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’.
Get Britain's best politics newsletters
Register to get The Spectator's insight and opinion straight to your inbox. You can then read two free articles each week.
Already a subscriber? Log in
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in