Only a handful of paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the 16th century Renaissance artist who spent much of his life in Antwerp and Brussels, remain in Belgium. One of them though is his Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, a masterpiece that inspired W. H. Auden’s 1938 poem Musée des Beaux Arts. Auden saw the painting hanging alongside other Old Masters in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts while staying in Brussels.
For Auden, the indifference of those who witness but ignore the extraordinary sight of “a boy falling out of the sky”, becomes a piercing critique on the nature of humanity and of suffering. Several decades later it was the first poem in a collection of Auden’s work that I studied at school. It had an effect. I spent the summer after school traveling in Europe. I saw Icarus when in Brussels, and many more Bruegel’s in other cities.
Bruegel painted Landscape with the Fall of Icarus during the years just before his death while living in Brussels, between 1563 and 1569. It was the most creative period of his life. Some of his finest works from this period – The Harvesters, The Peasant Wedding, The Peasant Dance and The Parable of the Blind (to name just a few) – can be found in museums around the world.
It was amongst the countryside and villages of the Pajottenland, just outside of Brussels in Flanders, that Bruegel found the inspiration for his greatest works. Peasants working in the fields, playing games, dancing, drinking and fighting at festivities, became the central characters of his work. Sometimes just as themselves, and at other times doubling up as characters in Biblical scenes.
The landscape has changed in the 500 years since Bruegel painted here. But as I cycled through Pajottenland on a route the Vlaams Brabant tourist authorities promote as the Castle Route, there are vistas and ancient churches familiar to Bruegel and his contemporaries. The Castle Route covers 70km and passes several castles, some of which were there when Bruegel was alive.
It would be hard to call the Pajottenland ‘dramatic’, but it retains a sense of the bucolic that Bruegel captured. The rich, rolling farmland is populated by small villages, church spires poke out above trees, and road-side shires are everywhere … and there are castles. Bruegel would likely have some difficulties using the vending machine selling strawberries. Even I was surprised by that.
This region is also famed for its Lambic beers. Said to be the oldest form of beer making in the world, the sour golden lambic isn’t to everyone’s taste, but Bruegel would have been familiar with it. There are other surprises along the route, one of which is how few castles or gardens are open to the public. The Castle’s of Gaasbeek, Groenenberg, Ter Rijst and Coloma can be explored.
It is also an area that has a lot of hills, at the top of one particularly steep hill in the hamlet of Woestijn a striking white chapel brought me to a halt. The chapel is said to mark the spot where a shepherd’s dog miraculously dug up a crucifix at the end of the 13th century. The current chapel dates from the early 17th century. A little further along is another building with legends attached to it.
The Hertboommolen windmill was the scene of not one but two gruesome murders. In 1745, against a backdrop of poverty and lawlessness during a time of war, the Flemish outlaw and gang leader Jan De Lichte murdered the mill owner during a robbery. In later years, De Lichte was rehabilitated as a Flemish Robin Hood despite a string of murders. In 1917, the miller’s sister and apprentice were murdered during another robbery.
In the 1960s, the mill would become famous again when the Flemish children’s TV series, Kapitein Zeppos, was filmed here. In nearby Lombeek I stopped at the 13th century Onze-Lieve-Vrouw church before heading to the pretty village of Gaasbeek and the castles of Gaasbeek and Groenenberg. Nearby Sint-Pieters-Leeuw is another attractive village, but I waited until Halle to stop for a well deserved glass of lambic.
“Photographs” of how my ancestors lived.
Beer looks good… I always think of the Brueghels’ paintings as “photographs of two my ancestors lived around Kortirjk and Lendelede. Their clothes. Their winters. Their celebrations… I look at one painting and I think, those are my people… 😉
Tot ziens Paul
That’s a very nice way to view his paintings, Brian.
That family painted every day life of peasants, which my ancestors were of course. Not nobility or wealthy patrons. The simple people.
Breughel the Elder did go to Italy through the Alps, though.
These photos are excellent. So glad to see them, they’re what we usually miss as we travel through, they’re the real places.
I think some of the Alps were then grafted onto the Flemish landscape in some of his paintings. It’s a pretty area, the Pajottenland, that’s for sure.