The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Pieter Bruegel the Elder · Die Jäger im Schnee · oil on oak panel, 117 by 162 centimetres · dated 1565 · one of a series of paintings of the seasons made for the Antwerp merchant Niclaes Jongelinck, five of which survive · Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, where three of the five hang together
Mode
Seasonal landscape as genre; the calendar page and the world landscape made one subject under one weather
Mythos
The hunters’ return to the hearth with little; winter as the dead season of the year; the hunter’s saint hung over a tavern door
Phase
One winter day, dated 1565; the hunters on the brow of the hill, between the wild and the village
Presentation
Oil on oak panel, 117 by 162 centimetres, landscape format; one field read down a diagonal from the hunters at the left to the valley and the peaks at the right; one of five surviving panels of a series
Register
One register, cold, quiet and steady, from the hunters’ backs to the far crags; the orange of the inn fire the one warm note
Scale
Three men, one village, one season
Governing Proposition
Three hunters come home over the brow of a hill with one fox between them, past an inn where a pig is being singed, above a valley where the village skates and plays on the ice, under peaks that stand nowhere in Brabant. The wager of the painting is that common life under the season is subject enough: that failure, labour and play can be seen at once, in one air, with no one judged, and that the season itself, not the labour of a month, can fill a panel the size of an altarpiece wing.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The panel is oil on oak, 117 by 162 centimetres, dated 1565, and it hangs in the Bruegel room of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The viewer stands high, on the brow of a hill in the left foreground, just behind three hunters coming home. They are seen from behind and from the side, heads down, spears on their shoulders, walking into the picture and away from the one who looks at it. One of them carries a single fox slung from his spear. That fox is the whole visible catch. Around them a pack of dogs works through the snow, most with their tails down, and the tracks of men and dogs run back behind them over the hill. No face is seen. The first thing the picture gives is a return, seen from where the men who are returning stand.
At the left stands an inn. Its sign hangs from one hinge, swung out of true, and shows a saint kneeling before a stag. Before the door a group tends a fire in the open, singeing a pig, with a table carried out beside them, and the wind drives the flames and the smoke sideways. It is the one warm field of any size in the panel. Down the slope, on the same diagonal as the hunters, a row of bare trees steps toward the valley, the trunks dark against the snow and black birds sitting in the branches. One black bird has left the trees and glides out over the drop, with nothing beneath it but air and, far below, the ice.
Below the hill the ground falls away into a valley. Two frozen ponds lie in it, green under the light, with skaters on them, figures playing a game with sticks and a ball, and a figure fallen. At the right a mill stands with its water wheel iced and still. Houses carry snow on their roofs, and there is a church. Beyond the village the land rises to jagged crags on the far right, under a grey-green sky. The palette is held to white, grey-green, brown and black, with the orange of the fire the only warm note. The eye enters with the hunters at the left, is carried down the diagonal into the valley and out to the mountains, and the whole of it, near and far, is in one weather.
Movement II
The panel was painted for Niclaes Jongelinck, a merchant of Antwerp who already collected Bruegel’s work, as one of a series of pictures of the seasons for his house. Five survive. The Gloomy Day, The Hunters in the Snow and The Return of the Herd are all dated 1565 and all hang in Vienna; The Hay Harvest and The Harvesters, the second now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, are the other two. Whether the series had six panels or twelve is disputed, and which months this one stood for depends on the answer. The series is the panel’s context, not its frame. This picture is complete in itself, and what was lost with a sister panel is not lost from it. Bruegel died in Brussels in 1569, four years after he dated it.
What he inherited was the calendar. In the Books of Hours each month had its page and its labour, and pig-killing was among the labours of winter. The Limbourg brothers had painted a snowy February in the 1410s, about a century and a half before this panel, and the Flemish miniaturists of Bruegel’s own century, Simon Bening above all, were still painting the months at the size of a page. Beside the calendar stood the world landscape of Patinir and his followers: a high view over a composite earth of rivers, rocks and towns, with a small sacred subject lost somewhere in it. Both stood before Bruegel, and both are in the panel.
He turned them. The season itself became the subject, not the labour of a month, and it filled a panel of about 1.2 by 1.6 metres, the size of an altarpiece wing, where the calendar had been a page. The high view of the world landscape was given to ordinary men, who walk into it from behind, so that the viewer surveys the earth from where they stand. The sacred subject shrank to the sign over a tavern door. And the whole surface was put under one weather and one light. No calendar page and no Patinir does this. The stake was smaller than the turn: a commission from a patron who already owned Bruegels, for a private house, in a series, and nothing records that it cost the painter anything.
Movement III
Three men and a pack of dogs have been out in the cold, and they have brought back one fox. The picture does not hide it. The fox hangs at a hunter’s back, where the eye meets it first, and the heads are down. The men walk past the inn, where others are cooking, and above the valley, where others are playing, and no one at the fire or on the ice looks up at them. The painting does not look at them with pity either. It sets their failure beside other people’s work and other people’s pleasure, in one place and at one hour, and passes no judgment on any of them.
Over the door of the inn, where the pig is being singed, hangs the sign with the saint and the stag. The saint is the hunter turned by a vision, though whether he is Hubert or Eustace is disputed, and he hangs from one hinge in the wind over a tavern: the sacred is here, small and askew, as a shop sign. The larger pattern of the picture is older than any saint, men coming back from the wild with little, to a hearth. The composition is that return made into a structure, descending from the brow of the hill toward the village and its fire. Behind it stands another, the year’s turning, winter as the dead season that carries the next. In this panel it is felt everywhere and built nowhere; the series built it, and the panel stands for it.
What the panel brings into the open is a condition, and it can be stated. Human life is one order inside a natural order that does not attend to it. Hardship and pleasure are simultaneous and unremarked in one society: the failed hunt, the cooking, the stopped mill and the play on the ponds are lived in the same weather, and the weather is indifferent to all of them. Warmth exists in this world only as a small fire blown sideways, against the season. Whether that makes the picture cheerful or bleak is a question it leaves open. What it does not leave open is that common life, under the season, is subject enough and meaning enough. A picture of mood alone would not need the fox.
Movement IV
The snow does the drawing. Because the ground is white, everything on it reads as a dark shape: the hunters, the dogs, the trunks, the birds, the skaters far below. Bruegel draws them as contour, with a draughtsman’s economy, exact in weight and gait, so that a hunter’s tired walk and a skater’s fall are legible at any distance and the world reads as pattern from across a room. The silhouettes are not a simplification of the figures; they are the form the white field makes legible. The trees, in the same dark line, step down the hill as a ladder for the eye, and the bird in flight carries the eye across the gap where the ladder ends.
The colour is held in one key. Four or five colours carry the whole panel, and the greens of the ice and the sky are tuned to the whites, so that the cold has a colour of its own. The recession from the trunks in the foreground to the peaks on the horizon is made by a continuous lessening of contrast, with no break between near and far. The paint is laid thin over a pale ground, in the Netherlandish manner, so the light comes up through it. The mastery is complete within that manner. It does not stretch the medium as Van Eyck had stretched it, or invent a new way of painting; it puts everything the manner knew at the service of one air.
The mountains on the right are not of this country. No such peaks stand anywhere in Brabant. Bruegel had crossed the Alps on his journey to Italy, and his alpine drawings and the Large Landscapes, published as prints by Hieronymus Cock, are where the type comes from. Van Mander, writing in 1604, said in effect that on that journey he had swallowed the mountains and given them back on his panels. Here the world landscape is folded into a village winter: the imagined is laid over the observed, and the seam is there for anyone who knows the map. But the panel’s law is the light and the cold, not the map, and the peaks obey it. A viewer without the geography sees no break.
Movement V
From Jongelinck’s house the series passed to the city of Antwerp, which gave it to the Archduke Ernst, governor of the Netherlands, in the 1590s, and it has been in the Habsburg collections ever since. For two centuries its presence was private, then courtly; it is shown publicly now in Vienna, where three of the five surviving panels hang together in one room. The image is wholly legible, and nothing the picture needs is lost. The costumes are of the 1560s, the weather is every winter’s, and a viewer who knows nothing of calendars or of Brabant reads it at once. What has gone is its place as one season of a year. It hangs now as an image in its own right.
Its own century knew the type better than the panel. The Dutch painters of winter in the next generations, Avercamp and van der Neer among them, descend from Bruegel’s winter landscapes, but the line runs mainly through his other winter pictures, the prints after his designs and the copies and variants made in his family’s workshop, because this panel had gone into Habsburg hands. With its sister panels it moved the field by making the secular season, genre and landscape in one, a subject fit for the scale of an altarpiece wing; most of those it moved, it reached at second hand. Van Mander’s account of 1604 fixed the image of its maker as a painter of peasants.
In the twentieth century the panel became the type of the winter picture, and those who came back to it quoted this composition, not winter in general. William Carlos Williams wrote a poem on it in Pictures from Brueghel (1962), and Tarkovsky quoted it in Solaris (1972). The readings divided: the scattered figures as patches of a formal design; the world landscape as Stoic or cosmological; the series reconstructed and its months argued; the panel set against the hard winters of the 1560s; the failed hunt and the singed pig read as economy. Which saint hangs on the sign, and what the hunters’ failure means, are still open. In Vienna the three men are still coming over the brow of the hill with one fox, and the bird is still crossing the drop.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on the composition, since the panel has no words. Take away the hunters and the painting loses its entry, its human measure and its argument, the return with almost nothing. Take away the inn fire and the cold has no counterweight: the one warm field makes the white read as cold. Take away the trees and the eye has no ladder into the valley; take away the bird in flight and the drop is not crossed; take away the mountains and the world closes to a village. What yields is the incident of the far valley, the fallen skater and the small business of the ice and the houses: true to the day, and several pieces could go without loss. That additive habit, inherited from the calendar page, holds the axis below the top.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The danger is that the axis scores a mood, winter rendered so exactly it seems felt on the skin. What the panel states beyond the mood holds. Human life is one order inside a natural order that does not attend to it. Three men and a pack come home with one fox, and below them the valley plays: failure, labour and pleasure are lived at once, in one society and one weather, and no one is judged. Common life under the season is sufficient subject and sufficient meaning, and a painting of mood alone would not need the fox. Held a tenth above the gate because much of the meaning belongs to the year’s whole round, which one panel can only stand for, and because so much of its power is in the air.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The elevation is cold, quiet and sustained rather than struck. It comes from height: the viewer stands on the brow with the hunters, and the ground falls away into the valley and rises again to the peaks. It comes from silence: the scene is crowded and reads as hushed, the snow taking the sound. And it comes from one figure, the black bird gliding out over the drop, which gives the air its scale and its emptiness. For one panel the frequency is high, present wherever the eye rests: the tilt of the trees, the green of the ice, the skaters far below. Held below the summit because it reaches neither terror nor transport: this is the sublime of a world seen whole and steady, not of a revelation.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The return of the hunters is the oldest homecoming: men coming back from the wild with little, to a hearth. That pattern is built, not evoked. The descent of the composition from the hill to the village is the return made into structure, and it holds the axis where it stands. Everything stays particular: these men, this fox, this inn. Over the tavern door, where a pig is being singed, a sign shows a saint kneeling before a stag, the hunter turned by a vision; but the sign is small and which saint it shows is disputed. The year’s turning, winter as the dead season that carries the next, is felt in every passage and built in none: in the single panel the cosmic year is atmosphere.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance is plain. From the calendar pages of the Books of Hours, from the Limbourg brothers’ snowy February of the 1410s to Simon Bening in Bruegel’s own century, came the month with its labour, pig-killing among the winter ones; from Patinir came the world landscape, a high view over a composite earth with a small sacred subject lost in it. The turn: the season itself becomes the subject, at panel scale; the high view is given to ordinary men walking into it from behind; the sacred subject shrinks to an inn sign; one weather and one light govern the whole. The stake keeps the axis a tenth above the gate: a commission from a collector of the painter, for a private house, in a series.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the panel loses what it knows: that the labour, the play and the mountains are seen at once, in one air. The snow makes the ground white, so figures, trees and birds read as dark silhouettes, drawn rather than modelled, legible as pattern from any distance. The diagonal from the hunters through the trees to the valley is the reading order, and the reading order is the return. The high view over the hunters’ shoulders puts the viewer in their place and denies them faces. Put the scene in a calendar strip with its border and the single field is lost; make the view frontal and the descent goes. Held below the top by the composite geography, a convention laid over the observed, and by incident the form permits rather than compels.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Evidence over promise, across 461 years, and the readings divide. Van Mander fixed in 1604 the image of Bruegel as the painter of peasants who had brought the Alps home with him. The last century added readings that cannot all be right and each find support in the panel: the scattered figures as patches of a formal design; the world landscape as Stoic or cosmological; the reconstruction of the series and its months; climate history, set against the hard winters of the 1560s; economic readings of the failed hunt and the singed pig. Which saint hangs on the sign, what the failure means, whether the picture is cheerful or bleak: all stay open. Held below the top because many disputes concern the series and the climate more than the panel’s meaning.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Force and reach are scored together, and the force stands above the reach. The force: with its sister panels the painting reorganised what a landscape could be in Netherlandish painting, a secular season at panel scale, genre and landscape one subject under one atmosphere. The discount: the panel was in Habsburg hands by the end of the century, so the Dutch winter landscape of Avercamp and van der Neer descends mainly through Bruegel’s other winter pictures, the prints after his designs and his family workshop’s copies, not through this one. Delayed influence is credited and discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: late and the panel’s own, the type of the winter picture in the twentieth century, this composition quoted by William Carlos Williams in Pictures from Brueghel (1962) and by Tarkovsky in Solaris (1972).
Score: 8.6 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over 461 years. The form is wholly legible: nothing the panel needs is lost. Its presence has been continuous, from the merchant’s house to the city of Antwerp, which gave the series to the Habsburgs in the 1590s, and in the imperial collection ever since, now shown publicly in Vienna. The surface is fixed to its moment only in its clothes: the costumes are of the 1560s, the weather is every winter’s, and a viewer who knows nothing of calendars or Brabant reads it at once. The charges are small. A panel is a fragile object; the series it was made to stand in is broken, so it hangs as an image rather than a season of a year; and for two centuries its presence was private, then courtly.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Command of oil on oak panel, at a size far larger than the calendar miniatures the subject descends from, and the making is load-bearing everywhere. The silhouette drawing: hunters, dogs and trees realised as contour against white, with an economy that lets a skater far down on the ice read as falling. The tonal command: four or five colours held in one key, the greens of ice and sky tuned to the whites so that the cold has a colour. The recession: from the trunks to the far peaks by a continuous lessening of contrast, with no break between near and far. The paint laid thin over a pale ground, so the light comes through. Held below the highest marks because the mastery is complete within a manner rather than inventing one.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the dark, heavy backs of the hunters in the left foreground and the white crags at the right of the horizon. They obey one law. Everything stands under the same light, the same cold, the same air. Even the strongest contrast, the orange of the inn fire, obeys: warmth in this world is small and wind-driven, against the season. The range runs from the near body to the far mountain, from labour to play, from the animal to the sacred sign, and it holds. The seam is geographical. The peaks are not of this valley’s country but the world landscape’s convention, the imagined laid over the observed. The tonal unity absorbs them, and the axis stops at 9.0 because the seam is there to be seen.
Score: 9.0 / 10
For one panel the orders are many, and one view integrates them rather than listing them. The natural order: the season, the weather, the animals, the mountains. Labour: the hunt, the fire and the pig, the mill stopped by the ice. The social world: the inn, the village, the play on the ponds, a community of every age. The sacred: the church, and the saint on the sign. Economy: one fox for three men and a pack, the provisions of winter. What holds the axis here is what one panel cannot hold. Consciousness is thin, with no face seen and the hunters’ minds given only through posture; the family as such, the state and history are absent; and the year belongs to the series.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.3, The Imperishable at 9.1 and The Inner Law at 9.0. A command of contour, key and recession that puts everything a manner knew into one air; an image wholly legible after 461 years and held in one collection for more than four centuries; and one law of light and cold from the hunters’ backs to the far crags, with a single seam where the mountains come from another country.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.8: nature, labour, the village, the sacred and the economy of winter are held in one view, while consciousness, the family, the state and history are thin or absent. Below the rest, The Archetypal Deep at 8.4: the hunters’ return is built into the descent of the composition, and the turning year is evoked rather than built. The two are one fact: the panel is one part of a series, and the year the series built is only evoked in the part.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.9, The Made at 9.3, The Inner Law at 9.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.1 clears the bar of 8.5, and The Unconcealment, The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clear it by one tenth each, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.4 falls short by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.4, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. The twelve sum to 104.7 and average 8.7, below the 9.0 the summit also requires; the placement in Tier IV is settled on the aggregate and on the gate alike.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the panel as it hangs in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, and of how it was made and what became of it. No image or written source was consulted. The work scored is the single panel, one field with no divisions. Not in the unit, and neither scored nor credited: the series of the seasons painted for Niclaes Jongelinck, of which this is one of five surviving panels, which is context throughout, and whose lost panel or panels are not charged to this one; Bruegel’s other winter pictures, which enter only where the reach of his winter type has to be divided; and the copies and variants by the Brueghel workshop and others, which are evidence of reception. Williams and Tarkovsky are reception, weighed on return and reach, never as the object. No words are quoted: the signature and date on the panel are not transcribed, the lettering of the inn sign is not given, and van Mander, Williams and the modern literature are paraphrased. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the inventory number, the number of dogs, trees and figures, the months the panel stood for, the year of the painter’s birth and of his journey over the Alps, the later history of Jongelinck’s collection before it passed to the city, the findings of technical study of the panel, the date from which it was shown publicly, and the identity of the saint on the sign, which is disputed.