Book review: “Pieter Bruegel and the Idea of Human Nature” by Elizabeth Alice Honig

The Procession to Calvary, also called Christ Carrying the Cross, is the second-largest painting that Pieter Bruegel the Elder is known to have produced.  Created in 1564, the work measures roughly four feet by five-and-a-half feet.

It is one of many landscapes by Bruegel, but Elizabeth Alice Honig notes in Pieter Bruegel and the Idea of Human Nature that what differentiates this painting from the others is “its population density.”

Dozens, scores, hundreds of people are in this place. They have emerged from the city gates, the dark-clad stragglers still running along the road in the distant left. The procession’s trajectory swings around across the sodden ground of the field at the picture’s center, over the creek at its right, and then makes its way slowly upward to the village under a clouded-over sky, where a crowd of men has already created a circle on the green.

The village green in the far upper right is where two crosses have been erected while preparations are being made to raise a third. As the crowd trudges toward this place of execution in the far distance, some, such as farmers on their way to market day, move against the current.

One farmer, however, Simon of Cyrene, is being grabbed by three soldiers to take part while his wife is frantically trying to keep him with her, dropping her jug and her fat lamb. It is the Lamb of God, Jesus, whom Simon is being grabbed to help in the event that is unfolding.

While the figure of Christ is almost exactly at the midpoint of the panel’s surface, spatially he is far from the foreground and, in particular, is lost amid the crowd….

 He knows, for instance, the place of himself and his story in the greater sweep of time in the cosmos: perfect centrality. And yet, in the kind of paradoxical twist at which Bruegel excelled, we experience him as visually insignificant.

Shared humanity

In her 2019 book, Honig, an expert on Northern European art, focuses on the way Bruegel’s paintings consider shared humanity — shared by those in the pictures and by those viewing the pictures. And how, in their often ambiguous way, they comment on the nature of people, on human nature.

He often structures his pictures so that they insist upon a detached perspective on the world, on humanity, on history — a viewpoint that can also promote self-questioning or what we might call introspection.

His painting of Jesus carrying his cross to a very Dutch-Flemish-looking Calvary is not so much caught up with the sufferings of the one to be crucified but offers to the viewer the actions of the hundreds of others in the painting, participating to one extent or another in the day.  As Honig writes:

So many figures, of such fascination, demand out attention before [Christ] does: the merchants in the costumes of many nations, the group of village idiots being brought out to watch the excitement, the Roma women with their characteristic flat, white headgear, the local children with their snacks and games, the riders who cannot control their horses…the list is almost endless.

 

Social discussion or introspection

At this moment in the mid-sixteenth century, Bruegel was, Honig writes, part of a conversation “about human beings, their position in the cosmos and how their habits and acts contribute to the nature of society.” This was on the minds of the intelligentsia, such as theologians and philosophers, but also on everyday people, such as the merchants who were Bruegel’s patrons.

Within this discussion, she writes, Bruegel’s paintings and drawings invited viewers to look at large crowds of individual people from his perspective and “to take one of the two routes I have imagined above, to enter into social discussion, perhaps deploying their own knowledge of written arguments, or to look inward and consider their own selves.”

The Protestant Reformation had just been sparked a few decades earlier by Martin Luther, and the former monolith of Christianity had been shattered into sects, creeds and denominations. New ways of thinking about the Christian faith paralleled new ways of thinking about human beings.

Humanists, such as Erasmus, wrestled with a growing sense of the power of human beings to transform the world and themselves. These lay people and theologians recognized that this sort of self-shaping, instead of passively listening to church leaders, also shaped ethical actions and life choices.

The relationship that Bruegel constructs between humankind and the world we inhabit moves back and forth between engagement and detachment, the sense of a journey ahead and refusal of that invitation.

 

“Intently watching or listening”

Honig notes that Bruegel is fascinated with faces, and his characters rarely give a sense that they are posing.

The most vividly characterized people are often those who themselves are intently watching or listening to someone or something else, as if being caught in a moment of attention leaves them particularly open to our own interpretive gaze.

His Adoration of the Kings (1564) is “a veritable study in physiognomies,” encircling the calm, idealized Mary and child.

The kneeling king at the left has a wrinkled forehead, downturned mouth and flushed cheeks, while the tall elegant African king on the opposite side peers with wide-eyed interest at his fellows. Behind him, contrasting with his respectable visage, are a pair of ordinary visitors, one bespectacled and with a jutting lower lip, the other with bulging eyes, a fleshy nose and thick lips, all legible facial traits indicative of inward character.

Such faces, Honig writes, would have intrigued viewers and led them to speculating on what each face said about the inner person.

This was an important skill in Bruegel’s age because, in cities, “people were being faced with…increasing numbers of people whom they did not know well and with whom they had to interact.”

 

“Unfeigned hilarity”

In a highly polarized, highly critical era, much like our own, Bruegel is never judgmental.  Or, better put, he is always embracing the humanity of his subject, even those who are thieves and scoundrels.

There aren’t any thieves and scoundrels in his Children’s Games (1560) which, Honig writes, is a remarkable work and not just because it’s a catalogue of over ninety games.

It is also an entire coherent city environment, complete with a town-hall-like building at its center that has been taken over by children…

 Festive pleasures and childish games manifest the same side of human nature in Bruegel’s rhetoric: a joyful and deeply embodied side of nature…And for someone like Erasmus, and I believe Bruegel, who saw human nature as good (although corruptible), children allow us always to witness human goodness…

 In Children’s Games their unfeigned hilarity exists in a complete game-world, as if the self-absorbed, special world that play normally creates as apart from dreary reality has turned the tables and enveloped reality in its own ludic mode.

 

“To contemplate the world”

Bruegel himself, as Honig describes him and his works, is inside and apart from humanity.  Indeed, it seems to me that he is like the peddler near the foreground in Christ Carrying the Cross, seated on a grassy bank with his back and his heavy pack to the viewer.

The peddler was often used as an everyman figure in sixteenth-century art, but at the same time he is the quintessential traveler. Indeed, he is everyman precisely because he always travels, as every man is a perpetual traveler on the journey through life…

 But Bruegel’s traveling peddler here is peculiar in that he has ceased moving, and in fact is the only figure in the entire busy painting who is seated and entirely still. He has stopped on his journey to contemplate the world, not from high above it but from just at the edge of the action.

 

That, it seems to me, is where Bruegel sits, just at the edge of the action, surveying the vastness of humanity, including himself, with great interest and acceptance.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

11.19.25