Headlong (7 page)

‘There’s a lovely one for May by Simon Bening, in the Da Costa Hours,’ she says. Two couples boating on the Bruges canals. One of the men rowing, one playing a pipe, and one of the women accompanying him on the lute. They’re bringing home the branches of may they’ve picked, and they’ve a bottle of wine hung over the side of the boat to cool.’

Yes, now I think about it there was water somewhere in the middle distance. A millpool, I think, with more merrymakers beside it engaged in some kind of rural sports. I’m still not clear, though, whether the iconography indicates April or May. It seems to be as ambiguous as the iconography in all the others. But then my clumping
pretmakers
aren’t gentry.

‘What about the peasants?’ I ask. ‘Are
they
playing lutes and floating about in boats? Or are they doing their courting in more peasant-like ways?’

‘The peasants?’ She frowns again. ‘I don’t think any of the calendars show peasants courting. It would be against the whole social ethos. Peasants don’t have fun – it’s the gentry who have fun. Peasants labour.’

We retire into our respective piles of books again. This slight anomaly doesn’t seem to me of any great significance. But as I read on I realize that something’s changed. The pages in front of me have lost their urgency. The bright light of conviction inside my head has begun to fade a little. I have to read each paragraph twice, because what my mind keeps coming back to is these two jarring propositions: all the pictures in the series, as every authority agrees, are based upon the iconography of the Book of Hours – my picture shows activities that have no place in that iconography.

It’s a trivial point. There could be a dozen explanations. I put it out of my mind.

It comes back. I begin to feel an old familiar feeling, of a stone growing heavy in my heart. Could it be that I’ve allowed myself to be carried away once again? One of the possible explanations for the discrepancy, it occurs to me, is a painfully simple one: that my picture isn’t part of a series by Bruegel based on the Book of Hours. It’s a scene of Merrymakers in a Mountainous Landscape, just as the label says, and it’s by a follower of Sebastian Vrancz.

The fact that this explanation is simple doesn’t for a moment mean it’s true. But the balance of probabilities has shifted. I can’t think now why I ever jumped to the conclusion that it was a Bruegel. Not a single objective reason comes to mind. It was just another sudden rush of blood to the head.

And I say
my
picture. But it’s not. It’s Tony Churt’s picture.

Yes, at least sobriety has returned before any irretrievable damage was done. Kate’s given me the chance to think again while there’s still time. She’s offering me a way out from the vertiginous enterprise I’ve got myself into; perhaps all the time I’ve been unconsciously looking for one. I bless Lufthansa yet again. Or at any rate I
should
. But somehow, totally unjustifiably, I find I’m feeling a little sour about Lufthansa. Next time I go to Munich I’ll fly on some other airline.

I realize that she’s watching me with another of her little frowns. ‘What’s the matter?’ she says.

‘What do you mean?’ I reply shortly. ‘Nothing’s the matter. Why should anything be the matter?’

But I know from the way she’s looking at me that she’s still trying to work out, with the help of the extra evidence provided by my sudden change of manner, what I could
have seen when I looked at that last picture. I suppose that now I could simply tell her.

I say nothing, though. I can’t bring myself to let her know what a fool I’ve made of myself.

I slide Grossmann, Glück and the rest of them to one side, and press
Open File
on the laptop. ‘C:\nominalism,’ I type.

A short-lived setback. The truth, the simple underlying truth, comes to me in the middle of the night, somewhere in the dark hours before the six o’clock feed. It’s the time when one tends to wake and find all one’s previous certainties and satisfactions replaced by doubts and dismay. The corollary, I discover, is that if you go to bed filled with doubts and dismay, there’s a chance that the metamorphoses of the night may change them into certainties and satisfactions.

This is the simple conviction that wakes me: that whatever my picture is, it’s not by an anonymous follower of a painter no one’s heard of!

It’s not by the school of Vrancz, or the circle of Vrancz, or an imitator of Vrancz. It’s not by Vrancz himself. I know this absolutely, even though I know nothing whatever about Vrancz or his school, circle, and imitators. Here’s the simple reasoning that’s worked itself out in my sleeping brain: if that amazing picture
were
by Vrancz, or anyone connected with him, then I
should
know about him, because so would everyone in the entire Western world, down to the parties of excursioning schoolchildren and the American tourists doing seven cultural capitals in seven days.

Remember Friedländer and his words of wisdom about how we recognize a friend, and with what certainty. The flash of recognition is the primary perception. It’s not to be replaced or devalued by anomalous details – the false beard, the dark glasses, the foreign accent. All these little
mysteries we can inquire into later, after we’ve thrown our arms around his neck and wept for joy.

In fact, now I see it the other way round: everything that seems to cast doubt on my identification really supports it. The question’s not if it can really be my old friend in that red wig, waving his arms about and speaking broken English. The question is who else it could be
but
my always astonishing old chum. Who else in the world would have had the notion of behaving like that?

Look at it this way. Let’s suppose that Sebastian Vrancz, or I, or anyone else you can think of, had set to work to paint the changing aspect of the year in a series of pictures based on the iconography of the Book of Hours. When we reached April and May, why yes, certainly, we’d have shown either peasants ploughing and milking, or ladies and gentlemen flirting and courting. But this is precisely why there isn’t an entire gallery in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, or a whole row of books in the London Library, devoted to Sebastian Vrancz or me, and why there is to Pieter Bruegel. Because only Bruegel had the originality and boldness to diverge from the model where it suited him, and freely adapt it to his own ideas. It’s an absolutely characteristic transformation, entirely congruent with his transformation of the traditional winter hare hunters into fox hunters – and unsuccessful ones to boot – and of the traditional autumn return of the hunt into the return of the herd. Now I come to think of it, he shows peasants having fun in two of the other pictures in the cycle! In the snowbound village to which the hunters are returning, the local people are skating and sliding on the ice. In midsummer, in the village beyond the cornfields, they’re swimming, and playing either
boules
or a rather more savage game called cock-throwing, where people throw sticks at a cockerel or a
goose, and win it as a prize if they can grab it before it gets up on its feet again. So letting them enjoy a dance and kiss in spring is all part of the same pattern of adaptation.

Kate and I
are
working on this together, in a way, because she’s unwittingly confirmed my intuitive identification. It’s Bruegel, there’s no longer a shadow of doubt in my mind.

Which brings me back to the same problem as before. April? Or May?

I turn on to my left side; it’s April. I turn on to my right; it’s May.

‘I can’t help you’, says Kate quietly in the darkness, ‘if you don’t tell me what this is all about.’

‘Nothing,’ I whisper back. ‘Just work. Just thinking about something. Anyway, you have. You have helped.’

Another clue for her to be working on, if she can’t sleep either. I force myself to lie still. We’ll have Tilda awake as well if I’m not careful, and I shan’t be able to explain to her either. April … May … At once I feel I shall go mad if I don’t turn back on to my left side … my right … If only I could be on my left side and my right side simultaneously I could get back to sleep!

I carefully get out of bed, and feel in the darkness for a sweater to pull over my pyjamas. I hear Kate’s head turn enquiringly towards me on the pillow.

‘Just looking something up,’ I whisper.

In the cold kitchen I turn on the fan heater and slide my pile of books back towards me.

Where are we? Yes,
De Twelff maenden
in the list of Jongelinck’s sixteen Bruegels. The list was compiled because in 1566 Jongelinck offered them as part of the security for a debt. The money was owed not by Jongelinck himself, but by someone called Daniel de Bruyne – 16,000 guilders to the City of Antwerp for unpaid tax on wine. Did de Bruyne
ever repay the money? Was the security recovered? There’s no record. But now I begin to move on in history. In 1594, twenty-eight years later, long after Bruegel had died, the City made a dutiful presentation to the Governor of the Netherlands, Archduke Ernst von Habsburg, which included
6 Taffeln von den 12 monats Zeiten
. Could these six pictures of the twelve months be part of Jongelinck’s security? It seems they could, because the inventory made of the Archduke’s estate after his death the following year lists what must be the same six pictures, now described as
Sechs
Taffell, von 12 Monathenn des Jars von Bruegel
.

So at this point, a quarter of a century after Bruegel’s death, there were
six
pictures of the twelve months extant. Six remaining out of twelve, with half of the total already lost? Or could it be six remaining out of six, because there never
were
twelve?

I’m not the first person to have had this idea. Tolnay hit upon it in 1935. ‘Everything becomes plain’, he says, ‘if one sets them beside the miniatures that inspired them, when one notices that Bruegel has put together in each picture scenes which illustrate two successive months.’

Six pictures, each representing not one month but two – this is what all the apparent ambiguities of his iconography demonstrate, according to Tolnay. I allow myself to dwell on this idea for a moment. Six pictures: three in Vienna, one in Prague, one in New York and one shortly to be occupying most of the end wall of this very room for a precious day or two, before moving on to take its rightful place in the National Gallery in London. To have found one of seven missing links in Bruegel’s great chain would be a glorious discovery, that would light up the rest of my days on this earth. But to have found the one single one that completes it …!

This is what I’ve had at the back of my mind all through my struggles with the iconography. It’s the conclusion I leapt to, in my simplicity, I have to confess, in the Churts’ breakfast-room. It’s what I thought I remembered from Vienna: that there was only one picture missing. The trouble is that none of the others, except Bianconi, agrees with Tolnay. I hunt through the remaining volumes, the pages clumsy beneath my impatient fingers. Glück, writing two years after Tolnay, with all the majesty implied by the royal plural, insists that ‘we share the opinion of most scholars’ in staying with twelve. Stechow, in 1970, believes that ‘it is becoming more and more probable’ that there were twelve. Grossmann, on whom Stechow based himself, is still agreeing with Glück in 1973. Friedländer, my beloved Max, even in the 1976 edition of
Early Netherlan
dish Painting
, still accepts twelve without question or discussion. But then Bruegel is right at the end of his period, tacked on in Volume 14, already out of the range suggested by the title.

Genaille goes in the opposite direction. He’s troubled by the fact that only five were being listed in a Vienna inventory by 1653, which for some reason seems to suggest to him that there may never have been more than five in the first place. Glück, disturbingly, appears to agree that the series of twelve was ‘probably never completed’, though how many Bruegel actually did paint he doesn’t suggest. Grossmann, even more disturbingly, reports the discovery of a later inventory of pictures in Brussels, which suggests that even a century after the event, when there were at least five and possibly six of the paintings known to be in Vienna, there were still six in Brussels.

Twelve, or six? Seven missing, or one? One-seventh of the deficit about to be brought to light? Or all of it? I sit at
the kitchen table, consumed by this terrible new anguish that seems to have taken root in my life.

When my eye first fell on that picture at the Churts, I have to confess, everything seemed so simple because I thought I knew for certain exactly how many pictures in the series were missing. It was absolutely clear and simple, and the figure wasn’t seven. Or nine, or six, or five, or four. It was one.

Why was I so sure? What did I see on that bright summer’s day in Vienna seven years ago that put this idea so firmly in my head? The museum catalogue, presumably. Or perhaps one of those brief explanatory panels that galleries put up on the wall. This was, after all, before my serious interest in art began. Indeed, that hour in the Bruegel room, now I look back, may have been the very beginning of it, and the future course of my life turns out to depend upon reconstructing its details. But, as with so many things at the back of your mind that seem clear and simple until you turn to look at them directly, all the clarity and simplicity are vanishing moment by moment as I read.

I need to fly to Vienna and take another look at the panel. Or else find a copy of the catalogue. Where will they have one in this country? Not in the organic farm-produce shop at Castle Quendon, that’s for sure. Not in the mini-market by the petrol station at Cold Kinver.

The door opens. Kate stands in the doorway, blinking in the light, watching me more uneasily than ever, waiting for me to explain.

But all I say is: ‘Will you drive me to the station again in the morning?’

By quarter past eleven I have it in front of me. I’m in the National Art Library, inside the V & A, sitting at a serious and scholarly leather-topped desk surrounded by PhD candidates doing their theses on Escher and Cimabue and railway advertising, by art dealers trying to track down provenances and attributions for their purchases.

It takes me most of the day to puzzle it out, because my halting German is such an inadequate guide to the amazing convolutions of Austrian academic style. The case made out by Demus, Klauner and Schütz, the editors of the Kunsthistorisches catalogue, is complex, and depends heavily upon a word by word re-examination of the text of the documents, mostly in an archaic German which is even further out of my reach. One of Grossmann’s arguments they counter by replacing a missing ‘and’; one of Glück’s by putting an ‘of’ in place of an erroneous ‘with’. They demonstrate that the French version of a letter written from Vienna in 1660, nearly a century after the paintings were done, which gives an account of seeing
six pièces de l’ancien
Bruegel, qui représentent la diversité des douze Mois de l’ Année
, and a Spanish version of it which also mentions twelve months, must be anterior to, and more reliable than, the Latin and Flemish texts, which refer to six pictures representing only six months, with the implication that the other six months (and six pictures) are missing. The inventory cited by Grossmann showing six still in Brussels at the
same period they dismiss as a mistake. After this ‘as we believe permanent repair of the weak points of the record,’ they consider that the identity of Jongelinck’s
twelff maen
den
with the six pictures in Vienna described as showing the twelve months of the year is definitely established.

By the end of the afternoon I’ve also found a no less magisterial survey of the problem by Buchanan, in the
Burlington
Magazine
, who concurs. Grossmann and Stechow seem to be holding out for twelve, but by 1953, I discover, even Glück, in a later book on Bruegel, has come round to six, because he thinks it impossible that the City of Antwerp would have presented the Archduke with an incomplete set.

The tide’s turned, no doubt about it, though the iconography still won’t work out smoothly. Tolnay makes his six pairs possible by beginning the year with December/January. But Demus, Klauner and Schütz, in the catalogue, point out that the traditional beginning of the year was in March. Glück agrees that the Netherlandish year began at Easter, but this leads him now to identify
The Gloomy Day
as March/April, and
Haymaking
as May/June – so in his view there’s no gap in April and May, and he expects the missing picture to show November /December. Buchanan, however, cites a drawing by Pieter Stevens, freely based on
The
Gloomy Day
, which is inscribed by the artist with the words Februarius and Mert. Demus, Klauner and Schütz believe that the difficulties can be resolved by accepting that the cycle breaks the year up in a less formal way than is permitted by the schema of months or pairs of months. They cite an old tradition according to which the year was divided into six parts, and they believe that Genaille is right in thinking that each picture catches ‘the characteristic moment’ of what Novotny suggests is Early Spring, Early Summer, High Summer, Autumn and Midwinter.

Which once again leaves Spring. High Spring. And this is what I have; there’s no doubt whatever left in my mind, if ever there seriously was. It’s something else, too. The old Julian year, which was still the basis of the calendar until Pope Gregory reformed it in 1582, seventeen years after the series was painted, began just after the vernal equinox, on 25 March. So my two months, if one had to be precise, are 25 March to 25 May. In other words, the missing picture, the picture I’ve found, is not just
one
of the series. It’s the first. It’s the point of departure for the whole enterprise.

Before I leave the library I stop at the shelves where the various records of sale-room prices are ranged. Not that I’m thinking about money, but it’s impossible not to be curious. Difficult to find any point of reference, of course. No major painting by Bruegel has come on to the market since
The Corn Harvest
was acquired in Paris by the Metropolitan in 1919. In 1955 a small, very early work,
Landscape
with Christ appearing to His Disciples at the Sea of Galilee
, emerged from the castle of the unnamed family that had owned it for the previous century and a half, was identified by Tolnay, and in 1989 was sold at Sotheby’s for £780,000. In New York in 1990 a copy by Pieter Brueghel the Younger of one of his father’s major works,
The Census at Bethlehem
, fetched £1,200,000.

Over a million pounds for a copy. So for an original … An original that opens and completes the great cycle of the year …

But I’m not thinking about the money. I’m truly not.