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’. Actually, it was not the Old Masters in general but Bruegel in particular who depicted momentous dramas in this way, taking place in a sea of unconcerned humanity. Auden’s thoughts were prompted by ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’, in which a ploughman is placidly at work in the foreground, while the mythical youth falls to his death in the sea in the distance behind. In the same gallery of the Musée des Beaux Arts, Brussels, hangs ‘The Census at Bethlehem’.

In this picture, too, most of the figures are oblivious to the ostensible subject. Mary and Joseph are far from prominent; indeed it might take a moment or two to find them. She rides on a donkey, about to slip between two wagons laden with barrels presumably in the direction of the stable (there being no room at the inn on the left). Naturally enough, nobody seems aware they are participants in an event that, in the eyes of Christians, is about to change the world.