Climate change, Bruegel-style

It is cold, but not in a cheery, robin-redbreast kind of way. The sky is slate blue; the sun, a red ball, is slipping below the horizon, figures carrying heavy burdens trudge across the frozen water. Yet this far- from-festive painting, ‘The Census at Bethlehem’ by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, is one of the earliest — perhaps the very first — to set the Christmas story in a northern winter landscape.

There is no attempt to pretend that this is the Holy Land. The setting is a village in the southern Netherlands. The houses are brick-built, one with a northern European crow-stepped gable. In the foreground, a pig is being slaughtered, an improbable sight in Palestine.

In his poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ W.H. Auden famously wrote: ‘About suffering they were never wrong,/ The Old Masters’. The gravest events, he went on, occur ‘while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along’.