The Lowlands, or Lotharingia, as Henri Pirenne insisted on calling it, because it was a distinct cultural place that for a variety of reasons never became a great nation on its own the way France and Germany did, was nevertheless a central place for the creation of European history because it was the meeting place of the Roman and the Germanic cultures, never mind that John Motley, in his Nineteenth Century nationalist way, thought the distinctiveness of the Lowlands could be attributed to a native people living in a swampland that made them both ingenious and cooperative.
The Lowlands was the setting for a world empire that for a while rivaled those of Spain and England. It produced unsurpassed art and some of the most important scientific breakthroughs: the invention of the microscope and the discovery of the cell. Though the Lowlands never created a great vernacular literature, their literary and philosophical accomplishments are marked by Erasmus, Spinoza and Grotius, all of whom wrote in Latin. But most important, the Lowlands is where both political and philosophical liberalism began.
“Liberalism” is a shorthand way of referring to what is at bottom the secular or mundane systems of historical interpretation that were radically different from the Christian perspectives on history that they came to replace. To the secular, liberal mind, society was at least apparently a clash of human forces driven by self-interest as that was settled within a context of natural forces that had no interests at all. Human society followed laws that were as natural and immutable as those of natural science, whether that had to do with the way nations interacted with one another as if they were atoms, which is what Grotius thought, to a sense that God was present in his silences, as Erasmus thought, to a conception of a God without free will and so, like people, subject only to own His essence and His circumstances, which is what Spinoza thought.
The purpose of this secular version of history might be imputed by those who care to make such leaps as arising from or fulfilling some supernaturally ordained trajectory, but that trajectory cannot be inferred from the actual events of mind or society. Governments, in this secular view, rule to provide opportunities to provide benefits that are tangible for both lord and commoner as well as to encapsulate and thereby render ineffective those awe-inspiring moments and movements of religious consciousness which, from the outside, testify only to the conviction of the believer and not to the accuracy of the believer’s knowledge. History is secular in that its causes and purposes are neither self-evident nor inevitable, no part of a prearranged plan, though God knows that there may be a divine plan hidden away in there. The symbolism of historical events or the symmetries that will be said by some to add up to the justice immanent in history is, at best, obscure, while the events themselves are all circumstantial to one another, answering only to the intersection of the needs of spiritually and physically circumscribed individuals who do not see out of the eye of history but only out of their own eyes, however those are informed by their educations and their other circumstances.
Pieter Bruegel is an artist who is in accord with this liberal consciousness in that he does not dwell on the shortcomings of human wisdom so much as on the complexity of everyday life as that is something other than merely illustrative of religious concerns. Not everything is an example of or a repetition of a Gospel story. Rather, Bruegel visualizes the intricacies of a secular, non-paradigmatic life, showing them to flood the boundaries of Christian moral maxims. Cervantes, his near contemporary, is doing similar work when he invents the novel as a secular antidote to the romance. “Don Quixote” overflows with life and incidents so distant from supernatural intervention that from the outside the adventurer in this life seems quite mad.
Both the Northern European and Iberian mind take from the Renaissance ideal something different from what is to be found in Renaissance Platonism, where individuality is always a descent from a perfection of self. Rather, Western and Northern Liberalism conceives of the self as engaged with a self-imposed tormenting vision that divides the individual from his society and which serves, among other things, to obscure the sources of human action. Hamlet is such a figure and so is a joke. His cleverness is self indulgent however much he occasionally rips off a soliloquy which is indeed a tribute to the possibilities of human nature. Rather, what occurs in the Western-most parts of the Renaissance is a clear view that distinct and private visions carry people into the world on a course made petty by the world’s grandeur rather than by the opposition of the supernatural world to their own petty natures. People are bound to the clear here and now even while, occasionally, they raise themselves to the most exalted of spiritual states. Bruegel is, along with Shakespeare and some few others, one of the grandest realizations of this perspective.
Bruegel, of course, is a painter rather than a philosopher or a historian and so is preeminently responsible only for the way he sees things. It is up to the critic to point out how a visual presentation has philosophical and historical presumptions which provide the interstitial connections that allow for comprehending paintings. The artist fashions in his own way and in a way that the culture which he is in finds pleasing the elements that go into any and all paintings: the subjects portrayed; the arrangements of the items in the painting, the conventions of representation that the painter chooses to use, and a fourth consideration which we will get to later on: the philosophical and religious issues that exist outside the frame of the painting that the artist chooses to invoke. Bruegel, in that sense, can be said to imagine a very distinctive and yet profoundly secular vision of life, particularly in that he liberates distance, something to be deployed in any painting, as a way to convey separateness, material causality, and the ingenuity of the human imagination. This is not a matter of symbolism; it is a matter of how paintings and storytelling and life, all three of them, work.
Consider Bruegel’s “Landscape With The Fall of Icarus”. It is a representation of the moment when Icarus falls into the sea after having risen too close to the sun. The perspective of the painting is the part of the sea where Icarus falls and the shoreline that is near it, the sea having a ship, naturally enough, and there is a plow, naturally enough, cultivating the meadow above the cliff that drops down to the sea. There is clearly an allegory at work here. Icarus falls in some moment of real time: the work of the world goes on. His personal tragedy is emphasized by it being placed in the context of the quotidian.
The allegory is much more complex than that if aspects of the painting beyond its description of ship and meadow and sea and shoreline are consulted. First off, consider an aspect of the structure of the painting. Scale is used to imply distance. The principle of perspective (which is a convention) is adapted or superseded or else, possibly, the picture is deliberately anachronistic in its rendering of distance so as to allow the picture to make a point of its own rather than make use of a presumption of how pictures, from now on, will be made. The descent of Icarus is very small and it is very far away, as can be seen from the large size of the ship in that part of the painting. Is this a big ship or a small ship too close to shore? Either way, Icarus is much, much further away than that. Here is an intimation that the spheres of the gods are an indeterminate distance away rather than at neatly ordered distances, as is the case in Dante, that prime medievalist, and that the descent of one of these into the world is not the case of a fall either long or short but just definitive. Icarus breaks through the celestial sphere and dies.
For their part, the figures on land are large as well as close and so can ignore what is happening far away, as if to suggest that such a great adventure might seem significant to the one engaged in it but not of much moment in the lives of real people. Important things happen when no one notices—or aren’t really happening at all except to the mind’s eye, which a peasant plowman is not going to turn to the heavens far above but only so far as he needs so he can tell the weather.
Both of these messages fit in well with the secular historical perspective, which is that history is happening while we remain unaware of it. In the Christian imagination, on the other hand, the quiet and small scale events of a birth in a manger and one crucifixion among the many that took place are magnified with attending angels and bugles, solemn moments turned into triumphs. These events turned history and so their renditions make them momentous rather than passing. That those religious events—a birth, a crucifixion-- were small events in the sense of ordinary events at the time is left only as an irony.
Bruegel’s pictures also move toward the secular because of their “sound effects” as that is created by a convention of painting rather than by the structure of or the content of the painting. “The Fall of Icarus” invokes a single distinctive sound. There is the splash of Icarus onto a largely silent seascape. Only with difficulty can we impute the noise of wind in the sails or the slap of the plow through the soil. Indeed, the primacy of visual association is why the plowman did not raise his eyes to the sound of Icarus falling. The sound of the splash is signaled by the stylized movement of the water which shows something else than just a splash is going on. Everything in the picture except that splash is not a signal but a realistic evocation of what is being presented. The “sound” of the painting is therefore conventional and, indeed, self consciously so because it is the only sound the picture makes.
Bruegel is in general a noisy painter, as “The Suicide of Saul” shows, while Bosch, for example, is a silent painter, all those attenuated souls suffering in silence on their barren dream like rolling plain, but here there is only one loud noise, the splash, and that reverberates. Why do we hear it at all if we are indifferent to it? Why is it important to mankind rather than just a failure of a young god? Well, people are young gods, like Prometheus, or people who would be like God, which is Adam and Eve—and not just Adam, Eve left out of the picture; she counted as part of the most important story until the coming of Christ, even if in some later stories, though not in most, the woman gets left out. Sarah is not asked about the sacrifice of her son, but Esau’s mother changes the fate of Israel. For some reason, Icarus is important, maybe because technology is important, even if Icarus only imperfectly realized his own ambition. Ben Franklin, an actual human technologist and a triumph for all the themes of secularism, might have been electrocuted when he sent his kite skywards. The gods of technology (and of knowledge, like Odin, and Athena, and the aforesaid Adam and Eve) must be paid their due because, especially to a secular mind, they are the ones who make history change and make mankind ever more important.
The single sound intruding on the landscape must have been a dissonant note for early viewers of the painting, even if they noticed it, given the silence of previous landscapes. Even if we concede a crunch or two when Alpine travelers cross into Italy, the vistas were purely visual. They are to be appreciated for what the eye sees so distantly. Certainly the vistas in Van Ecks are out of earshot range and, more importantly, the figures in the foreground of those paintings are sitting for portraits and are therefore, according to convention, silent. Raphael’s assemblages are frozen in a moment of their social intercourse and so are also silent. The subjects of those portraits and assemblages look at the “camera”—the artist’s space—and do not smile.
Bruegel’s use of noise may have been picked up from contemporary popular cartoons that were drawn and published as part of the Reformation debate. Figures speak and shout in balloons and labels. Bruegel’s illustrations of vices and virtues parrot the noise of those cartoons and share some of their weaknesses. Those cartoons and Bruegel’s illustrations of village life and of forthcoming important historical events, such as the end of days, attempt to get in as much information as possible and so every available bit of space is filled with another story or allegory or some play on the main theme. The parts of the illustrations cannot stand as separate compositions, a portion balanced within its own space within the painting and also balanced within the picture as a whole. Such a balance was achieved in the Italian and Flemish tradition, and would be again by Bruegel in his later paintings.
The problem is the same as in the cartography of Ortellius, who was a friend of Bruegel’s. It is necessary to carefully limit the number of names that have to be provided in a map and to scale them so as to render a map legible. There is a limited space available and if the task is not done carefully the map will look like a list with no space between the labeled items. Each one of the labeled items on a map has to have empty space between itself and another labeled item so as to represent the distances between places that are roughly proportionate to what they really are. No wonder present day map makers provide insert maps to spell out the downtowns of cities in a map of a state. You need space to make places distinct.
It is similar to the moral landscape. Bruegel’s new type of cartoon has to keep stories from overlapping on one another one another. Bruegel accomplishes his own task of arrangement so that in the resulting painting the moral lessons are all there. They are, however, not spatially related to one another and are applicable as one comes across them rather than is some visually cued sequence, as would be the case in various medieval paintings of the stages of the cross or of the life of Christ.
Go back to a consideration of the structure of “The Fall of Icarus”. There is another way in which Bruegel accomplishes the task of using space in a way that allows his story to unfold. He sets up the viewer’s eye at a point close enough to a larger subject matter so that the stories take place in different parts of the canvas. The eye of the viewer of “Icarus” is from behind but above the plowman and so the simultaneous stories of the fall of Icarus and the plowing of the field are part of a picture that is divided between being a portrait of the sea and a portrait of the land above it, itself a noteworthy accomplishment, never mind the story lines, because paintings are usually of either seas seen from shore or fields seen from the water and not so often of seas seen from far enough ashore that fruit bearing trees can play a part in the picture.
The most famous example of Bruegel’s use of space to separate stories while also the setting for a larger story is “The Harvesters”. That structural feature of the painting illuminates the social structure of the life it represents. There is the story of the workers reclining during their lunch hour within the wheat field; there is the story of the women making their way from their village through the wheat field; and there is the presumed story of the town that exists in the background, including its church, which does not rise up very far into the view of those in the wheat field, and so may be a clue to its less than grand significance. Brueghel has therefore accomplished the telling of a number of stories simultaneously but he has done so by reversing the strategy of the Italian Renaissance, which had shown out a window the receding countryside off into the mountains, and so contrasted the human and the sublime, the personal and the communal, the spiritually significant inside with the everyday grandness of what is outside.
Bruegel’s ”The Harvesters” presents the town as a confined space while the wheat field is an unconfined space. The town looks up a hill to the wheat field while the Italians had looked as the town as the expanse that is looked down on because that is the only way it could be seen out of a window. Moreover, the central event, which is the consumption of the lunch, is not visible from the town. The workers are surrounded by the wheat field which is to suggest that at least for the day that is their universe. They smell it; they see it; they are brushed by the stalks. It is a very true to life picture of what it is like to be in a field of any sort, enclosed in it as an environment. This sensation also suggests a moral: that life is lived within situations, the town hours away from the field not in travel time but because of the time still to be spent at work in the field, and so human lives are lived out in their immediate circumstances more than in the light of eternity. Even a wheat field close to home seems to go on forever. And that is as much of the sublime as most people can take; so much for churches.
Bruegel does not set out to give the moral paintings the compositional force that Bosch manages for his own distinctive sets of moral illustrations. In Bosch, individual instances of emblematic moral instruction are subordinated to some major feature of the architectural landscape, and there is sufficient flora surrounding the instances so as to make the landscapes into a garden, each moral and natural feature planted for a purpose according to the divine gardener’s layout and allegorical intent. Bosch’s pictures are religious because they refer to an emotional and moral orderliness that emanates from God, and whose instances have a pneumatic mythical character, breaking through from their emotionally supercharged essence into some particular incarnation and then back again to being the recognition of the supernatural landscape everywhere present in this world.
In Bruegel, however, a distinction has to be drawn between primary and secondary moral meanings. Primary moral means are those directly accessible as allegories, which means as illustrations of abstract moral truths. In the case of “The Fall of Icarus”, that is the fact that foolhardy schemes end in bad ways, or even that there are many events that are significant to those engaged in them that are not significant to others except as they are recalled in history. The idea is applied to the painting; this is what the painter is “getting at”, just as one says that what Kafka is “getting at” in “Metamorphosis” is that we are all cockroaches, the story an exemplification of that. Secondary moral meanings are those that arise as inferences from the formal characteristics of a painting. They are more difficult to raise to consciousness but they are there as the viewer’s take of the painting, what is visually appreciated and so gives a new look to a moral landscape if one cares to abstract out what has been sensed. In “The Fall of Icarus”, that has to do, as has already been discussed, with the issues raised by sound and distance and by the very angle of the painting. In the case of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”, it is a sense of what it feels like to be a cockroach, how its circumstances impinge upon us, and how that creates a consciousness that is also available to a human who feels pinned down by circumstances. This can be appreciated even if not articulated. That is why you read a story rather than a sermon.
The same distinction between primary and secondary moral meanings applies to “The Harvesters”. The primary meaning is the same that can be found in any number of Brueghel’s paintings of village life. The various parts of village life work well together. Each type of person plays their role: there are workers and wives and, one presumes, religious functionaries. In “The Hunters Return”, for example, there is the welcome about to be extended by a village teeming with life and warmth to which the hunters will make their contribution. The hunters have made it back; they had been very isolated and so what they had been doing might have been dangerous though now they are not worried. The village lives in the midst of a nature that is forceful in itself. That view of the painting and the village is somewhat self-congratulatory and is certainly why the paintings are so pleasing and yet so very different from Bruegel’s other paintings.
But the secondary moral meaning can contradict the primary moral meaning even if that is not required. In “The Harvesters”, the message is that life is not so bad; people can be prosperous and satisfied; that it is good to doze off one’s lunch before returning to an afternoon of harvesting. Being surrounded by wheat is more important that the church whose steeple just barely rises above the hill that holds the harvesters. All this is imparted as a sense of the place provided by the painting rather than the painting making a reference to what is already known. The returning hunters, for their part, are on a scale that suggests that they are already part of the village, and the landscape has been laid out in a way to suggest that the place where the village is does not differ very much from where the hunters had journeyed for perhaps but half a day. The hunters look safe and warm and the cold in the village is no different from what would have been the case not so far away. So there is a sense that there is no opposition between nature and the town; rather, the village lives off the bounty of the land in winter as it does in summer. This has not been a dangerous venture but a pleasurable one. That is very much in keeping with Bruegel’s usual sense of the relation of town and country: both do well in a bourgeois society. The towns supply and are supplied by the cities in their prosperous co-existence.
The important point is that both primary and secondary moral meanings are allegories only in a literary sense. They are applied to or generated by the pictures. They are without reference to the eschatological and anagogic meanings that tie down religious moral allegory to actuality. This simplification of the palette of meanings brings some gains and some losses. What is gained is greater sensitivity to the experience of the collective moment, all of which is aside from the psychological feelings so strongly presented in Italian portraiture. What is lost is levels of symbolic allusion, though that can be thought to be a gain in that the new landscape is steeped in what it is rather than in what it means and so is an opening to empiricism in all the many forms that will take once it gets rolling.
The resonances of Bruegel’s moral illustrations are there even in his directly Biblical paintings. “The Suicide of Saul” presents the sound of battle as its associated soundtrack and this helps to engage the viewer within its frame. There is a single aesthetic motif that ties together the elements of the picture: there are the folds of a soldier’s tunic and the draperies which fall to the side of the figure of Saul and his entourage who are in the corner of the picture. Saul is the central figure, however much he is reduced in scale and in prominence, because armies are his decoration, the emblem on his clothing.
That extension of portraiture into the realm of the landscape, however striking it is, is only one element of the design of the painting. That element alone yields a religious sentiment in that Saul’s significant role in religious history is unfolded in this painting like a garment always present, however much to the human understanding what is unfolded is merely the sequence of events that constitute his life. The major way by which Brueghel shields the painting from that religious interpretation is by putting the Saul figure on the interior landscape. Saul is small in scale and can view the whole of the landscape if he cares to. The picture also catches the moment just after the suicide but before the two armies are aware of it and so the viewer goes back and forth to catch whether the suicide has yet become known, to see if there are any reverberations among the troops, or if the battle would go on whether Saul is dead or not, history subject to bigger forces than whether the loss of Saul’s inspiration or the loss of whatever inspired Saul would make any difference. On the other hand, the suicide is private because it is physically separated from the battle but is an act with public consequences, the nearly arranged present bound to be swayed by the event, the tension of opposing forces resolved by the addition of the act of suicide. The massed forces are portrayed as powerful in relation to their space, the pressure of more soldiers breaking through a massed enemy. Leadership, however, might be capable of swaying the resolve of soldiers arranged like a deck of cards, easily trampled, with no independent balance, if the arrangement of dynamic tensions is pressed too hard.
These are structural matters and so point to the relation between a leader and his army. There is also a convention at work: how to depict the death of great men. Caesar is caught by his assassins unaware; Wolfe is carefully posed dying on the Fields of Abraham, surrounded by his officers. Gerome’s “The Death of Caesar” shows the corpse left behind by a mob, and so the act of no credit to themselves, which is rather different than Shakespeare’s view, summed up so famously in “Et tu, Brute?” which evokes the sense of fate catching people unaware, while “The Death of General Wolfe” conveys Benjamin West’s sense of a military death as noble. In the case at hand, Saul’s death is due to the pressure of battle, even far distant soldiers leaning toward the place where Saul is taking his life, as if this act were not in his control, he no longer the rather narcissistic person portrayed in the Bible but, rather, playing out his role in the drama.
The focus on the moment before an event is, as Lessing explained about the Laocoon, the cardinal characteristic of sculpture; that is not the case with painting, and so we can speculate on its significance for this particular painting. Consequences in paintings are problematic; what will come is not certain. The picture visualizes a point of cause and effect in the past which is distinct from and gives no evidence of any super-historical plan of which it is a part, and so cannot serve as an example of an eternal recapitulation of archetypal stories or of a single timeless story, which is what a painting is supposed to reveal about Christian history, as that is extended back to God’s plan for the times before Jesus. Rather, the picture captures what might not be, and the viewer is caught in regret, mentally capable of turning back the clock, and so to wonder at the repercussions that might have been prevented even though what they are is not yet known. What is past has been caused; what is future has not yet been caused. That is the Humean and very secular doctrine that is to be opposed to the Christian doctrine, which is to read history backwards, from the way it will end, to all the events that preceded the end and either foretold it, reflected what would be, or were somehow directed what would be.
That is also different from seeing the suicide of Saul as the warrior who stoically exits before he is captured, which would be the Roman way of seeing this scene. Saul’s suicide is another way of saying what is clear from “Samuel 1”, which is that Saul is a very troubled person, bound to be overthrown, even if he does manage to hold onto his throne for decades. The selection of just that moment as the one to be portrayed therefore balances regrets and expectations so as to heighten the transience and immutability of the moment rather than the transcendental nature of a moment. The knife edge of time is the drama of the picture, the viewer dissuaded from seeing time as an illusion rather than the crux of events.
The picture is therefore historical in a number of interlocking senses. Most superficially, it portrays an event that has no suggested supernatural oversight. The picture subordinates the purported subject to the general flow of events of which the suicide is a critical but private part, important to and motivated by personal sorrow and concerns, but nevertheless having broader consequences, which are the ones that take up most of the picture, ones which make more noise, that dominate the composition. As in “Icarus”, the main focus is small, but unlike what is portrayed in “Icarus”, where the largest event is the plowing, the large event here is a battle to take over a kingdom. Moreover, the battle going on around him is not an emblem of his soul; rather, his drapery overwhelms him, his drama made secret by its insignificance but for the fact of his role, which is the extension by direct lines of force into the political, historical battle. Saul is an historical figure whose own life, however familiar its personal themes, is caught up in the activities of his times and, even in his own mind’s eye, subordinated to the historical moment. While morality is universal, collective history is neither moral nor simply personal life writ large. The drama of individual life, whether pathetic, tragic, noble or evil, is seen by history at a distance and so its personal grandeur gets lost.
This shift of focus is unknown to the previous Christian mentality. There, universal history is fought out in each man’s soul and events bear witness to the internal battles. Erasmus had come to appreciate that individual virtues are justified for their own sake and that allegiance to a universal historical mission is a fool’s errand. That would have seemed a strange insight for a philosophical mentality such as his that was so steeped in the classics and is therefore resigned to have individual lives, except for a few, lost within the grandeur of history, individuals finding their consolation in the peace of individual morality. But Erasmus was a fresh mind. The new disjunction of individual from collective morality creates a sense of privacy, each man going his own way, finding his own path, philosophy the only passable and possibly mistaken guide. That is very different from the Old Testament idea of an aura of necessity clear and simple guiding Abraham toward his sacrifice of Isaac, Moses destined for his mission, and Noah also told what to do. It is also very different from the rule bound behavior counseled by Jesus who only wants you to take the rules into your heart and not obey them simply because they are the law.
The alteration of perspective that is offered by historical landscapes can be seen in “The Temptation of Death”. It treats the religious theme of the end of days as an historical catastrophe much like an earthquake. The figures around the table are taken by surprise. That is actual surprise rather than surprise that is moral because they have been so focused on this world that they could not recognize the next one coming, or by symbolic surprise, which would happen because everyone would be taken by surprise when the event actually took place, however much it had been anticipated. The movement of the army of the dead is not yet seen by the preoccupied card players even though the army is already in their view.
The moment Brueghel chooses to portray is akin to the moment that is portrayed in “Saul”. The repercussions of seeing the advancing army have not yet occurred. The scene is caught in the moment between the recognition and the consequences of the catastrophe that is inexorable. This suspension of time creates a good deal of poignancy. There is no way to avoid being overwhelmed when enough time has passed for the army to cross the distance from where it is to where the now aroused figure sits. The only thing between them is time, a quality that is visually dramatized as having the grandeur of a natural catastrophe whether that is the lava approaching Pompeii or the radioactive atmosphere approaching Australia in “On the Beach”. Under such conditions, we look for some distance as the temporarily saved remnant is our eyes to the enormity of the finality of the catastrophe. The irony is that our eyes as well will also be overwhelmed, and everything will be in the dark, totally other. The ultimate is appreciated from the vantage point of the penultimate and so the skeletons are an army vanquishing the living rather than from a moment after the time when they have finished their conquests, all the dead now dead, what they will be for all eternity. Looking at it from that later time, as if survivors were walking a battlefield filled with the dead, is impossible because there will be no survivors. Again, the future does not predict the past. You cannot see past present day causes.
Picturing the impending escalation as the coming of literal death is vivid but clearly a limited vision. Other artists might train their imaginations to envision the ultimate: Heaven or even the assignment of the evil to the flames of Hell. Bruegel picks a moment before that consignment. It is closer to the living world in that the dead are only that and the fate of the man in the picture is unclear, other than that he too will die. This choice does a number of things: it combines the image of universal judgment with individual death so that the significance of individual physical death is magnified without making that universal occasion stand for more than physical death. It leaves unknown the eventual symbolic and moral meaning of death. A focus on the horrors of the antechambers of death is devastating enough.
The picture also does not present the consciousness of a person awakened to anything but the factual consequences of the catastrophe. There is no portrayal, for example, of a sequence of people who are closer to the advancing army of death as awakening to awe, remorse, and penitence, and so spiritually transformed by the events. That would be to abandon Bruegel’s stern convention of treating time as associated only with distance, just as he did in “Saul” and “Harvesters”. The stories of personal or symbolic progress are not told in space and there are no map-like inserts for those fine tuned stories.
In short, the use of the religious theme of the end of days shows how powerfully the medieval conventions call to be used, how natural they are to a religious subject matter, and so Bruegel’s avoidance of the religious robs the picture of its spirituality. Avoiding the superimposition of time (and timelessness) onto space disjoints the levels of allegory and so abrogates the mutual references of factual, historical, psychological and historical transformations that are part of the Christian religious consciousness. Only the historical and factual is left. A catastrophe is only a catastrophe, and that brings forth the strictly secular emotions having to do with the waste of lives and the pain of suffering.
There is no rush to replace the religious feeling of a hopelessness that might possibly be redeemed, of what these piteous creatures might have had if they had thought ahead but is now too late to claim. Instead, there is just the ineffectuality of people. This Voltaire like contemplation of disaster replaces a sense of righteous and inevitable judgment. It is accomplished by a pruning of visual devices so that there is only a literal meaning for distance. It is a major conceptual accomplishment that is carried out by visual means.