lie alone upon a plain, as was the case with Wright’s idea for a mile high building which would have no purpose other than to show it could be done. Rather, there is a thriving city behind and around it. The Tower stands as an entrance way to the city, much in the same position as would a tower built to be a fortress to safeguard a city, but this time with a different purpose. Commerce has replaced military strongpoint as the reason for building a tower. The life of cities is not that they protect people from outsiders but that they welcome them in, as to a convention center or to any entrepot of the sort that had developed by Brueghel’s time all along the Mediterranean and North Sea coasts.
As in any other city that serves that purpose and puts up skyscrapers that don’t actually reach to heaven but only need to seem to, there will be many languages spoken because there will be sailors and merchants that have come to the place from any number of places. Most of the residents and many of the visitors, however, will be able to make themselves out in some language commonly used in commerce, which nowadays means mainly English. So that the claim that all the people of Babel spoke a single tongue is a bit of an urban legend, an exaggeration of the point that there was a single tongue that a great many people spoke as well as the many other tongues that were also spoken there. That would be very remarkable to nomadic peoples who encountered a great many tribes and dialects and languages in their wanderings. One wonders why the authors of the Bible did not take account of translation problems or even use it as a trope for the differences between peoples: Abraham and his sons from the Egyptians, Moses and his successors from the Canaanites. Perhaps it was because in Persia, where the Bible was consolidated, Persian was the lingua franca.
The point of the painting is that technology conquers distance by breaking it down into component parts. You build many stories by finding a way to build an inclined circular ramp that proceeds at a low grade but gets you all the way up because the construction technique can be continued indefinitely until it reaches some peak that can be calculated in advance by knowing how broad is the circle on which the ramp was begun and what is the grade of the ramp. The mathematics of conic sections was well known to the Greek ancient world (though not to the world of the Old Testament) and so there is no reason why big buildings were not built by Rome except that they did not get around to it. It was a matter of being ambitious enough to carry out the project. The imaginary is made practical. The pleasure of the painting is not sighting something never seen, like a unicorn, but something that could be seen if people, collectively, wanted to carry out ideas that only seem impractical but are not.
Genre paintings had used Biblical stories as an excuse for landscapes, and Brueghel turns the screw by making the “Genesis” story of Babel an excuse for a display of technology that is legitimated as an object of attention by its being included in a landscape. The manmade is as majestic as nature and as awesome. The liberation to portray technology is not one that was easily accomplished as that is demonstrated from the change from the first version of Babel that Brueghel painted. The earlier version makes the tower more mountain like even as it also looks like it is about to tumble over, that perhaps a tribute to the overwhelming ambitions of mankind. But the second version of Babel is neither fragile nor quaint. It is a working city in a building. It is the future and is also historical in the sense that it unfolds what is already possible in a richness of detail that would fool one into thinking that a false or future narrative had already happened.