Hunters in the Snow - Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

I would like to have a room, an empty room.
In winter, on the wall opposite to the window, I would hang a picture: Hunters in the snow, by the Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder.


He was an experienced artist in his forties when, around 1565, he realized the series called “Months”, commissioned by a wealthy merchant of Antwerp. Today, just five of these pictures are left scattered among museums in different countries: “Hunters in the Snow”, “Dark Day” and “Return of the Herd” are in Vienna, “Hay Harvest” in Prague and “Wheat Harvest” in New York.


Every picture shows an ample landscape where peasants attend their work according to the seasons. High mountains close the horizon in the background, valleys, caressed by winding rivers and dotted with tiny villages, stretch in the back of golden fields and meek cattle. Trees are grouped in the foreground. People repeat gestures unchanged from centuries, wearing coarse clothes and caps that hide their faces. Every element, carefully proportioned and positioned, contributes to give movement, depth and height to the picture. A wise use of colours enhances the spirit of the seasons: the warm, dazzling yellow for summer and the vibrant green for spring, lightened with coloured fruits placed in baskets. Winter privileges the grey-green shades of a day with no sun and the black-brown of the trunks. These echo the outlines of three hunters that, followed by a rich pack of hounds, have reached the hedge of a hill. A consistent stratum of snow covers the far mountains, the valley, the rooftops of small houses and the steeples of churches. People are everywhere: some skate on an iced lake, others just look at them while a man drives a carriage nearby; two women walk near a frozen mill and another carries a bundle of sticks on a bridge. A blazing fire, surrounded by a family, explodes on the left of the picture. But, the list of smoking chimneys, of little horses, of people engaged in amusing or working activities in the cold, dim light should be longer than this to include all details chosen with a poetic but firm eye. The truth and harmony of this winter scene reveal, with the beauty of nature, the difficulties and joys of life.

Bruegel was attentive to nature, interested in its unavoidable cycle symbolized, as in medieval tradition, by the peasants’ work “… but (he) modernized the stylistic expression of the conception with consummate artistry” (Charles D. Cuttler, 1968, 480). Just from the XVI century, landscape, portraits of common people as well as objects, flowers and fruits began to be considered as possible subjects of a picture and not as mere backgrounds or accessories. The Netherlands was the country where this process began.

People are strange, the same details that create a true masterpiece to me, as this snow that lowers the sounds and creaks under the feet, for others are just boring.

“But what meaning have all these principles if taste is a caprice and if there is not an eternal and immutable rule of beauty?” (Denis Diderot, 1991, 102; tr. Travelinagarden).

Denis Diderot, the French philosophe, wrote these lines in 1766. In the previous 100 pages he had analyzed colours, perspective, design and composition, stating his idea of painting, ripened during his activity as art critic started in 1759. His answer involved experience, study, sensitiveness and sometimes the intervention of reason to learn to see the true, the good and the beautiful in a picture and enjoy from this delightful emotions.

In the evening I would light up my fireplace. Its waving flames would warm the room and give life to the picture and to the story it tells.


Museum visited:
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria
http://www.khm.at/en/kunsthistorisches-museum

Further reading:
Northen Painting from Pucelle to Bruegel, Charles D. Cuttler Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc. New York 1968

Elogio del quotidiano, Tzvetan Todorov 2000 Apeiron Editori S.n.c. Roma

Saggi sulla Pittura, Denis Diderot, Aesthetica edizioni Palermo, 1991.

Photos:
Travel in a garden, Vienna February 2009.