Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder work like antagonistic muscles in the imagination, pulling with and against each other. Bosch is a painter of medieval hellfire whose fantastical creations exceed our nightmares. Bruegel, most memorably and wonderfully, shows us a recognisable world where children lick bowls clean, bagpipers draw breath and harvesters stretch out in the sun. Turning from metaphysics and from myth, he attends to the ploughman who labours his way across a field while Icarus falls into the sea far below. Bosch’s pale figures belong to the international gothic; Bruegel’s weighty peasants dance vigorously into modern times.
Yet Bruegel (born 10 years after the elder artist’s death) was greeted by his contemporaries as a “second Bosch”, and the connections between the two Netherlandish masters have fascinated viewers for centuries. In this revelatory new study, the US art historian Joseph Leo Koerner argues that they are – together – the originators of what would later be called “genre” painting.
The very idea of Bosch as genre painter sounds at first absurd and horrifying, as if a devil were to break in through the open door of a Pieter de Hooch courtyard and Vermeer’s milkmaid were to let her earthenware pot smash across the tiled floor. Yet the doors and the pots and the floors, the dances, games and quarrels were there in Bosch. Almost all the themes that in Bruegel look like “genre” subjects were painted first by Bosch. The difference, and it is a giddying world of difference, is in tone and intent. “At its beginning,” Koerner writes, “the painting of everyday life was bound inextricably to what seems its polar opposite: an art of the bizarre, the monstrous, the uncanny.”
These apparent contraries are yoked because for Bosch our material things and common activities constitute the devil’s prop-cupboard of lures and disguises. They are worthless or worse, the products of a corrupt and doomed humanity. To make them better, to make them beautiful, to lavish on them the attentions of art, is to risk a form of idolatry. But in order to make us feel the overwhelming fertility of the world, holding us on the vertiginous brink of mesmerised attraction and repulsion, Bosch has to paint the “enemy territory” that is everyday life.
He engineers the Haywain Triptych to look like an altarpiece. Its shutters break open, miming the priest’s breaking of the host, to reveal an image of celebratory worship. Crowds gather round to admire the glowing golden object at the centre. But this object, so gloriously revealed, is not Christ but a cart laden with hay, and so densely laden as to become sinister. This lumpen globe may be heavy but it is spiritually empty. Here is all flesh rendered grass, and the round world mere chaff. Those who grab at it, and throw themselves at its feet, are clutching at straws. The material painting, which might be called an “anti-altarpiece”, is an object, wood and pigment, cautioning against the love of things like itself.
Training our eyes to read these icons of corruption, Koerner leads us carefully towards The Garden of Earthly Delights, intent both on preparing us for the horror and on deepening our experience of it. In their closed state, the grisaille shutters bear the translucent sphere of a half-made universe, quiet and yet brewing, heavy with giant husks and seed-pods, “at once fecund and already decaying”. The doors of the world part to reveal what Koerner calls “psychology in painted form”. There in the middle is the eye of the owl, one of Bosch’s figures for himself, an emblem of the devil, yet all-seeing, like the eye of God.
And what does he see, that owl whose surveillance extends from the picture to its viewers? It is rare, when reading a work of scholarly criticism, to be so gripped as to feel nervous about turning the page. Be warned: there are chapters here more frightening than a thriller because they allow us to see, with Bosch, infinitely multiplying sin.
It is a bodily relief to reach the section on Bruegel, but best not relax too much. Like Bosch, Bruegel is deeply interested in art as a form of oracular trap analogous with the traps man faces in the world. Whether he paints builders climbing to the impossible summit of Babel from which they can only fall, or a bird-stealer who lays a trap but will himself be caught, his panels are primed with “snares, nets, ambushes”. When he paints hell and death, Koerner writes, “he outdoes Bosch on Bosch’s home ground”. That’s saying something.
Still, even when Bruegel chooses the same motif as his forebear, he works towards an entirely different expression of lived human experience. Bruegel’s way of painting allegory is to depict ordinary people playing out that allegory, variously inhabiting and forgetting their symbolic roles. In The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, he shows us the spirit of Lent personified, and also the real person dressed as Lent, and the children who play around her. The grill outside a baker’s shop is a penitential symbol, but it is also – radically – a grill, which will slide back into an oven.
Everyday life, in Bruegel’s work, carries on insistently, urgently, even while miracles are happening. One has to look hard to see the Holy Family in the corner of The Adoration of the Kings in the Snow; the saviour is born, but it is a freezing winter day and people hurry through the gloomy streets, anxious to gather their fuel and be home. The falling snow gives the scene “a palpably present tense”; we see the weather closing in rather than eternity opening up. The events of Bethlehem are translated to the familiar surroundings of a Flemish town, so that the extraordinary is pictured within the commonplace. Religious painting becomes genre painting, and genre plays reciprocal host to the sacred.
This is a book to read and reread in any moment of doubt about what critical analysis can achieve. Koerner believes that every painting by Bruegel “can sustain a lifetime of looking”. He has written a passionately attentive book that brings all life to bear on these pictures, and makes one feel that a lifetime of looking would be well spent.
• Alexandra Harris’s books include Weatherland, Virginia Woolf and Romantic Moderns. Bosch and Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life is published by Princeton. To order a copy for £46.71 (RRP £54.95) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.