Welcome to the crazy world of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, where a huge, disembodied head has a right eye like a shattered window, an open mouth full of people, and a screaming man in a boat emerging from a bridge with a hollowed-out ear. . Meanwhile, a monster fish balances on its bandaged forehead, with people doing acrobatic or perhaps sinister things on its dug-out stomach. This is just one of the visions in Bruegel’s drawing The Temptation of Saint Anthony, which is also a homage to his Dutch predecessor Hieronymus Bosch, who transformed Anthony’s plight into a carnivalesque romp of gargoyles and absurd events. The difference is that it takes a sadder and more accepting view of the madness of this world.
Bruegel appears in the title, poster and catalog cover of the Ashmolean’s survey of Renaissance and baroque drawings… from where exactly? Today Flanders is a region of Belgium. In the 16th century it was part of the Dutch territory governed by Spain, with much less clear-cut borders; While what is now the Netherlands successfully rebelled against Spanish rule, the southern Netherlands, including major cities such as Brussels and Antwerp, remained colonized and Catholic. Here is a panoramic rendering of the important North Sea port of Antwerp, where Portuguese merchants lived shoulder to shoulder with artists fascinated by the monkeys and coconuts they traded, as well as the locally caught fish. Perhaps the material abundance of the thriving Atlantic economy is actually what makes the art here so characteristic.
This certainly stimulated the genius of Bruegel, who painted monkeys in Antwerp harbor and was as familiar with ocean-going ships as windmills. But be warned, there are only a few of his works in the exhibition, and at first glance his prescient drawing depicting St. Anthony’s demons may seem incongruous. Other artists seem to be more classically minded. For some people it reads “boring”. This was an era when money and power flowed from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, but Italy displayed immense cultural charisma. The show even includes a cast of the ancient Belvedere Torso in the Vatican to introduce the idea that many artists from Northern Europe trekked to Italy in the 1500s to study antiquities and Renaissance masters. One of them, Jan van der Straet, settled in Florence and decorated his palaces with frescoes under the Italianized name of Giovanni Stradano: his drawing of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a she-wolf adds a nice Flemish realism to the mythological scene.
Bruegel, by contrast, is traditionally seen as an uneducated and crude peasant painter. This is not true. The Landscape with Peasants and Cattle at the beginning of the show is not a peasant’s view of the countryside. This is an idyllic city dweller’s paradise of a peaceful hamlet in the forest. You can daydream about this little drawing for hours.
In fact, Bruegel also traveled to Italy. His son Jan, who added the letter “h” to the beginning of his surname, followed in his footsteps. Jan Brueghel’s drawing of the hulking, overgrown, eerily magnificent ruins of the Baths of Caracalla in Rome is here in Italy’s most fascinating souvenir. Next to it you can see Peter Paul Rubens’s fleshy, undulating portrait of the ancient Roman emperor Galba, which transforms the stern busts and profiles of classical portraiture into a seething, intimidating physicality. Rubens, who lived in Italy for years, brings the same frenetic, manic muscularity to his drawings of male backs and limbs in ancient sculptures.
Here’s the point: you can take an artist out of Flanders, but you can’t take earthly eyes to find the almost edible details in these Flemish drawings. The beer humor that emanates from Bruegel’s art is also present in the efforts of his contemporaries, even if it takes on the guise of a classic Bacchanal. A 1540 drawing by Lambert Lombard shows women enthusiastically worshiping Priapus, the Roman god of fertility. In 1621, Sebastiaen Vrancx depicts a village where, among trees and thatched-roof houses, everything seems normal except for a statue of the god Saturn eating one of his children. The design is illustrated by the painting Vrancx made of it, which is even stranger. Could the violence of the statue be a comment on the share of peasants who produced food for everyone but were always victims of lords and plundered by armies?
Bruegelesque beggars drink outside an inn, in a drawing by David Vinckboons. Jacques (aka Jacob) Jordaens, one of the best and meatiest artists in the exhibition, depicts the topsy-turvy revels of Twelfth Night in his 1640 work The King Drinks, or The Bean King. Nature is full of these little masterpieces, depicted with a mixture of flamboyant sensibility and casual precision. You literally can’t get anything more realistic than a portrait of a worm drawn by an unknown artist on a blank sheet of paper. Rubens’s drawing of a woodland is surprisingly realistic and unhurried for this artist who can look so wildly baroque.
These lovely drawings take you on rich and whimsical journeys where chalk and pencil lines curl like curls of Flemish butter, bringing bodies to life and anchoring faces in memory. But they always come back to what is humble and real. On October 1, 1659 – he noted the date on paper – Jordaens saw five women talking politics on the street and immediately drew a picture of them. Here they are, four centuries later, still engrossed in their conversation.
• From Bruegel to Rubens: The Great Flemish Drawings is at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford from 23 March to 23 June 2024. Jonathan Jones’ talk Earthly Delights: A History of the Renaissance at the Oxford literary festival on 22 March 2024.