Captivated By Art, Illustrated With Music

In an art book an oil painting on a wood panel from 1565 caught my eye one day. It was Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Hunters in the Snow. My eyes grew wide. I leaned closer to the printed page, drinking in the details. It was like stepping back in time, a way to visit another world in my imagination. Here was history where I could feel the cold through their shoes and squint at the morose, inhospitable sky. No explanation or text was needed because the images themselves spoke to me. I had seen snow and leaden skies, too, but 400 years later than Bruegel’s cold Flemish day.

As I gazed at it a door opened into the preindustrial world. Here were real people alive in their daily world. The hunters are coming home from their search. The dogs are with them, coursers from the looks of them with the curled tails and wiry build of greyhounds, but other dogs have the drooping ears of hunting hounds. There are pups with the adult dogs, along to learn the ways of the hunt. They are close to the hunters, and tired too after trudging so far in the deep snow. The hunters carry spears and clubs and game bags, evidence of a successful outing.

It is a cold winter’s day in the Little Ice Age. There is dull snow, well tracked, and everyone is in cold weather clothing. Every head has a hat or covering of some kind. The clothing is dull for there are no chemical dyes to bring vibrant colors to the eye. Hats and head coverings, some in leather, most in linen and wool, dull colors, all hand made, coarse, and expensive. Every article of clothing is practical. There are no displays of wealth or privilege.

Here on Bruegel’s panel are everyday people, common folk, all going about the urgent business of finding food and shelter, keeping warm, and surviving to the next warm spell. There are two man-made ponds. On their frozen surfaces most people fish through the ice. Only a few appear to be skating and these may be merely crossing the ice. Most are adults with but a scattering of children.

Fires and smoke are everywhere because it’s winter time in Northern Europe. It is cold and damp and skies are sullen with a greenish tint, same as the ice. A man carries a bundle of branches on his shoulders as he crosses a bridge. Surely those sticks are to feed fires evidenced by smoke from every chimney. Pollarded trees at the bottom of the hill speak to the annual necessity of finding more firewood and kindling in the winters to come. Another man has felled an entire tree and will drag its parts home to stave off the chill. The dangling sign of an inn hangs in front of a roaring outdoor fire. The fire slants to the left away from the sea in the distance, so there is some wind on this day to chill everyone. Are these people cooking outdoors? Are they butchering? We can’t quite tell, but to be sure there are no power lines, no lighted signs, no paved roads, no vehicles other than carts. They are off the grid because there is no grid.

Spontaneous order grows out of an unplanned landscape. Everywhere is evidence of a vibrant preindustrial society. Houses with clipped gables and snowy roofs dot the landscape near and far, their warm red bricks and pale stucco almost glowing with warm colors. There are many built structures, bridges, and churches. It is less than 50 years since Luther nailed his theses to the door of the church at Wittenburg, but what are these churches we see? Catholic? Protestant? We don’t know. Cultivated fields are scattered to the horizon interspersed with houses and patches of woods, lanes, and walls. Opportunistic ravens sit huddled in branches while a long-tailed magpie flies to a safer, warmer location across the valley. Where will they shelter for the night?

All of these images seemed somehow familiar. Was it because northern Europe was the home of my own ancestors? Was it because literature and folklore had shown many images like these before? Was it because I was a kid with an historical interest and a love of snow? My cultural background nurtured in the public schools used New England and the Middle Atlantic states as norms for all American school children. We grew up with images of Pilgrims and rigged sailing ships arriving in the New World after a harrowing nine week passage across an icy North Atlantic. Winter was the time of hardship and staying close for warmth. It still was. We could all relate to the painting that made us remember the chill.

Over the years that followed, there grew a connection in my head between these images of everyday life in the 16th Century and the music of the winter seasons. It took me a while to make the connection, although I already loved the hymns and Christmas music that we heard in the time of frost. They were wistful minor key compositions that soon came to sound like cold winds and tightly closed coats and scarves. Even the hymns of the harvest time sounded plaintive and chilly, hymns like We Gather Together and Now Thank We All Our God, sung every October and November in churches lacking the less colorful modern praise music.

There was a Percy Faith Music of Christmas LP in our house and every year the record went on the turntable giving us God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, It Came Upon a Midnight Clear, Silent Night, and Good King Wenceslas out when the snow lay all about, deep and crisp and even. On that album I began to hear another sad melody, O Come, O Come Emanuel. This music brought images of traveling in the winter time for the purpose of a census and taxation with shelter hard to come by, even for expectant mothers. There was In The Bleak Midwinter, always a winter portrait in sound. 

Perhaps the best of them all was Lo, How A Rose E’re Blooming, its beautiful harmonies and emotional pauses sending the chill air back into my imagination. The wishes of believers for the long awaited Messiah punctuated every verse. Accompanying the music were snowy scenes of my own life and creches in the little village where we lived. The wait for redemption rang down through the years from the scattered settlement in Bruegel’s painting to cold and foggy Victorian England to my own days as a child. I was part of an ancient tradition and shared it with 16th Century Flanders, Handel, Tiny Tim and Scrooge, and the writers of old hymns.

Over the years I have taken the Bruegel book down from the shelf many times when the days grow shorter and the snow returns. I gaze at the scene and always discover something new. Bruegel was among my first windows into our past, our culture, and the remarkable features of Western Civilization that have come down through the ages. I hear all of these when those minor key hymns remind me that it’s the time of snow and advent again.

Lo, How A Rose E’re Blooming