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Rural Memory, Pagan Idolatry: Pieter Bruegel's Peasant Shrines

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Rural Memory, Pagan Idolatry: Pieter Bruegel's Peasant Shrines Rural Memory, Pagan Idolatry: Pieter Bruegel’s Peasant Shrines Stephanie Porras Painted in 1563, The Flight into Egypt (plate 1) is a curious picture within Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s oeuvre. The small, jewel-like panel (c. 37 × 56 cm), with a handful of miniscule fi gures, is executed in the banded landscape format more evocative of the previous generation of Netherlandish artists, such as Lucas Gassel and Jan van Amstel. While its size and highly fi nished style connect The Flight into Egypt with Bruegel’s Landscape with Bird Trap of 1565 (Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum), here the artist is engaged in the representation of a biblical scene. Owned at various points in its history by such distinguished collectors as Peter Paul Rubens and Pieter Stevens, The Flight into Egypt is also one of the few paintings by Bruegel for which during the artist’s lifetime an attributable owner is known.1 In the bottom right-hand corner of this diminutive panel, there is a small wooden gabled box attached to a pollarded willow (plate 2). This peculiar structure is a shrine, holding a tiny grey fi gure that appears to fall forward at a jaunty angle. A casual viewer, at fi rst glance, may almost entirely miss this modest construction, a peculiar detail nearly subsumed within a naturalistic landscape. The inclusion of a falling idol within the panel is not in itself unusual – the motif was a well-established part of the iconography of the Flight into Egypt, originating from the apocryphal gospel, the Protoevangelion of James.2 According to the text, when the Holy Family entered a pagan temple upon their arrival in Egypt, all the idols crumbled in the presence of the Christ child. This narrative, with its message of the false crumbling before the true, had already become hugely popular in artistic representations of the Flight into Egypt by 1500. Netherlandish artists typically rendered the idol’s spontaneous destruction either by showing a piece of antique fi gural sculpture toppling from its pedestal or cracking in two, as the Holy Family passed by. In Simon Bening’s illumination of around 1525 (plate 3), for example, the golden idol in the right background is shown broken at the knees; the lower half of the statue remains fi xed to its columnar base, while the upper body is depicted in the process of toppling. Bening’s idol is distinctly classical in appearance, positioned atop a freestanding column, both symbols of pagan antiquity. Detail from Pieter Bruegel, The idol in Bruegel’s panel, seemingly carved from grey stone, similarly evokes Haymaking, 1565 (plate 4). classical statuary in its monochrome fi nish. Although both Bruegel and Bening DOI: depict the falling idol in the form of an antique sculptural fi gure, Bruegel’s idol 10 .1111/j.1467- 8365. 2010 . 0 0799. x differs markedly from that of Bening. The shrine within Bruegel’s The Flight into Egypt Art History | ISSN 0141-6790 34 | 3 | June 2011 | pages 486-509 consists of two distinct components: an idol and its housing. Bruegel’s stone idol © Association of Art Historians 2011 487 Rural Memory, Pagan Idolatry topples not from a column or a pedestal, as in Bening’s illumination, but from a wooden gabled box attached to a tree. The shrine in The Flight into Egypt is thus a strangely hybrid object in both its facture and its origin. The shrine’s inner sculpture appears to be the product of a pagan antiquity; the form of the gabled shrine, however, is remarkably like that of the post shrine at the centre of Bruegel’s monumental panel of peasant labour, Haymaking (plate 4).3 Although the object in the lower right-hand corner of The Flight into Egypt is conceivably a pagan idol, the form of its wooden gabled shrine is also exactly the type of contemporary peasant devotional object depicted by Bruegel in Haymaking. The vernacular form of the shrine in The Flight into Egypt appears at odds with the tiny statue within. The idol of the pagan past is rendered as inhabiting a contemporary and, to its viewers, somewhat familiar shrine. This hybrid shrine in The Flight into Egypt is an amalgamation of materials (wood/stone), infl uences (local/foreign) and temporalities (present/past). By examining the singularity of the broken idol depicted within a peasant shrine, this essay aims to investigate the ways in which Bruegel pictures the temporal implications of the relationship between © Association of Art Historians 2011 488 Stephanie Porras the historic pagan and the contemporary peasant. The connection between rural religiosity and pagan rite was one often cited by religious reformers of the sixteenth century – the painting’s provenance, however, as will be discussed below, seems to preclude a specifi cally doctrinal reading of the panel. Yet the hybrid shrine within The Flight into Egypt is also more than a documentary element, a straightforward refl ection of the religious topography of sixteenth-century Europe. In this essay, I will focus on this apparently odd detail, the idol cum shrine, in a picture rarely discussed in the literature devoted to Bruegel. My intention is to explore the ways in which Bruegel’s strange hybrid shrine operates as a site of cultural 1 Pieter Bruegel, The Flight into Egypt, 1563. Oil on panel, 37.1 × 55.6 cm. London: Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery. Photo: The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London. 2 Detail of Pieter Bruegel, The Flight into Egypt, 1563. 3 Simon Bening, The Flight into Egypt, c. 1525. Tempera colours, gold paint, gold leaf, and ink on parchment, 16.8 cm × 11.4 cm. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum. Photo: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Ms. Ludwig IX 19, fol. 47v. © Association of Art Historians 2011 489 Rural Memory, Pagan Idolatry 4 Pieter Bruegel, Haymaking, memory, signalling the historic character of local rural custom, and indicating the 1565. Oil on panel, 114 × 158 cm. Prague: Lobkowicz perceived continuity of peasant practice in the Low Countries. In depicting the Palace. Photo: Lobkowicz peasant shrine as a place where cultural memory was housed, Bruegel engaged Collections. with the intertwined problems of local history and identity, at a time when many within the Spanish-occupied Low Countries were beginning to craft a distinctly ‘Netherlandish’ identity for themselves. Rural Religiosity, Pagan Idolatry Local religious markers – images hung from trees, post shrines and rural crosses – feature repeatedly in Bruegel’s images.4 Bruegel’s frequent representation of these objects refl ects the prominence of the rural shrine in Netherlandish provincial geography.5 Thousands of obscure religious markers, post shrines and crosses dotted pre- and post-Reformation Europe, and were often associated with particular neighbourhood rituals, such as the blessing of the fi elds, or with traditional accounts of healing and miracle-working.6 Crosses and shrines could also act as sites of remembrance, commemorating not only miraculous occurrences but also tragedies affecting individuals or the community at large. Some of these markers were part of local, regional or even international pilgrimage networks, acting as sign-posts to further pilgrimage destinations. Thus, while often intensely localized in origin and use, rural religious markers could also function as part of the sacred landscape of Christendom. Bruegel was not the fi rst to picture this kind of peasant shrine. Hieronymus Bosch, Albrecht Altdorfer and Hans Holbein all included rural religious markers © Association of Art Historians 2011 490 Stephanie Porras within images which foreground travel, indicating that such rural religious sites were aimed at a peripatetic populace.7 While previous representations of rural shrines accentuated the role these sites played for an itinerant population, Bruegel, in contrast, identifi ed the physical connections between peasant, landscape and rural shrine. These sites were represented as functionally linked to rural communities, used and maintained by local people. The festive fi gures of Bruegel’s Peasant Dance (plate 5), for example, have placed fl owers in the jug hanging below an image of the Virgin (plate 6), as part of their village celebration.8 Throughout his oeuvre, Bruegel presents the rural shrine as a working part of peasant culture. In Haymaking, Bruegel placed a shrine in a prominent position between the fi elds where the peasants work and a road fi lled with their fellow labourers who bear baskets of fruit and vegetables back to the village. Surrounding the shrine with peasants and the fruits of their labour, Bruegel reinforces the link between the fertility of the fi elds, the labour of the local peasantry, and the rural shrine. In Bruegel’s post shrine a tiny barrel is affi xed below the devotional statue, where the community may place gifts in acknowledgement of a successful harvest. An abundant harvest was frequently acknowledged by a symbolic offering of thanks, typically a sheaf of wheat.9 The fertility of the fi eld was thus specifi cally connected to the effi cacy of the local shrine, while the peasant’s labour was fi rmly bound to the local landscape. Bruegel’s post shrines all have roughly the same form: a wooden post with a 5 Pieter Bruegel, Peasant small gabled structure attached to the top in order to house a devotional statue. This Dance, 1568. Oil on panel, 114 × 164 cm. Vienna: is a manifestly different construction from that pictured in Bruegel’s design for the Kunsthistorisches Museum. engraving Hope (plate 7 and plate 8).10 In this work, Bruegel depicts an ornately carved Photo: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. or cast shrine on a city street. Instead of resting on a wooden post, the shrine of Hope © Association of Art Historians 2011 491 Rural Memory, Pagan Idolatry is placed upon a column seemingly made of stone.
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