T. J. Clark's Ravishing Style #7

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Land of Cockaigne (1567)

This is the seventh post in my monthly series “T. J. Clark’s Ravishing Style,” a consideration of what makes Clark’s writing so distinctive and delectable. Each month I choose a favorite passage from his work and analyze its ingredients. Today’s pick is from his splendid “Bruegel in Paradise,” included in his great 2018 collection Heaven on Earth. It’s a description of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Land of Cockaigne (1567):

At bottom left, especially, grass gives way to earth. But again, whatever upset and instability the tilt of the land may bring on is more than counteracted – this is my answer to the idea of Cockaigne as the world in the negative – by the painting’s relish for things, details, textures, contours. All the contents of the world’s full stomach.

There is no good way of repeating the relish in words. Pointing out and enumerating are what language is designed to do, whereas what is glorious in Cockaigne is just pointless endless proliferation. Look at the airholes in the cheese! Look at the excellent ironwork on the flail. Or the fine silver clamps on the Bible. How exquisite the man of letters’ face – pink cheeks and nose, glinting eyes, delicate nostrils and lips. Look at the flayed-flesh pink of his tunic and leggings, the latter like exposed tissue. Compare the furred lightness of the soldier’s chainmail. How beautiful the drawing of the young man’s shirt, especially its neckline and long liquid folds. Notice the roots of the tree by the mountain of gruel – a typical Bruegel interest here in the character of a particular root system, plus a specific kind of spreading into the surrounding earth, and a set of outrider saplings.

Two of the cactus loaves are half sunk in the grass, like tombstones. The peasant has a thick mane of hair. The soldier’s lance is steel-tipped, glinting even in the shadow. The egg in the foreground has yolk spilling down the right side of its shell!

I find this passage ravishing. Why? What makes it so? There’s poetry in it. Clark takes his cue from the picture: “the painting’s relish for things, details, textures, contours. All the contents of the world’s full stomach.” The key word here is “relish.” Clark, in describing Cockaigne, doubts whether he can convey Bruegel’s “relish for things, details, textures, contours.” He says, “There is no good way of repeating the relish in words.” But he tries anyway, and he magnificently succeeds, noting detail after vivid detail: “the airholes in the cheese”; “the excellent ironwork on the flail”; “the fine silver clamps on the Bible”; “the man of letters’ face – pink cheeks and nose, glinting eyes, delicate nostrils and lips”; “the flayed-flesh pink of his tunic and leggings, the latter like exposed tissue”; “the furred lightness of the soldier’s chainmail”; “the drawing of the young man’s shirt, especially its neckline and long liquid folds”; “the roots of the tree by the mountain of gruel”; “a set of outrider saplings”; “the cactus loaves ... half sunk in the grass, like tombstones”; the peasant’s “thick mane of hair”; the soldier’s steel-tipped lance, “glinting even in the shadow”; the egg in the foreground, “yolk spilling down the right side of its shell.”

Note the exclamation marks (“Look at the airholes in the cheese!” “The egg in the foreground has yolk spilling down the right side of its shell!”). Clark is excited. He relishes Bruegel’s “endless proliferation” of “things, details, textures, contours.” It’s double relish – Bruegel’s and Clark’s. 

Top Ten Exhibition Reviews: #1 John Updike's "The Thing Itself"

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Beekeepers (c. 1567-68)

I begin and end with Updike. He’s the greatest pleasure-giver of them all. It was through his work that I first discovered, many years ago, the joys of reading exhibition reviews. His three collections of art writings – Just Looking (1989), Still Looking (2007), and Always Looking (2012) – are among my favorite books. To conclude this series, I choose his wonderful “The Thing Itself” (The New York Review of Books, November 29, 2001; included in his 2007 essay collection Due Considerations) as my #1. It’s a review of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2001 Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Drawings and Prints. In it, Updike wrote,

What we treasure in Bruegel is his realism – the sense we get that through him we are looking into the sixteenth century more clearly than through any other artist of the time. The taste of actual atmosphere, of a bygone Europe’s climate, in the winter paintings Hunter in the Snow (1565) and Census at Bethlehem (1566) and Adoration of the Magi in the Snow (1567); the heavy, itchy heat of summer captured in the drawing Summer (1568), its two principal figures clothed in such respectful detail that peasant costumes could be reconstructed on their model; the moment of Halloween shock preserved in the one surviving woodcut based on a Bruegel drawing, The Wild Man or The Masquerade of Orson and Valentine (1566), a token of the widespread pagan remainders, the bizarre festivals and costumes which enlivened quotidian existence in Europe much as electrically promulgated entertainment does now; the surreal reality of the basket-headed Beekeepers (c. 1567-68); the imposing, intricately rigged ships, some of them with sails filled to bursting, presented in etchings based on vanished Bruegel drawings: of such is Bruegel’s gift to us, the life of his time seized at a coarser, more mundane level than the myth-minded artists of Italy descended to. His drawings are not the main part of his gift, but they are the basis of it, where his eye and hand began, and where they laid claim, through the medium of his prints peddled to an anonymous public, to a new form of patronage.

How I love that “surreal reality of the basket-headed Beekeepers.” It perfectly captures my own Bruegelian way of seeing.